Finding Albion

Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore & The Quest For A Hidden Britain

Zakia Sewell

Hodder Press, 2026

‘Why has not England a great mythology?’ asks Margaret in EM Forster’s 1910 classic Howard’s End. ‘Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness.’

Afternoon tea, red phone boxes, crowns, and palaces represent a vision of England adored by tourists, alongside cosy emblems like Paddington Bear, Britain’s only truly beloved immigrant. It’s an identity which, writes Marxist critic Raymond Williams in 1983, ‘flows down from a political centre’, emanating from Westminster and Buckingham Palace, from hierarchy and empire. This is England – red, white, and blue.

But what of Albion? What is it, where is it and how does it differ from England? This is what broadcaster Zakia Sewell, a Welsh Caribbean Londoner, sets out to discover in a trip around Britain, from Penzance to the Hebrides, via Glastonbury, Notting Hill, Oxford, Carmarthenshire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Stonehenge.

Sewell is looking for a different version of British national identity – pagans and druids rather than Beefeaters and Beatrix Potter. An identity that is more inclusive, honest, and rooted in England’s ancient folkloric past, rather than its more recent ‘Rule Britannia’ story. There’s just one problem: ‘There’s no English equivalent of the [Welsh mythical] Mabinogion, the Irish Fenian Cycle or the Icelandic Sagas,’ she writes, adding how ‘[t]he English were more preoccupied with classical mythology from Ancient Greece and Rome.’ Folklore and myths were deemed primitive.

Yet symbols of quintessential Englishness are often not English at all. St George was a Turk with Palestinian roots who never set foot in England; the St George’s Cross is from Genoa; the King Arthur myth was ‘adapted from Welsh stories’; tea comes from India, not Yorkshire; even the Welsh harp began life in 1600s Italy. Or, as the British Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri puts it, ‘Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves.’

Sewell grew up in West London listening to grime and ‘R’n’B’, but it was at a folk concert with her Welsh dad – Pentangle at the Royal Albert Hall in 2008 – ‘where the seeds for my quest were sown.’ A quest for Albion, a name coined by Greek geographers in the 4th century BC, that ‘is both a landscape and a dreamscape […] pre-colonial, pre-industrial.’ What began as a BBC Radio 4 series became this book.

Sewell’s Albion is ‘the alternative spirit of the nation’: the visions of William Blake, solstice sunrise at Stonehenge, folk dancing, storytelling, rave culture. (For me, it’s the Glastonbury Festival – community, creativity, music, and merry-making, on criss-crossed ley lines by the Glastonbury Tor).

Sewell spends a year exploring old traditions and celebrations connected to the Spring Equinox, May Day, the Summer Solstice, Lammas (August 1st) , the Autumn Equinox, Samhain (October 31st), the Winter Solstice, and Imbolc (February 1st), and discusses how paganism – druids, Wiccans, shamans, heathens, nature worshippers – shares connections with practices like witchcraft, Voodoo, Obeah, Santería. And she looks at how such practices feed ‘a primal aspect of our nature that longs for ritual, story, community, and a connection to the earth.’

We learn about Morris dancing – not Moorish, but originating during the Tudor period with European roots – and hear of a ‘feminist, prog-Morris’ outfit called Boss Morris, who have performed with Wet Leg and Bridget Christie: ‘rowdy, raucous and ravey.’ May Day is linked to the ancient Celtic festival of Beltane – the Irish word for May is Bealtaine – which involved bonfires, flowers, and lots of post-winter sex, although dancing around the Maypole with ribbons and crowning the May Queen originated from 19th century theatre and poetry, specifically an Old Vic production in 1836, and Tennyson’s poem ‘The May Queen’ from 1842.

Jack In the Green, most famously celebrated in Hastings, comes from a 19th century London chimney sweeps’ march, rather than pagan tree worship. Such reimagining of May Day ‘reflected the Victorian preoccupation with “Merrie England”’, writes Sewell, and was ‘almost a form of cosplay.’

Her chapter on the more recent folk tradition of the Notting Hill Carnival examines its political origins – the first one happened indoors in King’s Cross in January 1959, created by radical activist Claudia Jones ‘in an attempt to uplift Britain’s Black community after the Notting Hill race riots’ where so-called Teddy Boys, ‘emboldened by the racist vitriol of the far right’, went on the rampage. In 1966, it moved to Notting Hill, blending Caribbean folk culture – masquerade, steel drums – with London street fair traditions to become the second biggest street carnival on earth after Rio.

Sewell makes her most powerful point in the chapter on Samhain – the Irish word for November – which we also use for Halloween, and its connection with ghosts. Despite the English obsession with ghosts and ghost stories, the spectre that truly haunts England is its dogged refusal to exorcise its own past: ‘Our colonial history is the ghost in the attic, the skeleton in the closet,’ she writes. ‘Britain is haunted […] by the 33.4 million enslaved Africans transported on British ships; the millions who were killed during Britain’s imperial conquests […] the indigenous peoples […] violently displaced and dispossessed of their lands.’ She adds, ‘The real ghosts are notably absent from British ghost lore.’ There is ‘the unacknowledged spectre of empire’ in the ongoing denial of both Britain’s diverse past and of its colonial crimes.

This may seem like a long way from Morris dancing and May-poling, but Sewell urges us to look for ‘a more honest and united Britain’, and to acknowledge that the ‘magic and spirit of Albion […] is not fixed and static; it is an idea that continually evolves,’ like the people who inhabit it, from here and from everywhere.

Waterstones: Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain

Suzanne Harrington

Suzanne Harrington is an Irish author and journalist.