Find an extract from the interview below.

_{Photo: Richard Allenby-Pratt}

Some quick-fire questions to start us off.

Firstly, I’m really interested in how fictional your characters are within the village. Did they emerge purely from imagination? They seem very believable!

Thank you! They did. I find characters easy to create: often I’ll start with a glimpse of clothing, or a gesture, a nickname, or a turn of phrase, and the rest coheres quickly around that starting point. Once they’ve stepped into the book and begun to speak I rarely have to change anything about them. Very occasionally there’ll be a character who I can’t see or hear clearly, and then I have to consciously ‘make them up’, which feels like doing work rather than just encountering them. There were a couple of those in the first draft of this book, but they didn’t make the final cut.

Was it important to not assign this village to a real place? I’m interested in whether there’s a reason you chose not to make it ‘placeable’ or mappable and therefore recognisable?

Very much so. None of my novels are set in a defined location; I need enough wriggle room to let my imagination work freely without the feeling that someone might write to tell me I’ve ‘got something wrong’. There are a couple of locations in The Given World that were inspired by real places near my home, but given that there’s a steep hill in the Welm Valley, stone houses, and dairy farming, it’s definitely not set in Suffolk. I also really love world-building: coming up with my own names for rivers and places. It’s one of the most satisfying parts of my job.

I’m really interested in how you consider our skewed relationship with the changing seasons in the book. One of the passages I immediately underlined involves your character, Angela, who is dismayed that her daughter doesn’t understand that the cherry blossom she is telling her about will be gone by the time she comes to visit. She realises that ‘her daughter hasn’t yet understood how fleeting things were, that cherry blossom and blackbirds singing weren’t a constant backdrop but a clock that counted you through your life’. Why does it matter to you to build characters so devoted to careful attention? Or, maybe as importantly, so alarmed by a lack of it.

I suppose you could say that trying to inspire that kind of attention is my life’s work. I think it matters, for all sorts of reasons: it can improve your mental health and wellbeing, sure, and it’s also the first step in inspiring people to care for the natural world. But that’s to instrumentalise it. Understanding seasonality and temporality are ways in which we can come to terms with mortality, which is something I think our Western society and values permits and even encourages us to fail at – with pretty catastrophic results, both for ourselves and the planet. The world is beautiful, fragile, and mortal, and pretending that isn’t the case allows us to commit all sorts of depredations. Attending to the fleetingness of the world around us can be painful, but it’s the very least of the labour that we owe to it, and builds a foundation for more.

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Melissa Harrison’s ‘The Given World’ is out now and available here, published by Hutchinson Heinemann. Read an extract from the book here.

History shows us that going out goes in waves. For years it might be at high tide, with a wide array of activity taking place after dusk. And then gradually, or all at once, the night world can go dark. Sometimes this takes place on a national level, for example when war breaks out, or authoritarian rule arrives, but going out can also recede on a personal level: during illness, bereavement, or simply through aging. 

Imogen Willetts’ Up All Night tracks a long arc of big nights out by selecting a chronological series of maximally creative highpoints, across the centuries and from across the world. Her stated intention is to reconstruct a series of notable nightlife moments, and to make them accessible to readers through deeply researched storytelling. Her authorial ability to spark connection to collective nightlife feels especially relevant today.

 We’re not short of reports showing that UK pubs, clubs and public space in general are in sharp decline (community-owned pubs being a rare upwards line on the graph). Covid broke the chain that led youngsters through grassroots spaces into nightlife for grown folks, and the government’s new National Youth Strategy reported that half of fifteen-year-olds in England spend most of their free time in their bedrooms. 

The nightlife tide is demonstrably low, here and in many other comparable places worldwide. Willetts’ jaunty, jam-packed and dynamic history contains plenty of evidence to suggest that this might be temporary because low points are an essential part of her story, with new and energetic waves following enforced quietness. Just as a couple of examples, this rollercoaster ride through time and space includes mafia-run casinos and cabarets in LA and Havana that followed World War II, and the Mutoid Waste Company’s industrial techno raves that flourished after the Berlin Wall came down.

