Last year, I started writing about this idea, Sovereign Albion, because I felt that in a world of economic stagnation, geopolitical volatility and AI takeoff we not only needed durable statecraft and sovereignty, but also to revive something deeper: a spiritual, cultural and aesthetic foundation that binds us together, as a nation, so we can navigate these times collectively.
One of the biggest inspirations for this work was Zakia Sewell, a writer, broadcaster and DJ on a quest to discover Albion: an alternative national story and canvas rooted in myth, folklore and enchantment.
When so many people seem to be looking for meaning, and at a time when so many conversations about national identity are about who to exclude, I found it a hugely inspiring project and proposal about what it is we could all be inspired by, proud of and connected to.
Now, having written her new book, Finding Albion, it was an enormous privilege to hear more about what she discovered on her journey.
Thanks to the Centre for British Progress for supporting this podcast, to Podcast House for their production support, and to Simon Panayi for original music.
How to find Albion, with Zakia Sewell
Zakia Sewell is a writer, broadcaster and DJ from London. She is the host of Dream Time on BBC 6 Music and the author of Finding Albion, which explores British national identity, folk culture and myth.
[Transcript lightly edited by Claude.]
So Zakia, welcome to the show. Let’s start with an easy one — what does Albion mean to you? How did you come to it?
[01:26] An easy one, he says. Albion is the ancient name for Britain, and it’s a nebulous word or concept that means lots of different things to different people. I can’t pinpoint the first time I came across it — it was probably emblazoned on a pub sign, or when I lived in Stoke Newington, around the corner from Albion Road.
It’s probably seeped into my consciousness slowly over the years rather than in one particular memorable moment. But to me, it represents this alternative spirit of the nation. In some of the early texts and histories of Britain, the island is referred to as “the isle formerly known as Albion,” so it represents this kind of time before. And yet at the same time, we don’t really know anything about what the word really means or where it came from. There are guesses about the etymology, but it’s all a bit unclear — shrouded in mystery.
I think the fact that we can’t quite pin it down has meant it’s rich and fertile for dreaming about Britain and alternative visions of the nation.
That really came through in your work. But it’s funny, because when I started writing about Albion I had this bittersweet moment where it became clear the word has some contested connotations — someone sent me a message from a person who said “oh, you’ve got to beware, this is textbook fascism.” Which I found funny, because what I was writing was basically the opposite — rather than a national identity based on who we exclude, it’s about what we should all actually be connected to. But it did make me wonder: did you have a blank slate here? How do you think about the different connotations?
[03:31] It was quite interesting through the process of researching the book — you end up in all sorts of weird corners of the internet, and I came across a book called Dark Albion.
I bought myself a copy. I really regret buying it. I’ve given £7.50 to this nasty guy, whoever wrote it. It was basically this negative fantasy about how the country has been colonised by immigrants. One of the potential roots of the word Albion is the Latin albus, meaning white — and some people see that as a reference to the white skin of the “true inhabitants” of the nation. So absolutely, people with very different views and visions of Albion to mine have been drawn to it.
However, I didn’t really feel the need to reclaim it as such, because for me the most powerful association with the word is via William Blake. Blake, the incredible polymath, for whom Albion was a kind of giant — a personification of Britain. He had this very complex mythology, written across various books and prophetic works, in which Albion represented the soul of the nation that had fallen into a deathly slumber, walking in a kind of state of death. Blake saw this as a consequence of the hyper-materialistic, empiricist, irreligious state of his age — and yet he promised that the spirit of Albion would rise again. That is my most dominant association with Albion, and it eclipses some of those darker visions.
That’s interesting, because you’ve talked about this in a way that I think many people will resonate with — rationalism has its benefits, but it’s not the only way of seeing the world, and there’s something about synthesising the rational with the woo-woo. There’s an element there that takes it beyond just the nation state. I’m curious: on your travels throughout the quest, was there a particular folk festival or custom that you were especially drawn to?
