The choir was founded in 1991 by the present conductor, Bob Hanson, when he assumed the position of Director of Music at Morley College . After a precarious start the choir quickly established itself as one of the foremost performing groups at the College, which itself has a fine tradition of music making – former Directors of Music include Michael Tippett and Gustav Holst. Many of the most distinguished figures in English music in the twentieth century have worked or studied at Morley in some capacity (Vaughan Williams, Harrison Birtwistle, Walter & Alexander Goehr, Hugh Wood, Janet Baker, Anthony Hopkins, Cornelius Cardew...).

The choir gave its first concert in March 1992 with just a dozen singers, at St Matthew's Church in Westminster , with a programme including Monteverdi, Handel and Byrd. Since then our repertoire has expanded both forwards and backwards in time, including music from the Eton Choirbook which we sang in the contemporary Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey, to living composers including MacMillan, Pärt, Hanson and others.

Our most ambitious undertaking to date has been to couple Tallis's celebrated 40-part motet Spem in Alium with And There Shall Be No Night There , another 40-part motet with brass quintet and organ, composed for the choir's tenth anniversary season by Bob Hanson in 2002. For this event we invited back past members and others to make up our numbers and placed the eight five-part choirs around the circular nave of Temple Church – a stunning location for a memorable event. We repeated this pairing in 2005, collaborating with Morley's sound engineering tutor and students to create a surround-sound recording in St Giles's Church, Cripplegate.

We have sung in numerous venues around central London , usually churches with good acoustics, but one of our most memorable occasions recently was being invited to sing in the enormous Raphael Gallery at the V & A, with its cathedral-like acoustic. Pärt's Magnificat sounded terrific in there and even evoked cheers from the audience!