Merrie England - 2026

Last May Day, I found myself at the Greenman Festival in Bradford on Avon, watching the town explode with folk music and Morris dancers. At the day's end, we all pulled pieces of foliage from the Greenman's frame, each of us carrying forward a symbol of community into the new season. 

A few months later, St George flags appeared everywhere. People said they were "getting the community together," expressing their culture. But others felt threatened, unwelcome. They said the flags were sending a message: this Englishness is not for you.

What happened to "Merrie England"? The term once evoked pastoral joy, communal activity, and shared heritage. When Morris dancing nearly died out after the Industrial Revolution, two folklorists tried to revive it - with radically different visions. Cecil Sharp wanted to preserve it "correctly," codified and controlled. Mary Neal wanted it alive and breathing, and set up a club for working-class factory girls to dance and reconnect with something they'd lost. Sharp won. Neal's joyous, people-led Morris was shut down, and the tradition became something else: pageantry for nation-building, performed by men in white, dancing by the book.

This film traces how that historical split - community versus nationalism, living culture versus preserved symbol - echoes in today's struggle over Englishness. From archive footage of post-war "Merrie England" displays to contemporary far-right rallies claiming flags and tradition, the question remains: who gets to define what it means to belong? At a Morris gathering in Glynde, I met dancers building something different - diverse, evolving, rooted in landscape and joy rather than exclusion. One told me: "Tradition is passing on a flame, not worshipping the ashes."

Can we reclaim "Merrie England" from those who would fossilise it? Can folk culture be a foundation for unity rather than division? This film doesn't offer easy answers, but it asks us to consider: is Englishness a relic, something to preserve and fight for? Or is it a dance, alive in the moment and a future we create together?