In Up All Night, nightlife relates to ‘commercial and secular environments, designed to offer a variety of pleasures at night’. Variety is the key word here because in Willetts’ world, ‘going out’ extends far beyond the dancefloor. She does spend time in jazz dives, discos and nightclubs, for example NYC’s Studio 54 or Berlin’s Berghain. But this is a history which revels in spectacle and theatricality, happiest when bringing the reader into spaces that have been transformed by imaginative special effects. It’s less ‘a red, light, a basement and a feeling’ as articulated by US house DJ Kerri Chandler – and latterly by our very own Luke Unabomber – and more Punch Drunk through the ages. 

She is a sparky guide, and accordingly, starts in an unexpected location: Yoshiwara, 17^th century Japan, a ‘flashy pleasure quarter on the outskirts of the shōgun’s wooden canal city’ designed by the shōgunate. Bathed in red lanterns and year-round cherry blossom, it offered entertainment, acrobats, food, courtship and paid-for sex. Yoshiwara offers a unique starting point which allows Willetts to articulate another of the questions that propel her thesis: that nightlife also illustrates the workings of society. In reconstituting nightlife she’s able to explain the surrounding picture: that Japan had a strict four-layer class system and that one socially low-ranking group – merchants – ended up with huge wealth (‘the tech billionaires of their time’), with Yoshiwara as a state response to this particular aspect of social change.

Despite outlining a lost world, this chapter, like many others, contains details which chime with the present. Her description of the guards in a watchtower, logging every arrival and departure to Yoshiwara reminds me of today’s ‘No ID, No Entry’ rules. The requirement to show identification is clearly not about checking people’s ages, because even individuals who are clearly over 25 – double that age, even – have to show their driving licence or passport to get past the bouncers. It’s about logging arrivals and departures, just as in ancient Japan.

As an author, Willetts is drawn to the visual, and not just in the Van Gogh quote selected for the epigraph. We meet hard-drinking Parisian art students in 1890s Montmartre whose takeover of the newly built Moulin Rouge included specially commissioned paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec; costumed fawns, Egyptian mummies and gladiators; and dancers erupting from human-sized eggs: ‘somewhere between a party from the TV show Skins and a night at the museum’. 

Willetts’ clear enjoyment of spectacle makes sense. She’s a university lecturer specialising in cultural and urban history, and before writing this book, worked at the Royal Academy of the Arts where she developed their popular Lates series creating large-scale installations and performance. One of these, in 2019, was inspired by the 18^th Century Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens where thousands of Londoners would gather at night to walk down tree-lined boulevards, listen to musicians mimicking birdsong in gooseberry hedges, dine al fresco, or attend balls on a site the size of twelve football pitches. 

The depth of her knowledge shines through in this chapter, for example when we read about English painter and satirist Hogarth suspending coloured oil lamps from trees in this dolled-up park, creating a ‘trippy, glittering phantasmagoria’, long before the arrival of electricity. Or when we learn that this new form of mass entertainment travelled, with a version of Vauxhall Gardens built in Russia. The country’s first railway line was constructed to take passengers from St Petersburg to Pavlosk where it was sited. The association between trains and the pleasure gardens became so intertwined, she writes, that the Russian word for station is still vokzál. 

Before ending in noughties LA, with tabloid photographers chasing reality TV stars into waiting taxis, Willetts squeezes in a huge array of stories. Her explorations into going out make the deep past accessible as she criss-crosses Europe, North America, Cuba and Shanghai. Millionaires, mafia and aristo-celebrities appear repeatedly, along with occasional turns from upstart radicals, particularly in the final quarter of the book – whether they’re Belgrade techno DJs or LA punks at The Masque, a venue memorably described as ‘heaven and hell rolled into one’. 

Willetts asserts that nightlife has barely changed since 1995, but I’d be inclined to disagree. One street-up example would be the grimy jazz jams that emerged in mid-2010s London, with live musicians having an energetic effect on packed dancefloors, and which have since spread across the UK and abroad. In the main, though, Willetts has created a compelling alternative history of nightlife; positioning it as the maximally inventive wing of the creative industries.

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Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ‘Up All Night: A History of Going Out’ by Imogen Willetts is out now and available here (£23.75).

Emma Warren’s latest book ‘Up the Youth Club: A Love Letter’ (Faber) is out in paperback in July.

Find herein tracks from the weekend’s lineup, including Andrew Wasylyk, Modern Nature, Kayla Painter, Music to Watch Seeds Grow By and a live session from Clémentine March — plus nature sounds from the field, spoken word, and nature-related tracks courtesy of a CBTR Spoken Word & Nature Disco mix from the vaults. Listen below.