[06:12] The most powerful experience for me personally was Stonehenge. Which might also be because it was the final place I visited — the book starts at the Spring Equinox and finishes at Stonehenge on the following Spring Equinox. It was also a gorgeously sunny day.
I’ve been to Stonehenge before, but I’d never been for one of the Solstices or Equinoxes, when the barriers come down and you can get up close with the stones. What I found really special was that it was genuinely diverse — much more diverse than I expected. And I had this sense, as we were all trudging through the mud towards the stones at 5am, of disparate tribes and nations and peoples from all over coming together just to watch the sunrise. Something so simple and yet so deep and profound.
Being there, I was walking around thinking about what it all means — and in recent times the evidence has revealed that the building of Stonehenge was exactly that: stones from the northernmost point of Scotland, England, and Wales, lugged for miles to this particular site. That sense of gravity, that idea of unity and coming together in our difference — it was a really positive and hopeful note to end my personal quest, and hopefully the book, on. It was a quiet ritual. There was a bit of a Druid session happening, but really it was just that simple act of watching the sunrise.
How much do you go in for the woo-woo? I remember talking to people in my family and they’re like, “why are you talking about paganism?” — the Woo-Woo Taboo. How have you navigated that?
[09:12] The Woo-Woo Taboo — I love that, I’m going to steal that.
I would say I’m definitely interested in spirituality, and I’m quite open to mystery — quite open to not having to know it all. I like the fact that there are things we can’t know or understand. And yet at the same time, I would say I’m quite a rational, practical, pragmatic person. I’d like to think I’m a healthy balance of the two.
I know there will be people who are put off by talking about spirituality or paganism, and it’s not an attempt to convert anybody to that way of viewing the world. Within folk culture, a lot of folk traditions really aren’t woo-woo at all — it’s like blokes carrying flaming tar barrels on their backs, not necessarily to bring about a good harvest or for any fertility reason. I like that it’s a mix of the two.
I hope that anyone put off by the more woo-woo aspects of my journey for Albion will find more rational, historical arguments in the radical histories and other aspects of the book.
Because there’s the woo-woo, crystals end of the spectrum, and then there’s folk traditions that are of, by, and for the people — and there’s a quite radical politics here. This is not about the state; it’s about communities building up their own customs across the country. In some ways you’re doing a kindness by making these paths and customs more legible to people. But on the other hand, a lot of people might look at this and say: “this feels like Merrie England cosplay — middle class, National Trust, Morris dancing, cream teas.” How should we think about making it more accessible? Is that your mission?
[11:37] I don’t see myself as some sort of folk evangelist — or a Priestess of Albion, just a humble follower.
I’ve just had this strange fascination for a really long time that I thought was a very personal, quirky thing about me. It’s only in recent years that I’ve realised it has legs, that there is an appeal for people outside the folky scene — of which I was never really part.
I’m not out here to convert people to the virtues of folk, but rather to say: within folk culture we have this fertile source of alternative stories about Britain. Traditions like Morris dancing, old songs passed down through the ages, strange seasonal customs performed all around the country — these have traditionally been the expressions of disenfranchised people: the working classes, women, people of colour here in Britain and across the empire, who didn’t have access to high forms of culture or were excluded from the national imaginary. In that sense they’re a fertile source of alternative stories, alternative information that we can excavate and use.
That’s particularly helpful when we’re thinking about alternative visions to balance out the exclusionary, racist visions of Britishness that are extremely dominant at the moment. So my mission is more: here is a rich seam of our culture that’s been buried. And yes, that could be slightly twee May Day celebrations in Oxford, but it could also be traditions practised across the empire that are fusions of British and West African customs — which tell a very different kind of story about our history and heritage.
I think it’s those radical and subversive histories that I’m personally much more drawn to.
There’s definitely something I want to come back to on new folk customs, but just to follow up on that point about contested national identity. I think a lot of people look back at some of the awful things that have happened in British history and don’t want any association with them. It has complicated the ability to feel national pride for many people. How did you explore this through your quest?
[15:14] This book is really an expression of my very specific identity. My dad is White, English and Welsh. My mum is Black Caribbean, born here.
