“The calendar had turned, and it was summer.”¹

This year (2026) has been a time of repositioning and reflecting on intellectual and historiographical developments. I was quite ill at the start of the year, but when Spring arrived and I recovered, a series of invites, events, co-incidences, and changes all combined. Dare I say it, I experienced an assemblage of people and experiences from past and present that interacted in unexpected ways. This interlude is a reflection on how culture weaves many of these experiences and people together.

Deep England

To do this reflection, we need to go back to 2019.

In 2019, Justin Hopper, author of The Old Weird Albion, made a companion record with Sharron Kraus, Chanctonbury Rings (Ghost Box records, 2019). It is a landmark record for me, and the following is why:

In the summer of 2019, my colleagues and I were put through a redundancy process. On the Thursday afternoon, 19 June, we were summoned to a meeting to outline our fate. Most of the group, including myself, decided to fight back. Much of the rest of that summer involved us focusing our energies and research skills in putting together a counter-proposal. The experience was intense, time-pressured, and collective. On the Friday 20 June, at just after 5pm, we received invites from HR to our individual consultation meetings, beginning Monday. I remember seeing mine pop into my inbox on my phone, while waiting outside a lab at Imperial College waiting for my spouse to finish work. We were already exhausted. My colleagues had planned to have a meeting on the Saturday morning to do more work on the counter-proposal, but we decided to cancel and try to enjoy the weekend instead.

From Imperial, my spouse and I then went to State51 Factory in Shoreditch for their ‘A Midsummer Night’s Happening‘ event in collaboration with the Ghostbox label. I’ve been a fan of the music released on Ghostbox for years, now firmly recognised as expressive of ‘hauntology’. But I had largely experienced only the electronic elements of their releases, all mid-century science experiments and allusions to Radiophonic Workshop and a very urban (indeed New Town) vision of lost futures.

But this evening, in the middle of one of the most urban places in Britain, we experienced rurality. A different kind of hauntology. The seeds of rediscovering a rural arcadia that has now flourished into the new English folk (see below).

It was balmy and warm, full of the buzz that East London still has. The experience that State51 had put on was genuinely magical. Different rooms in the converted warehouse/workshop were decorated with trees, scenes and lights and sounds. We were transported to different imaginings. It also helped that there was a free bar in the courtyard. Everyone there was in with the in crowd, and so it felt were we.

And then the bells.

The bells of the morris men, dancing upon Chanctonbury Ring, projected on a screen while Sharron Kraus played a selection of instruments. I was drawn in by the bells, and by Justin Hopper’s narration of the legends, traditions and his sense of place on that iron-age hill fort in Sussex.

Time had indeed gone soft at the crossroads. It didn’t matter any more. Just being in the moment did.

The next morning, Midsummer, my spouse decided the best thing we could do in amidst the intensity of the chaos, was to go to Chanctonbury Ring ourselves.

Reader, we walked the Ring.

It was just as Justin described. The midsummer sky was ‘recklessly blue’. On the way, even, a spot of Folk Horror. A sheep was on its back, stricken with fly-strike. A teenage boy, his bike propped up against the fence, was trying to turn it over. We tried to help too, the flies swarming around us, but to no avail. A local walked past with their dog, and told us that an appeal for the farmer had been posted on the local Facebook page, but he was uncontactable. We had to leave it there.

The evening in Shoreditch, and the following day’s walk along grass, stubble and chalk of the South Downs, will stay with me forever.

In late 2025, Justin invited me to speak about my new book on his podcast, Uncanny Landscapes. I was super thrilled and honoured to do so, and we eventually recorded it in February 2026.

We discussed my book, the meaning of the commons, and protest past and present. It was a wonderful conversation.

https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-86hec-8803d6

On 28 March 2026, I went to see the documentary, ‘We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher‘, showing at the Rio in Dalston, with a Q and A afterwards featuring the two makers, Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter, and some of the contributors, including Justin, who plays the M. R. James’ character, ‘Professor Parker’, in the film as well as narrating it.

Which lost futures?

And herein follows a digression within an interlude, a short review.

The makers of We Are Making described it as a film within a larger piece of art, with the art being the engagement with the public and the process of inspiring further conversations about Fisher’s work. They did not expect such a positive demand for the film, especially from grassroots alternative groups in Italy for example.

