On a sunny March morning in Bunhill Fields, a burial ground in central London, broadcaster Zakia Sewell is musing over whether folk traditions can really be an antidote to far-right nationalism.
The 32-year-old writer and BBC Radio 6 DJ has been mulling that question over for some time as she journeyed around the British Isles exploring the nation’s folk resurgence for her debut book. Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain builds on Sewell’s hit audio series for BBC Radio 4, which saw her seek out a different, more inclusive idea of “Britishness” beyond the usual national myths and symbols. The book has been longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for non-fiction.
Britain is in a “folk frenzy”, according to Sewell, gesturing to a post-pandemic resurgence in folk culture evidenced by a new slate of pagan festivals as well as the growing popularity of folk music, dancing, films – and magazines like Weird Walk, which takes its name from a movement that invites people to explore sites rich in myth and ritual through walking.
“People are becoming more interested in folk today because they’re searching for alternative visions of Britishness that are more eccentric and fun,” Sewell says. Today, she stands footsteps away from the gravestone of poet and mystic William Blake. Born in 1757, Blake was a fellow seeker of “Albion”, the oldest known name for the island of Great Britain.
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Finding Albion follows the Pagan calendar, also known as the “Wheel of the Year” – which delineates the changing seasons with eight annual festivals around the UK, all of which Sewell attended. She marked the spring equinox with a druid ritual on Glastonbury Tor, celebrated May Day with Morris dancers in Oxford, and observed Samhaim, known as Gaelic Halloween, amid the ghosts of York. During Montol, a midwinter festival in Penzance, Cornwall, Sewell dressed up as a wolf before rounding off her year at Stonehenge for another spring equinox.
Alongside this resurgence in folk culture, however, another sort of frenzy has taken hold. Last year, “flag fever” emerged as a result of Operation Raise the Colours and the Unite the Kingdom marches – two movements with connections to well-known far-right campaigners such as Tommy Robinson. Street by street, flags proliferated as their meaning was debated ferociously in newspapers and on social media: a symbol of patriotism or racist nationalism?
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Finding Albion looks to history to help undermine attempts by far-right groups to co-opt traditional symbols and stories to fuel division. “Many of our national symbols in England aren’t rooted in English soil at all,” Sewell says, noting how England’s patron saint, St George, never set foot in England and had Palestinian roots. And St George’s cross, the national flag, originated as the flag of the Italian Republic of Genoa. “The English even paid Genoa a tax for many centuries for the privilege of using the flag,” she says.
Sewell is not the only one hoping to grapple with divisive visions of the past. The LGBTQ+ female Morris dancing troupe, Boss Morris, breathes new life into the English folk dance dating back to the 15th century. Based in Gloucestershire, its dancers perform at festivals and fetes. In 2023, they appeared alongside Wet Leg at the Brit awards.
Boss Morris hopes to redefine “Englishness” into something more inclusive and with broader appeal by reimagining a modern vision of folk culture away from the darker aspects of folk traditions – including the practice of blackface.
As someone of British and Caribbean heritage, Sewell’s relationship to her own Britishness has always felt complicated. Along with her love for sunshine and syncopated rhythms, she also inherited stories from her Caribbean family of her ancestors who were transported from West Africa in tightly packed ships and worked as slaves on sugar plantations under British rule.
Much of Britain’s inequality Sewell attributes to the spectre of its colonial history and the racism that was used to justify it. But through her research she has discovered that, “Britain of the past is not as white as we think,” she says. Take the Cheddar man – the 10,000-year-old Mesolithic skeleton dubbed the “first Brit” was revealed in 2018 to have had dark skin. Even the ruler of Great Britain in Roman times, Septimius Severus, was a North African.
Finding Albion is rich with knowledge and insights that help to pave the way for a more inclusive vision of Britain. The book’s cover is an illustration of something that looks a lot like the illusive Holy Grail; the book is an incredible find.
Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain by Zakia Sewell published on March 19th by Hodder & Stoughton.
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