Author(s): Adam Gordon, Stephen Ellcock

Art

Bestselling author and online curator Stephen Ellcock selects pivotal images from art, films and television to chart the weird and wildly generous and creative spirit of England as it has developed over several thousand years.

This is a dream of England, a glimpse of what it has been and what it could be. Something we capture in fleeting glimpses, outside the everyday interactions, the politicking and the rhetoric.  This book tries to piece it together, from the films, tv shows and art that we have made, and the stories and poems we have written.  How do we relate to the land that we live on?  What energy do we draw from it, perhaps unconsciously?  And what can we learn from the past that we can apply now, to heal this country?

More than one hundred carefully selected images ranging from medieval psalters to contemporary television - plus accompanying text - show that English spirituality is not just rural Arcadia and Morris dancers on the village green and embraces both the sublime and the terrifying, the bucolic and the nightmarish.  It is an affectionate tribute to the English spirit in both its calm and its manic manifestations, a scrapbook of "the weird and the eerie", collecting images of some of the greatest moments in our culture, when things end up far from idyllic.  It's also an inspirational book that shows off the best that all the different inhabitants of this land have been able to create across all media and in our landscapes, buildings and streetscapes.

England is a tolerant, generous and wildly creative place and these things need to be asserted.