Growing up between those two cultures has at times been quite complicated, because in many ways I feel very at home in Britain — it’s where I was born, it’s where I’ve always lived, and there are lots of things I love about this country. When I go to the Caribbean, I feel more British than ever. And yet, as a person of colour, as someone with very direct links to the devastating impacts of colonialism — not just on the Caribbean island my family are from, but within interpersonal relationships in my own family — it’s quite a difficult place to be. How can I reconcile these two aspects of my identity?
So the idea of pride — I still don’t even know if that’s something I aspire to. More, a sense of peace about who I am and where I live. That’s where I’ve arrived through writing this book.
Something I’m grappling with within it is: how can we name and be honest about those really dark aspects of our past and present? We only need to look at the horrific behaviour of the far right in the last year or so to know this is a very much living, breathing problem. How can we balance that — come up with practical ways collectively to address these dark aspects of our history, our heritage, and our present — without letting go completely of hope? Can we find a national story that can hold the dark and the light? That is the question. I don’t know. I hope so, but I suppose my book is an attempt to start doing that work.
There’s something to learn from how Germany has engaged with its darkest history — it allows you to decouple and say: here are the awful moments, and also the moments of real invention and ambition and greatness that have nothing to do with the bad. And when I look at Britain now and see a country that’s stagnating, or feels like a bit of a museum — parts of the country just not doing as well as they might — there’s a tension there. I want us to aspire to greatness again, but not the kind that manifested so badly before. Can those two things be reconciled?
[19:22] I think firstly it’s important to analyse what we mean by greatness. The greatness I’m critical of in the book is the greatness of empire — of feats of engineering, of military, of monarchy. A self-aggrandising, pompous greatness. It’s about superiority. And that is an aspect of our national story and identity that I and many others find very difficult to contend with, especially when my ancestors were enslaved by the British. I know what that greatness was built on. I know the dark underbelly of it.
That’s not to diminish the incredible creative achievements and works of British people throughout the ages — it’s just that story’s already had a lot of airtime. We’ve got Shakespeare, for god’s sake. He’s not about to be toppled from his plinth. My hope is just to bring things into balance a little bit.
It was also an invitation to ask people: what do you actually think is great about Britain, if we’re rejecting those inflated visions of Britishness latched onto by the far right, by Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and so on? What are the aspects of Britishness we’re actually proud of, and that we want to integrate into a more balanced, healthy, and nuanced national story? The darkness doesn’t have to eclipse the light — but nor should the light totally conceal the darkness.
That’s a good way of looking at it. There’s also an angle here about class — this is a story of national history, but it’s also one of class struggle. You write really interestingly about the Right to Roam campaign as a modern manifestation of that. And maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but the one permanent thing throughout time has been the land. There’s something in rituals that connect you to land over time, and something in Right to Roam that feels like a modern enfranchisement — because the enclosures severed a connection to land that so many people had. How do you see the next phase of rebuilding our connection to the land and our national story?
[23:17] In the chapter where I was talking to Nadia Shaikh, one of the Right to Roam campaigners, it was really my first significant exposure to Britain’s radical history. Right to Roam are a modern incarnation of the people throughout the ages who have fought to make Britain a fairer place — from the Tolpuddle Martyrs to the Chartists, Kett’s Rebellion, the Diggers. To me, this is such an important aspect of our history and culture that should be taught at school. It could be a really inspiring way to think about who we are and who our folk heroes are. Why are they not on plinths? Because the powers that be don’t want us to rebel.
One of the things that really stuck with me from my conversation with Nadia was this relationship between our disconnection from the land, enclosure, and the erosion of local identities. The acts of enclosure that shoved people off the land and into wage labour in the cities eroded those long-term relationships that distinct local communities had with their landscapes, and the traditions and dialects that went along with them.