Find full Elmley lineup info and buy tickets here.

Read an excerpt from the piece below, and log in or subscribe via Steady to read in full.

_{Illustration: Adam Higton}

It starts with a gentle cracking open, so soft and quiet you could be mistaken for thinking you had imagined it. This cracking open happens, like all good and beautiful things, slowly: bit by tender bit.

It begins in the way of all potent beginnings: with a small, delicate seed.

It begins in the way of all sacred beginnings: with a strange, wild story.

In spring, we give ourselves back to the earth.

In spring, we allow ourselves, once more, to trust in the potential of seed.

In spring, we allow ourselves, once more, to trust in the power of story.

And what are the seeds we sow in spring?

What are the stories we tell in spring?

The spring I gave birth to my first child was a spring unlike any other I had ever known. It was a global pandemic, and the UK and Ireland were experiencing, for the second year in a row, the kind of spring I always thought only existed in vintage children’s picture books, or in old stories handed down from elders to us young’uns as a way of keeping the magical past alive. But, no – it turns out this beautiful, bruised earth of ours still offers us those kinds of springs.

Springs that can change a life; heal a wound; create a future; leave a trace for all times.

When spring returns to us all, we are returned to the earth – our original mother, in a way we may feel we have not experienced, since the moment she left us – almost a full cycle ago.

We are, in myriad ways, returned to joy.

You likely know of that old saying, that a person cannot be sorrowful, not really, when spring is moving on the earth. I won’t say that I agree with this wholeheartedly, but I do know that spring offers us a way back to somewhere – a place we can’t quite name, and in this place, we are able to find something once more – something we may have taken, for quite some time, as lost. And I think that thing we are able to access once more is something perhaps even more impactful than joy, something that runs deeper than hope. Something that feels ancient, ancestral, full of wild healing.

That spring I became a mother; I had sown seeds into the earth beneath my feet in a way I never had before. Barefoot; sun kissed; full of fear and excitement; increasingly taken by the ways in which the earth, this planetary home of ours, still holds in her delicate, folds the ability to surprise me to my core.

To surprise us to our core.

To startle us; to settle us; to soothe us.

I remember, most of all, the shock of the light.

How, at a time that felt so dark and uncertain, the resounding image was lightlightlight. Those pandemic springs were so bright! Such tender reminders of all that is good about this our shared home. How we explored and learned; sowed and tended; harvested and loved. Oh, how we fell into spring, in those days, right when we needed her expansive joy more than ever, it could be said.

I sowed seeds, flower seeds – poppies, love-in-a-mist, cornflowers.

I sowed seeds, grass seeds – sheep’s fescue, hare’s tail, quaking.

I sowed the seeds that would become the garden of my motherhood, and it was the thing in my whole life I most cannot imagine not having done. It changed me, to grow that garden that spring. It changed me as a person, a woman, a writer.

It made me a mother.

That spring, that garden.

What potent power there can be in small, cyclical, quiet things.

I stood in that garden, right when spring was at her fullest, and wept with gratitude to live on a planet that still welcomed our hands in her soil. To live on a planet that still offers us something as jubilant, as joyful, as spring. To be a passenger on this sturdy, black-velvet-space faring vessel; the best home any of us could ever dream of.

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Kerri ní Dochartaigh is the author of Thin Places (Canongate, 2020) and Cacophony of Bone (Canongate, 2023) both listed for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. She has written for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the BBC, Winter Papers, and others.

The security guard looks as though he is crying as the rain runs down his glasses but his voice is steady and warm. We are behind Lord Warden House, a shabby ghost of old England, white as a whale in the darkness, haunting Dover’s Western Docks. Once a grand hotel, a favourite of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Napoleon III, its shell now hosts the offices of freight firms. Visitors come for its parking spaces and the tents on the quay behind it. This is Tug Haven, where the people from the small boats are escorted off their rescue vessels. On the ramp up to the processing tents is where the photographers catch them. Thousands of people from across the sea, anonymous figures with their dark hair and orange life jackets, some wrapped in blankets, some carrying children, some children themselves, begin their new lives here. This facility will be attacked with petrol bombs, and the screening will be moved to Western Jet Foil nearby, but for now this is Britain’s threshold.

Once they have been processed in the tents, people from the small boats are driven to a second fenced and guarded area where they await further processing, or just wait, until they are directed to a coach and driven up the hill and over the chalk cliffs to an England of motorways, outskirts, reception centres and hotels.

