Rosie May Jones
Affiliation: University of Worcester
Rosie May is a multidisciplinary artist and poet, specialising in spoken word and place-responsive performance. Her work explores the intricate relationship between landscape and identity, exploring how narratives of place shape our sense of self and community. Working at the intersection of arts, heritage and environmental practice, she has been developing co-creative projects with the National Trust and Surrey Hills National Landscape, working in dialogue with communities, landscapes and the stories that connect them. She is currently pursuing an arts practice-based PhD at Worcester University, researching Animist Landscapes and Multispecies frameworks for Co-creative and Therapeutic Practice.
Panel: Pilgrimage, Procession, Pageantary
Talk Title: "Whose Green and Pleasant Land?" — Community Pageant as Creative Placemaking
In 1938, E.M. Forster and Ralph Vaughan Williams created the community pageant "England's Pleasant Land," exploring how land enclosure reshaped England's relationship with its landscape across 1000 years of history. It brought together hundreds of community players, actively engaging them in the heritage and stories of the place.
88 years later, in collaboration with the National Trust, we are developing a contemporary response to this work. This presentation focuses on how we are building on this historic model of creative placemaking, to develop connections between isolated communities and the Surrey landscape.
Our contemporary response gathers oral histories from Surrey communities — particularly elderly residents and young people experiencing homelessness. These landscape memories will then be woven into spoken word and electronic music performed alongside the historical pageant.
The methodology positions spoken word and electronic music as contemporary folk practice. Young people facing housing insecurity work with composer Jack Kingslake, sampling oral histories from elderly residents alongside recordings from the pageant's musical revival, to create an original piece of electronic music. This intergenerational exchange embodies living folk tradition: participatory, generative, rooted in place, engaged with landscape and heritage. The poetry will also draw these voices together through verbatim work honouring both historical dispossession and contemporary displacement.
The presentation will include poetry readings and a discussion of heritage and co-creative practice as a mechanism for landscape connection, particularly for communities facing access barriers. This work positions pageantry not as nostalgic performance but as communal creative intervention, asking urgent questions about access, belonging, and who gets to claim connection to the landscape and its heritage.