The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain

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The proposed programme of follow-on work enhances the impact of the earlier AHRC-funded research project, 'The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain 1905-2016' (RoP). This project drew on documentary, visual and oral history sources to provide an authoritative treatment of a subject that had largely escaped academic scrutiny. Historical pageants were one of the most important and ubiquitous channels of popular engagement with the past in twentieth-century Britain: communities of all sizes came together to stage theatrical re-enactments of local and national history, often involving thousands of performers and tens of thousands of spectators. The original RoP project considered the social organisation, dramatic content and wider cultural significance of historical pageants, using locally held sources across the country to examine how communities and institutions told their own histories. The central output was a free-to-use, fully searchable online database that now contains details of more than 650 pageants (www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/). In collaboration with project partners in Bury St Edmunds, Carlisle, St Albans and Scarborough, the RoP team also produced a series of successful exhibitions, workshops and other events, stimulating public engagement with the research.Involving one existing and four new project partners, as well as other collaborating organisations, the follow-on activity will extend and deepen the non-academic impact of the research. It will do this by deploying techniques of public engagement that were not exploited in the original RoP project, including dramatic and musical re-performance and the use of film. It will also result in the first national-level exhibition on historical pageantry. The key elements of the follow-on project are:1. A 30-minute documentary film, produced in partnership with the Windrose Rural Media Trust, telling the history of pageantry across Britain and including re-performed pageant scenes and music, as well as existing footage;2. A programme of activities at Eversley, Hampshire, and St Albans, Hertfordshire, co-organised with project partners and engaging both adults and children in re-performances and other activities connected with pageantry, alongside new exhibitions focusing on those localities;3. A local history fair at Cecil Sharp House, London, organised in partnership with the English Folk Dance and Song Society. This will bring together local historians and heritage sector organisations, many of whom have an active interest in undertaking research into, and staging exhibitions about, historical pageantry. It will also include an element of re-performance, and will take place alongside an exhibition in the same location, focusing on the links between historical pageantry and the folk arts;4. The production of a 30-page Guide to the study of pageants, aimed at local history and heritage communities and available online and in hard copy;5. A series of activities at Axbridge, Somerset, in partnership with Axbridge Pageant Association, during its preparations for the 2020 Axbridge Pageant;6. A 'roadshow' of events in three locations - Glasgow, York and Dorset - at which members of the project team will share the results of their research, including the film and Guide, with project partners and other collaborators, and help to build further capacity for local history research into the pageant tradition.Through these activities, the follow-on project will extend the reach of the RoP project, while also promoting independent and collaborative research at a local level into an important and stimulating aspect of modern British community history.