Between the processing tents and the holding area, the security guard is keeping an eye on a potential weirdo in a cagoule, wet jeans and soaking shoes, shivering at him. I am here in Dover because what is happening on the French coast and in the Channel, and in this town and behind these fences has become an obsession – for the press, for the politicians, for the people of Britain and for me. I have come here to try to understand it.

The Channel looked surly and thuggish at noon, the sea a spiteful yellow-grey under fog. Through the short dusk and into nightfall the wind has been bitter and inconstant from the south-west, spitting squalls of mist and rain. Surely, I think, nobody in a dinghy has tried to cross the Channel today. I hunch in my jacket, feeling awkward with the guard’s eyes on me.

‘Good evening!’

He looks uncertain. ‘Can I help you?’ he says. He is quite an elderly man.

‘I’m writing about Dover,’ I say. ‘What do you think about the people in the small boats?’

And that is all it takes. As rain runs down his specs, the security guard speaks softly. He talks as though he has been waiting to tell someone this: ‘I’m from Dover,’ he says. ‘Lived here 30 years. Retired. I came down here to see if these people are being treated properly. And they are. Really well. We can be proud – we’re looking after them. We got an alert this morning – they cooked 200 sausages and then we had to eat most of them because it was a false alarm.

‘There was a 26-year-old girl with a three-month-old baby on a night like this, January 4th. That really upset me. These people need help. And look at these fences! Look at the size of them. They’re not going away – the world’s on the move and politicians are not telling people the truth. I shouldn’t be talking to you really.’

After a short while we say goodbye and I move away, bend over my notebook in the gloom and write down what he said, and then I stand in the rain, amazed. I have only been here half a day and already the story that I thought I knew, the one everyone knows, has collapsed.

On the slipway earlier I met a jet-ski team from Border Force who told me they were trained and willing to do pushbacks out at sea. I was surprised, because according to the news and the narrative of this crisis, Border Force are preparing to go on strike rather than have their members risk prosecution for sinking dinghies. Ramming an overloaded inflatable crammed with people, which is what a ‘pushback’ means, could amount to attempted murder, so the union which represents Border Force is angrily opposed to it. But the jet-ski men I spoke to on the slipway are excited at the prospect. Some of them could not wait to get ramming.

‘We’ve practised it!’ one said. ‘We know it works!’

‘But what about the union?’ I asked.

‘We’re not members of that union.’

‘How do you feel about doing pushbacks?’

‘I was in the Falklands,’ said a senior member of the team.

‘The mission then was “Get them off there!” If the mission now is “Push them back”, this team won’t have a problem with it.’

To this frank, stocky man with his Welsh accent and straight back, Argentinian soldiers had become people in small boats. They are them.

When I told them I was a writer they said they were not bothered about speaking to me, albeit anonymously. ‘No one has been down here to ask us what we think,’ said the Welshman with a shrug. We talked about their jet skis, and I mentioned volunteering on lifeboats when I was young.

‘You should sign up!’ the team leader said. ‘You can find the application on the Home Office website. There’s lots of jobs!’

They also said they sometimes turned their transponders off when they were out at sea. With the Automated Identification System disabled, they could not be tracked.

‘We switch it off when we’re doing something covert,’ said the youngest and most excitable. He refused to elaborate on that. Perhaps it was a fantasy. On the French shore, a young man dreams himself on the other side, safe in Britain. On the English side, a young man dreams he is some sort of commando, repelling Britain’s foes mid-Channel. How many dreams soar over the Channel tonight, over this black and sloshing sea?

In London, politicians dream of resolving the crisis and news editors dream of milking it. Behind mansion gates, the owners of private outsourcing firms dream of ever bigger hotel-accommodation contracts and higher transport and custody profits (their dreams are real). Across the sea, smugglers dream of euros, sacks and bags and cases full of euros (their dreams are real, too). And across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, across the Earth, countless closed eyes have imaginary Englands flickering behind them tonight, Englands like Edwardian Lord Wardens in Edwardian sun, with sea views and tall windows. And here in Dover, the security guard stands in the rain beside the ghost of a once-upon-a-time hotel.

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Horatio joins us on Elmley Nature Reserve, Isle of Sheppey later this month, where he will be interviewed about ‘We Came by Sea’ by CBTR contributing editor Tallulah Brennan. More info, including about full lineup and day tickets, available here.