And the kind of blanket Britishness — the contemporary visions of national identity that we have today — came in to replace those more rooted, localised identities that were really about specific communities and their histories. I suppose one of the radical possibilities of folk culture that I see is this: if we came up with new traditions, new ways of rooting stories about who we are in our local, specific landscapes, reinvigorating that local sense of community identity — then perhaps people wouldn’t need to cling to vast, unwieldy ideas of Britishness. You could be British, but with all the feeling and emotion located in your local identity. I think a lot of people feel that way already. But it’s something that could be nurtured a lot more.
That’s really interesting. I find it easier to describe myself as British than English — and the more I’ve understood some of these alternative customs and practices, across England and across Britain including Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the more I’ve been able to extract from that a kind of emergent national connection. But it’s interesting that you can go one of two ways: you can go bigger, or you can go much more local. Which brings me to new folk customs — you write so interestingly about Notting Hill Carnival and others. How do you think about what counts as folk culture today? Is UK Garage folk? It could only have existed here.
[28:58] A lot of people talk about grime as a kind of folk expression. I’ve thought a lot about it. I think one of the problems with thinking about grime as a whole as folk culture is its relationship to the music industry — because usually when we’re talking about folk culture, we’re talking about things that have existed outside of the academy, the institutions, or commercial enterprise.
So maybe those early grime freestyles — I’m thinking of a specific stairwell, D Double E doing a freestyle back before these artists were releasing on labels. It was absolutely DIY: little camcorders uploaded to YouTube, people speaking about their experience in Bow and across the city. That could count. But there’s a crossover point where those things become part of the music industry and are perhaps no longer folk.
Do you think there’s a tension between folk culture becoming commodified or trendy, and still preserving the meaning while being able to scale it to a new generation?
[30:53] There’s been a lot of talk about the contemporary folk revival, lots of newspaper pieces — “Oh, Britain’s new cool folk wave.” There definitely has been a resurgence, to the point where Morris dancing was on the Brit Awards, which I’m sure few people had on their cultural predictions list.
One of the interesting things about this contemporary folk wave is that a lot of it is happening online, and it is largely a revival of the aesthetics of folk in particular. Because it’s happening on Instagram and TikTok, it’s the traditions that look a certain way that are getting more views and likes.
I spoke to a die-hard folky in the book, a lady called Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe, who grew up going to folk festivals, is a Morris dancer, and is raising folky children. She’s not on social media, so she didn’t even realise there was a folk revival happening. We had this conversation about: yes, you can see the hard data for a revival in social media followers, but what about membership to folk clubs?
I think one of the wonderful things about this revival — even aided by journalists and brands being interested in it, and Simone Rocha using pagan imagery on the catwalk — is that so many people from different walks of life are being exposed to these traditions and becoming curious about them. It’s so much more diverse than folk revivals of the past, not just because of the demographic shift in Britain but because of the visibility. You don’t have to get up at 5am and turn up to some town in the Midlands — you can watch it in bed on your phone.
Just recently, the first Black British folk club has been set up. I don’t know if that would have happened without social media and this slightly more sheeny, trendy aspect of the revival. Blessings and curses. I think the people on the ground who’ve been preserving these traditions out of love will carry on doing what they’re doing. And I hope that even once the journalists have lost interest and the brands have moved on, there will still be a more diverse, wider range of people who’ve got the folk bug — and who will continue being interested, preserving things, and creating new traditions in times to come.
There’s something more fundamental and meaningful about where these customs come from and what they represent. There’s been a decline of religion, people still feeling something’s missing — and it feels like there’s a gap that folk could and should fill. I’m interested in how you think about why there’s been this revival and how much deeper it is than just an aesthetic.
[35:22] I think there are a few layers to it. Church attendance is at its lowest ever — but that doesn’t take away people’s yearning for a deeper sense of meaning. Why are we floating around on a rock in space? I don’t have the answer, but these questions are fundamental and stay with us. So people are turning to alternative sources for meaning: alternative forms of spirituality, astrology — maybe that’s going too far.
I’m drawing the line at astrology.
