‘Real change comes from below!’: walking and singing about places that matter; the formation of Commoners Choir

ABSTRACT

This article details the first event Commoners Choir performed: a singing and walking project, Magna Carta, about the rights of lay people to access land for leisure and recreation. Using original songs, the project conceives both singing and walking as political acts of protest and commemoration. Situated within new walking studies, it argues that the choir’s walking is embodied and politically ‘artful and wilful’. Drawing on radical walking collectives and practitioners from British psychogeography such as the Loiterers Resistance Movement, Wrights & Sites and Phil Smith, it explores how Magna Carta affected the choir as they connected, through song with the rural spaces where the choir performed. Using a small-scale sample of interviews with choir members, the piece explores the experience of the Magna Carta project. To capture the subjective and reflexive nature of both the action of the protest and the psychogeographical response to space as an output, the article is written using a deliberately creative mélange of lyrics, histories, happenings, symbols and images to offer a ‘thickness’ of description of Magna Carta as a walking event.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest choirs
• radical walking
• land access
• embodied attachments to place
• psychogeographical writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For an animated experience of the Magna Carta project, our short film made by Chian Gatwood at Leeds Beckett University can be accessed on YouTube.

2. This study was given ethical clearance by Leeds Beckett University. The people of the study gave us signed consent to use their responses in published materials. We use pseudonyms to protect the identities of the people of the study.

3. The upside down crown was used specifically as a reaction to Magna Carta – the original Charter was written to diminish the power of the King, whose power was out of control. As well as protecting the forests and commons, the Charter limited the sovereign’s power in the courts and in law, so the upside-down-crown was logical.

4. Walton uses the term ‘stravaging’ to mean ‘walking unconstrained by legally established rights of way’ (2012, p. 247).

5. The font used in all Commoners print is by Golden Type by William Morris. A pioneering socialist designer and poet, his Arts and Crafts Movement was based on the idea of art and references design being part of ordinary peoples’ lives rather than as an elite fancy for the wealthy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Taylor

Dr Lisa Taylor is Head of Media at Leeds Beckett University. She has published on media studies, popular film, music and art. In 2008, A Taste for Gardening: classed and gendered practices was published, an ethnography about the relationship between lifestyle television and gardeners. She is currently working on an ethnography of responses to demolition in an ex-industrial textile village. She is a member of Commoners Choir.

Boff Whalley

Boff Whalley is a musician, writer, runner and former band member of the anarcho-punk folk band Chumbawamba. In 2012, Run Wild was published. He has written drama for theatre and radio and composed sound tracks for films by Ken Loach and Alex Cox. He is now a playwright and the founder of Commoners Choir who released their first album in 2017.