‘We Came by Sea: Stories of a greater Britain’ is out now and available here, published by Little Toller Books. Read Sue Brooks’ review of the book here.

Riley Summer is a South London–based multimedia artist and recent graduate of UAL London College of Communication. Her practice is hands-on and largely analogue, with a strong focus on screen printing. Rosa Amora is a Bristol–based illustrator whose practice combines digital and analogue drawing techniques, blending traditional mark-making with contemporary processes. Riley’s work explores people and human connection, focusing on emotion and how we interact with one another. Rosa’s background in ecology leads her towards themes of nature and our environment. Both artists draw inspiration from their surroundings and from lived experience. 

The artists state: “We are working together to build a body of work that celebrates migration in the UK. Where fear-mongering narratives are loud, we believe the shared joy of movement is louder. We want to uplift these voices and show the UK for what it truly is: a rich collage of culture, stories and community. Movement is survival. Migration is life.”

Rosa and Riley will be running two kinds of workshop at Elmley Nature Reserve at our Caught by the River weekend: 

Gel Plate Printing Workshop
A drop-in printmaking workshop where participants create layered prints and collages inspired by movement and migration. From the birds passing over Elmley to the people and patterns that have shaped the UK. Using gel plates and hand-carved lino stamps, everyone leaves with something unique and handmade. All materials provided, no experience necessary. 

Collage Workshop
Participants create unique, personal pieces drawing on their own experiences of nature and the world around them. Using a mix of materials and techniques, everyone is encouraged to make something that feels genuinely theirs and to share what collage means to them. A space for open conversation about how the UK itself is a collage of nature, culture and people. All materials provided, no experience necessary. 

Look out for more from Rosa and Riley on the Caught by the River site this summer.

Find full details of our Elmley event — for which day tickets are now available! — here.

I first met Zakia Sewell in 2023, when I chaired a conversation between her and the artist Marianne Keating for ACV Magazine. This was just as my own book Babylon, Albion had begun taking shape. I told Zakia about my book, and that I was deeply moved by her Radio 4 series Finding Albion whilst embarking on my research. Zakia’s work arrived at such a pivotal point in my life; I was beginning to truly untangle the knotted weeds of my British and Iraqi identities, and my place within my beloved British countryside and landscapes. I wanted to understand how I could see myself as British whilst wholly and proudly being someone with roots in a former British mandate, Iraq. 

Britain, and Britishness, does not have to be synonymous with the Empire. Instead, Britishness could be ritual, folk dance, and mythology. This was the kind of Britain I was more interested in being a part of. 

Having adapted the radio series into a book of the same name, Finding Albion offers a richly textured exploration of identity, belonging, and cultural inheritance in contemporary Britain. Blending memoir, cultural criticism, and musical history, Zakia interrogates what it means to feel rooted – or unrooted – in a country whose identity is itself layered, contested, and constantly evolving. The “Albion” of the title evokes an ancient, almost mythic version of Britain, yet Zakia’s journey is grounded firmly in the present, shaped by migration, memory, and the intimate influence of family. Through this interplay of past and present, the book becomes both a personal search and a wider cultural inquiry.

Zakia’s book starts at a gig by the British folk band Pentangle in 2008 – where her “obsession” with folk music and British folk culture began. ‘Like the old myths of Albion,’ she writes, ‘their otherworldly folk songs seemed to emanate from a very different kind of Britain to the one invoked by anthems like ‘God Save the King’ and Rule Britannia’, or by the Union Jack. These folk songs had little do with glorifying the empire, the military or the monarchy – they were alternative stories of Britain, told from the ground up.’

When reading, I was surprised by how similarly I express the sentiment in Babylon, Albion, where I lament ‘Britain’s attachment to historic symbols of Britishness such as our national anthem, which glorifies a royal rule over the nation’s people.’ But I shouldn’t be surprised; Zakia and I have been subject to the same kinds of narratives our whole lives, growing up as girls of colour within landscapes and cityscapes that didn’t always seem to love us back. 

At the heart of Finding Albion lies Zakia’s mixed heritage, born to a mother from Carriacou and an English father, and her attempt to reconcile these different strands of identity. Rather than presenting identity as something fixed or easily defined, Sewell portrays it as fluid, shaped by experience, geography, and emotional connection. Her reflections move between childhood memories, family stories, and moments of self-discovery, creating a narrative that feels both deeply personal and widely relatable. This duality allows the reader to see how individual lives intersect with broader questions about nationhood and belonging. If anything, personal and emotive language is something Zakia could have drawn even more on at these anecdotal asides. 