The documentary was made on a small budget, as Mellor and Poulter repeatedly reminded us. So, other than the opening sequence with Hopper as Parker running along Felixstowe beach, it comprised the usual collection of found footage (from the makers’ collection of attending protests, mainly the student protests in London in 2011), and talking-head interviews from those who responded to the social media invitation to participate.

I did wonder who the film was aimed at. Most of the audience there at the Rio had no doubt read his work, knew of the main arguments, knew of the controversies and difficulties with the work and individuals in his networks etc. If you’d had said, ‘critique Exiting the Vampire Castle and discuss the legacies of its discourse for today’, to the people sitting in those spring velvet chairs, I’d have expected at least three quarters of them to have written a 2000 word essay, with footnotes.

The questions from the audience confirmed this. There were polite queries about whether the film was still a work in progress, and would be revised. Someone critiqued that the focus of the film was too much on the context of protest and politics (though arguably even that was pretty thin – at some points, the collages of clips of 2010s crowds versus the Met Police veered into sub-Adam Curtis generalisations). It somehow gave a (to some extent misleading) impression that Fisher was involved in a level of activism and leadership that he wasn’t in practice. He wasn’t a wholehearted supporter of the student and anti-Austerity protests of that era. Discourses around Vampire Castle were briefly presented as simply akin to a contemporary social-media pile-on, and then left under-packed. There was no real acknowledgement of edgelordism, around which at least some of Fisher’s contemporaries circled.

There was confusion about why Fisher’s more innovative thinking and assemblages of seemingly unrelated or oppositional culture, in literature, writing and music, were not explored. Why start with M.R. James and not expand that theme; why briefly mention Mark E. Smith and then not unpack how Fisher was able to take influences from an equally contradictory and contrary figure and connect them to contemporary left-wing concerns. There was very little cultural analysis in fact in this film, which portends to be a cultural analysis.

Where the film could have been much more clever, I suggest, would have been made more of the fiction as a framing device, and an intervention in the talking heads. Hopper’s character appears at the start as a synecdoche, as representative of the way in which Fisher framed the role of culture in consciousness, but the construct isn’t used fully in the rest of the film. Hopper just becomes the narrator as himself. There could have been some creative interventions between fact and fiction, that could have been used to offer more incisive exposition of Fisher’s theories, both to audiences who were knowledgeable and new audiences who knew nothing of his work. That’s a shame, as it just requires some creative imagination rather than a bigger budget.

I’m not here to go into Fisher’s contradictions. His concept of captialist realism is in effect a reworking of Gramsci’s cultural hegemony model, to which I subscribe. More pertinently, the vision of the ‘lost futures’ which he was creating, and which has been later mangled into an all-encompassing ‘hauntology’ was forged in an urban context. A cyber-punk, free-reign early internet, Matrix atmosphere. His later thinking on ‘acid communism’, a trip, psychologically, back to the promises of the 1960s and 70s, link more to the ideas of arcadia, of communalism, which Fisher could see heterotopias of in rave culture of the 1990s that was oppressed again by neo-liberal capital power.

Back to Massey, enclosures and lost landscapes of communality, however imagined. Accumulation by dispossession.

Thanks to Justin’s hospitality, I tagged along to the pub drinks after the Q & A, in a lovely pub in the side streets of Dalston. As always, I’m on the fringes, the penumbra, of intellectual communities rather than being at the centre of them, so I was grateful to feel a little part of that gathering. Everyone was lovely, naturally, and there were good conversations had about philosophy, politics and life.

And did those feet?

So back to the new folk. The various cultural influences that I had followed separately since 2019 and earlier were starting to combine and assemble.

Gazelle Twin’s third album Pastoral (Anti-Ghost Moon Ray, 2018) is a striking and deliberately harsh electronic exploration of themes of English identity and folk culture. The cover, showing Elizabeth Bernholz in red costume and mask, interrupting, glitching, a Constable-like pastoral scene, is an intervention in the ‘Better In My Day’ discourse that had swirled like sewage around Brexit and its aftermath. It is a great album.

But NYX choir’s remaking of the album as Deep England takes the symbolism and soundscapes to a different place. Figuratively but also historically.

