Are We Living Through a New Era of British Weirdness?

Keir and Jem spin the ‘pagan wheel of the year’ to mark the official start of spring, as they investigate the weird-left politics of leylines and megaliths.

From folk horror films to Weird Walks and Zakia Sewell’s search for Albion, and from Stonehenge to Whirl-Y-Gig to our near-and-dear Circle Dance, there’s a new-old weirdness in the air.

But is any of this really new? Or is it just the latest expression of a centuries-old reaction to modernity? And what, if anything, does it all mean for Britain in the 2020s?

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Books, poems and articles:
Zakia Sewell – Finding Albion / Ben Edge – Folklore Rising / John Doran’s New Weird Britain (The Quietus) / William Blake – Jerusalem / Benedict Anderson – Imagined Communities / Georgina Boyes – The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology & the English Folk Revival / Margaret Murray: The Witch-Cult in Western Europe / Julian Cope – The Modern Antiquarian / Mark Fisher – The Weird and the Eerie / Raymond Williams – Culture and Society 1780-1950 / Alfred Watkins – The Old Straight Track / Alan Moore – From Hell / Alan Garner – The Owl Service / Ben Anderson and Anna Secor – The Politics of Feeling

Films, TV and radio: The Stone Tape (1972) / Penda’s Fen (1974) / Britannia (2018-2023) / New Weird Britain on Radio 4 / My Albion on Radio 4