Episode 2: What Happened at the First Therapeutic Landscapes Symposium, and Where It's Going Next

Nobody quite anticipated what the first Therapeutic Landscapes conference would feel like from the inside.

The organisers, Dr John Cussans and Desdemona McCannon, had hoped for good conversations. They'd put together a programme that mixed research presentations with practical workshops, invited artists alongside health practitioners, and made space for the kind of ideas, magic, ritual, folk practice, enchantment, that don't always find a way into more conventional academic settings.

During the conference, there was an overwhelming sense that the attendees had finally found their people. Practitioners asking similar questions in different disciplines, realising there was a community around them. A community of practice that had existed all along, scattered and unconnected, waiting for somewhere to gather.

The programme itself was rich and genuinely eclectic.

Dr Guy Hayward's keynote on pilgrimage sparked debate about the right to roam and the politics of access to landscape.

A second keynote with Dr Azadeh Fatehrad explored how creative arts can support the integration of migrant communities, work that moved John deeply, the experience of really understanding the work of a colleague's practice.

Other conversations around folk fiction opened up questions about what it means to reimagine the past and captured something of the anarchic, speculative energy. A performance that included chimes turned the room into something that felt genuinely enchanted. And work on folk culture as working class culture brought a sharper political edge to the conversation about whose folk culture gets preserved and whose gets ignored.

Then after the presentations ended and everyone went to the pub, both John and Desdemona agreed, that was where some of the best conversations happened. Sat on the long benches of a the old Tudor pub in Worcester, the the conversations continued, the stories got more engaging, with conversations around shamanism and the cultural approaches to how the dead can inhabit the living.

The queue for tea. The pub afterwards. The energy that builds when a room full of people realises it has more in common than it knew.

For the second year, that energy is already building again, and if anything, the response to the call for papers has been even more striking. Themes are emerging around deep time and experimental archaeology, carnivalesque and clowning, creative practice as a form of magical thinking or amulet-making, the politics of access to nature, and international work with diasporic communities exploring heritage and identity. The programme isn't finalised yet, but the shape of it suggests something wider, deeper, and just as impactful as year one.

And beyond this year, the organisers are already thinking bigger. A longer programme. Something more immersive. Maybe, even eventually, a festival.