Music plays a central role in Sewell’s exploration. Drawing on her background as a broadcaster, she uses folk traditions, radio archives, and contemporary sounds as a lens through which to examine British identity. Folk music, in particular, becomes a powerful symbol throughout the book. Often associated with a nostalgic or exclusionary vision of “Englishness,” Sewell reclaims it as something more inclusive and dynamic. She highlights how folk traditions have always been shaped by movement and exchange, specifically with the Caribbean and West Indies, challenging the idea that culture can ever be pure or static. In doing so, she redefines Albion not as a closed, homogenous space, but as a site of continual transformation.

Her response is not to reject the tradition, but to reposition herself within it. As she reflects on songs like ‘The Cuckoo’, introduced to her by her father, there is a sense not of borrowing but of mutual recognition: the music belongs to her as much as she belongs to it. This reframing subtly dismantles the idea of cultural ownership, replacing it with a more reciprocal understanding of cultural participation.

I found most fascinating the parts where Zakia details how music introduced her to the practice of Paganism, Britain’s Celtic, pre-Christian spiritual practice which centred around the earth’s seasons rather than monotheism. As she notes, Christianity in the UK is fast dwindling, but Paganism is one of its fastest growing religions. It makes me wonder what that says about the current cultural zeitgeist that (mostly) young people find themselves in. What are they yearning for in place of a so far disappointing or unsatisfactory story of Britishness?

Crucially, Zakia situates folk music within a much broader history of migration and cultural exchange. Rather than treating it as an untouched relic of the past, she highlights the diverse influences that have shaped it – from jazz inflections within British folk revival bands to the contributions of musicians of mixed or diasporic heritage. These examples, such the olde English inspirations for today’s Notting Hill Carnival from the traditional ‘fayre’, complicate any attempt to define folk as purely “native,” revealing it instead as the product of ongoing cultural entanglement. Even forms often imagined as quintessentially British, such as sea shanties, are shown to carry traces of transatlantic exchange, shaped by Caribbean and West African musical structures. In this light, cultural traditions appear less as fixed inheritances and more as living processes, continually reshaped by migration, trade, and encounter.

Zakia’s exploration also intersects with wider critiques of British identity, particularly those that address the lingering effects of empire. The concept of “postcolonial melancholia,” articulated by Paul Gilroy, provides a useful framework here, describing a persistent attachment to imperial narratives that obscures more complex histories. As thinkers like Ben Pitcher suggest, such attachments often sustain exclusionary visions of national identity, built on selective myths of the past. Zakia’s work challenges these constructions not through outright rejection, but by exposing their partiality – demonstrating that what is often presented as a unified national story is in fact only one version among many.

For nerds of everything decolonial, Finding Albion is rich, in-depth and well-researched. For those less familiar, this journalistic format could have benefitted from Zakia’s warm voice – the one we love hearing on BBC Radio 6 – and though her sense of humour pops up occasionally (‘absolutely my kind of party’), I finished the book wanting to get more of a sense as to why Brits should be invested in such Neopagan stories or narratives around cultural exchange. Zakia’s conversation with Nadia Shaikh, for example, who contributed to the Right to Roam movement, tugged by necessity on my heartstrings. 

Ultimately, Zakia’s work suggests that to move forward, Britain must be willing to loosen its grip on singular, mythologised versions of itself. Something I myself have been longing to encourage through my own writing, understanding how Albion might welcome and inform an Arab identity such as my own, rather than dilute or compete with it. Tradition, in Zakia’s hands, becomes not a static inheritance to be defended, but a resource for imagining new forms of collective identity. By foregrounding the multiplicity of influences that have always shaped British culture, she opens up the possibility of a more inclusive and dynamic understanding of belonging – one that recognises that the story of Albion has never been singular, and was never meant to be.

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‘Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain’ is out now and available here (£23.75), published by Hodder Press.

Zakia will be interviewed about ‘Finding Albion’ by Emma Warren at next month’s Elmley event on the Isle of Sheppey (where she will be also treating us to a couple of hours behind the DJ decks!). More details and tickets here. 