[35:53] It’s lighthearted, but it speaks to a genuine curiosity. Also, we’ve lived through the peak of Enlightenment thinking and the materialist, empiricist hopes and dreams for humanity — and we’re seeing that project is somehow incomplete. There are many ways of understanding the world, ways of being, that were eclipsed by the Enlightenment’s bright light, that people are now trying to retrieve from the shadows.
Then there’s the environmental dimension, which is huge. We’re faced with climate catastrophe. So the idea of honouring the landscape with traditions, getting out into a field at six in the morning and doing a funny ritual with friends — whether you believe there’s any great spiritual meaning to it or not — it’s about a connection to the landscape. Following the pagan wheel of the year, or even just noticing the seasonal shifts, the Equinoxes, the Solstices, May Day. This is about becoming more aware of the natural world and its cycles. For me personally, that’s been a massive re-connector.
And then there’s everything we’ve discussed about Britishness and the identity crisis we’re going through in this country. Folk culture seems to offer a different flavour of Britishness — one that’s eccentric and strange and weird, but a bit radical and aligned with people’s politics, and also mischievous and silly. I think people are being drawn to folk as an antidote to some of those more toxic visions.
Folk in its broadest sense is just the culture of the people — people getting together and singing or dancing or coming up with a community event that they practise again and again. That is something fundamental that can look completely different according to where you are in the world, or who you are. We need to de-twee folk a little bit, to make it more appealing to the masses.
There’s also something in the choice to believe — or the choice to sit with uncertainty. You can try on some practice without really knowing whether you believe in it, and it can still connect you to something. I went wild camping in Dartmoor and walked through a forest where all the trees were swaying in a particular way, and I thought: are there spirits here? There might be spirits here. I choose to believe the Dartmoor spirits were talking to me. Beyond this individual level, there’s also a decline of communities of place — and you write so nicely about how communities of place can fill a hole that communities of interest, no matter how valuable, can’t always fill. You’ve gone on this journey, explored the Wheel of the Year, travelled the country, spoken to so many different people. When you ask whether a vital collective reimagining of our folk customs and festivities could help revive the communal spirit that’s been lost in Britain — what did you conclude?
[41:19] I have a dream. I’ve been reading about the Festival of Britain after the war — this great collective, nationwide series of events all about bringing community together. Obviously it had a particular flavour; it was of its time. But I thought: what would it look like to have a Festival of Albion? One where it was just local people, in their town halls or wherever, coming together and asking: what does our community need? What event could we put on?
And if that’s in Rochdale, it’s going to look very different to if it’s in Stroud. But actually it would be a way of bringing the contemporary, current communities of Britain together — whether you’ve got a large Muslim population, elderly locals who’ve been there for generations, and new young families who’ve moved in from London or wherever. Everyone coming together and bringing their unique perspectives, perhaps bringing their own traditions and customs, and collectively coming up with new traditions that could bind the community. That’s my utopian dream.
This is ultimately what these folk customs and traditions have always been about: bringing people together. Usually it’s the depths of winter, or living somewhere really gruelling and miserable, and just coming up with something fun for your community — not to make money, not because there’s a rational basis for it, but because it makes you feel good to commune with your neighbours. Even if you’re not a great singer or artist or sculptor, to use your creative faculties to conjure something fun and beautiful for the people around you.
When I went to Cornwall and got involved in the Montol parades in Penzance, I’d thought I might experience some deep ritualistic spiritual feeling while processing through the streets. But actually that’s when I really understood what these traditions are about. It’s just about people — connection to people, connection to place, and the sense of passing something on to those who will come next.
I would love to see the Festival of Albion ripple across the country, with people recognising that yes, our customs and traditions and songs and stories might be different in flavour, but ultimately they are an expression of that human desire to tell stories about who we are — and that is something that crosses faiths, cultures, continents. It unites us, coming together in our difference.
Obviously this is a utopia under a Reform government, so it’s quite unlikely — but that’s my dream.
I want to make the Festival of Albion happen. Any sponsors listening, get the chequebook out. Thanks so much for coming on, Zakia. That was great.
[45:05] You’re very welcome. Thank you.