I watched their performance during the summer of 2021 when live music was still under strict restrictions, so artists live-streamed performances online instead. I dare you not to watch this without astonishment and being drawn in to the drone.²

“And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green?”³

The literary references take us back to Raymond Williams, notably his Country and the City (Penguin, 1973), and his essay, ‘Ideas of Nature’, in Culture and Materialism (1980). I must confess I find Williams difficult to parse because all his references are literary, but that’s a preference not a criticism. Williams’ desire to define nature as never abstract, never ‘separate from the ideas of man’, came out of uneasiness about improvement and enclosure, the desire (perhaps failing) to find an Englishness in the landscape that is not about dispossession and oppression. Again we are back to Doreen Massey, Robinson in Ruins, and David Matless here in contested understandings of landscape and a sore desire by those not on the Right to feel a sense of place in the English landscape without any of its inevitable overtones of nationalism.

Pastoral and Deep England, I think, connect directly to the rise of new folk culture over the last few years, seeking to reclaim English folk culture post-Brexit. A few years ago, I think the resurgence emerged from a reaction to the rather white male ego-centric nature writing that was (and to a great extent still is) dominant on the non-fiction shelves of bookshops. Now the overt threat of fascism has made such efforts to shore up English folk against its twisting and misinterpretation by right-wing extremism.

What brings the two performances of Chanctonbury Rings and Deep England together? Church bells and a recorder. I joke, but they are emblematic of attempts to understand Englishness in the longue duree.

It is a checkpoint, a diary entry written onto the earth at Chanctonbury, with footsteps, like lines accrued on a face/

That, that is tradition. That is its sole purpose, to be enacted and ever so.⁴

Like its adjacent ‘landscape punk’ of David Southwell’s Hookland and other writers (who also seek to reclaim landscape writing from the reams of vapid nature writing that fills the shelves of Waterstones), they look for the darker side of the landscape. This reclaiming is active rather than reactive or nostalgic. “Re-enchantment is resistance” is a Hookland tagline.

Left-leaning and socialist, young, intersectional artists such as Shovel Dance Collective and Goblin Band, and initiatives such as Black British Folk Collective, have reclaimed folk for the young. This upsurge has also lifted the visibility of Jennifer Reid, the ‘Lancashire balladress’, whom I’ve known for her work with the 2019 Peterloo commemorations and her carnival band at various events in and around Manchester. I happened to stumble into the Holloway bookshop in Norwich in its first week of opening in December 2024, another new centre for alternative folk.

New antiquarianism has similarly and adjacently resurfaced, promoted by event organisers such as Stone Club and publishers like Weird Walk. With the rise of alternative morris dance groups, alternative-traditional folk culture is now much more widespread and accessible. It is also paralleled by the re-organisation of the Right to Roam movement, led by Nick Hayes and Guy Shrubsole, and a new environmentalism.

At a performance by Shovel Dance Collective at Cafe Oto in December 2024, the band reflected on why singing traditional folk songs was important. One of them said that folk song is the claims of injustice and dispossession of the poor. The dead can no longer make those claims, so we continue to do so in the living.

Hopper has been influenced by Robinson in Ruins, which focuses on the deep contested history around Thatcham, Berkshire, and that takes us back to Doreen Massey, as discussed in my previous blog.

For me it’s a method too. Not quite the Annales School, but nevertheless a deep history rooted in place. Historical geographers do it much better than political and social historians. Historians tend to be stuck to shorter chronologies, debating when a “long” century begins and ends, rather than observing change over time in one place over centuries.

Assemblages

The first weekend that I started feeling better in Spring 2026, I went for a restorative Thames walk from Twickenham to Richmond. It was the first bright Saturday after interminable weeks of dark cold rainy winter. The first blossoms and spring bulbs were bright and hopeful in the many gardens and small parks along the route. A single white magnolia flower in the woods of York House Gardens often such a ray of light after so much darkness.

I went down a little lane to the Art at Home gallery, a beautiful Georgian house full of light. The exhibition was of artists including Mandy Payne, whom I had shown around Croydon a few years back. Justin Hopper had written one of the pieces in the exhibition catalogue. I had a lovely chat with the proprietors, and only then realised that I knew the wife of one of them through academia, who had also written an essay in the catalogue. Another assemblage of my contacts aligning.

TBC

1. Justin Hopper and Sharron Kraus, Chanctonbury Rings (Ghost Box, 2019) ↩︎
2. We did ‘Doom Yoga’ with NYX choir accompanying, in the dark at Kamala arts space in Birmingham during Supersonic Festival a few years ago and it was as intense. ↩︎
3. No, they didn’t. ↩︎
4. Justin Hopper and Sharron Kraus, Chanctonbury Rings (Ghost Box, 2019) ↩︎