Dalia Al-Dujaili is a British-Iraqi writer, editor, publisher and curator based in London. She is the founder of HIKMA Iraq and of The Road to Nowhere magazine. She has bylines in The Guardian, Dazed, GQ, The Face, Rolling Stone and more. She is the author of ‘Babylon, Albion: A Personal History of Myth and Migration’ (2025, Saqi Books). She has been featured in Dazed – including on the Dazed100 – Vogue Arabia, AnOther, NY Magazine, PhotoVogue, Stylist and more. ‘Babylon, Albion’ is out in paperback on 9th July.

_{Zakia Sewell, photographed by Buster Grey Jung}

A couple of quick-fire questions to start.

You note in the book that there is something quite specific about geographically isolated communities. For example, folk customs have remained very strong in Cornwall, with some of its inhabitants citing living at the land’s end as a reason connections between people have remained so strong. I wondered how you relate to this as someone who lives in a place defined by its vastness and huge number of people — but also as someone who has experience of quite the opposite, in rural Wales?

I was lucky to have a split screen, or a kind of double experience of growing up. At my family home on the outskirts of West London, I was allowed to cycle around my block of flats but not really go any further. I lived in incredibly close proximity to people in a council block, and yet didn’t really know any of my neighbours. That experience contrasted with my time spent with my grandparents  in Wales, in a township called Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, where there was a real deep sense of community. That included longer term residents with a generational relationship to the place, along with newer incomers — it was a community bound together by pubs, and the carnivals that happened every summer, and the ‘common walk’ which happened every three years, which I write about in the book. There were all of these community events which really bound people and gave them a sense of local pride. I feel very lucky to have had that experience, and also the experience of visiting the Caribbean. Where my grandparents are from, Carriacou, similarly, there is a real sense of island pride. And again, if we’re thinking about isolated communities, Carriacou is tiny, it’s 7 miles long, and each village has its own traditions and customs and its own distinct sense of identity. So, I suppose the book draws upon my experience of all of those places, the urban and the rural, the sense of community here in Britain and that in the Caribbean. This is very much the perspective from which the book is written.

There’s a moment in the book in which you write: ‘When I’ve not left the city for a while, I find it’s easy to forget there is moist, damp earth beneath the concrete; that the hills of Highgate and New Cross were once covered in grass and wild flowers, or even forests, roamed by wild boars and wolves.’ Are there daily rituals or routines you have which allow you to connect to the land despite the ease of forgetting you describe?

Forcing myself to get out for a walk. It’s very easy, when we’re busy running around in our city lives, to forget to pause and take time to notice the natural landscape. For much of my life, I barely looked up to notice the trees were in blossom, or that the leaves were withering. One of the lovely things about starting to follow the wheel of the year, albeit in quite a gentle way, has been to reroot myself in seasonal shifts, and to mark them. Even if it’s in a small way, like making the effort to step out and go for a walk, or doing a little ritual with friends. It’s made me so much more aware and made me feel so much more closely connected to those seasonal shifts and cycles, which, even if you’re in the centre of a big city in London, you can access.

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In the book, I find it really interesting that you find a story which flows both ways — you visit the Ivory Bangle Lady, for example, in York, but you also write in your chapter on Notting Hill Carnival about finding an image of Jack in the Green in the National Gallery of Jamaica. As you write, this refutes the idea that folk culture is confined to rural villages of Britain, but there’s another almost opposite truth too, which is that Black history is found in many other places than urban centres, whether it is in Cheddar, Suffolk or York, in the remote countryside, or in small towns. Did you set out to write with this two-way direction in mind, or was it more organically formed from your research? 

No, I don’t think it was conscious, but I suppose one of the wonderful things about folk culture — whether it’s stories or older songs which have been passed down orally through the generations — is that these are traditionally the expressions of marginalised people; people who have been excluded from the academies and institutions who’ve had to find other ways of expressing their identities or their culture, or stories. That means that when we look at the folk song repertoire or traditions, often we find narratives and perspectives that trouble the dominant narratives and complicate simple visions. So that was something that happened quite organically throughout the book, whether that was looking into the history of the Notting Hill Carnival and the origin story of the Trinidadian Carnival and discovering that it began as an exclusively white form of entertainment for the planter class, which complicated my idea of the carnival as a distinctly Black Afro-Caribbean tradition, or as you say, finding that image of Jack in the Green in Jamaica in the 19th century — a quintessential English folk character. Or indeed, the tales of struggles and poachers fighting against gamekeepers. What we find are stories that are complex, and entangled and to me, far more interesting, because as you say, they reveal multiple truths.

One of the most compelling parts of the book, for me, was how attentive you were to what lies beyond England. You write about the discomfort of attributing some kind of mysticism to Welsh identity, and you mention Matthew Arnold, who had this idea that the Celtic race were inherently more spiritual than the ‘rational, industrialised Anglo-Saxons’. There’s little point in the ‘envy’ you describe, which drives some to claim some Irish, Welsh, or Scottish ancestry, if the Welsh harp is actually Italian, or the supposed traditional dress actually has little grassroots substance to it; these identities are also in flux, or not as straightforward or ‘pure’ as we might imagine. If we think with the St George’s flag say, which is in fact Genoese, do you think the reality of how patchworked our identities are, is actually an antidote? If we’re all made up of conflicting, or complicated pieces?

Absolutely. I think this is a theme that emerged in the book, without it being predetermined as something I wanted to thread through. Often, when we take a look at some of these national symbols and forms of folk culture that supposedly are indigenous and expressive of something ‘pure’ and ‘authentically British’, they’re often a lot more mixed up than we might think. That to me is what’s exciting. As someone of mixed heritage, with connections to both Britain and to the Caribbean, I’ve always been drawn to these combinations and clashes, and fusions of culture. When Cecil Sharp, the godfather of English folk, started folk collecting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he was concerned with finding folk expressions which were, in his eyes, authentic or pure. He wrote about the Moorish influence on morris dancing as being somehow a polluting influence, instead of a fascinating creative, generative collision of cultures. So, absolutely, making visible the mixed-up-ness of our culture, and our identities, and finding symbols that can help us to celebrate that is absolutely one of the antidotes and challenges to the kind of toxic and exclusionary conceptions of identity that are getting a lot of airtime today.

Liz, a Pagan living in Glastonbury, believes Paganism is on the rise in part because of patriarchal and abusive structures. I hadn’t expected to find so many examples of how folklore can be used simultaneously as a liberating tool, and as a way to subdue women, to keep them in their place as it were. An example that really stuck with me was on May Day, young maidens were encouraged to wash their faces in the sunrise dew, to maintain their ‘youthful complexions’. Or your retelling of the history of Morris dancing, that it was taught at the Espérance Club for the working class women living in the slums of King’s Cross. So, I wanted to ask how much the question of women’s role in folklore, and in its reinvention, led you in your research for this book? Or was it less intentional than this, and these were stories you picked up on the way?

While writing and researching I felt it was important to cast the net wide and to represent an array of different experiences and perspectives. It’s very easy to replicate exclusionary practices or to somehow replicate power dynamics that exist in society in our writing if we’re not careful. Most of the people I interviewed were women. I don’t know if that was necessarily a conscious thing but it ended up that way. You give the example of Mary Neal, and that was an important inclusion for me. Including her story was not necessarily integral to the argument I was trying to build in that chapter, but it felt really important to highlight the woman who was so influential on the development and revival of Morris dancing, but whose contribution is largely overlooked.

It was really serendipitous the way that I discovered her. I was at Cecil Sharp House doing some research, and on the bookshelf underneath his bust was this book about Mary Neal. It was fascinating because he gets a lot of airtime when we’re thinking about English folk, and yet, when he first started folk collecting, it was the songs, rather than the dances that he was drawn to, and, in fact, Mary Neal was one of the first people to champion the dancing. She saw that it had this healing or transformative power, and set up the incredible Espérance Club with a fellow suffragette, and got working class women in King’s Cross to learn the Morris dances to empower them.  A lot of people see Morris dancing as a solely male dance, or something that only happens in rural villages, and yet here is this story of working class girls in inner-city London, totally at the centre of the Morris revival. It’s when we look at peripheral stories, stories which have been consigned to the margins, that we get a more interesting picture.

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Zakia Sewell’s ‘Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain’ is out now and available here, published by Hodder Press. Read an extract from the book here.

Zakia will be interviewed about Finding Albion by Emma Warren at next month’s Elmley event on the Isle of Sheppey (where she will be also treating us to a couple of hours behind the DJ decks!). More details and tickets here. Lunker-tier subscribers were emailed a 20% ticket discount code last month.