Coming to Leith Hill Place this summer.
ENCLOSURE is a four-month creative programme exploring how our rural landscape has been shaped, fought over, and accessed across the centuries. Exhibitions, events, and performances delving into belonging, displacement, and access in the Surrey Hills.
House Exhibition
OPENS 6th June
A contemporary art exhibition drawing on the history of land, community and protest. Including new work by students from the University for the Creative Arts, the exhibition brings together painting, sculpture, printmaking and installation, to explore the boundaries that protect and confine, the histories hidden just beneath the surface, and the question of who — or what — gets to belong.
T-Time Talks
Artists, historians and activists tell the stories that have shaped the English countryside.
6th June — Monument to the Vanquished Peasant with Leah Gordon
Artist, curator and writer Leah Gordon discusses her exhibition and book Common People — a history of land dispossession told from below, and the remarkable visual culture of rural resistance it inspired. BOOK HERE
13th June — Holmwood Common: Uses and Abuses through the Centuries with Kathy Atherton
Local historian Kathy Atherton traces a thousand years of one Surrey commons — how it came to be, how it survived, and what its story reveals about the communities who have depended on it. BOOK HERE
22nd August — The Three Founders and the Fight for Green Space with Helen Antrobus
Historian and curator Helen Antrobus explores the fascinating lives of Octavia Hill, Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley — and how their fight to protect the English landscape led to the founding of the National Trust. BOOK HERE
29th August — The Fight for Our Right to Enjoy the Outdoors with Kate Ashbrook
Kate Ashbrook, General Secretary of the Open Spaces Society, reflects on 161 years of campaigning for public access to paths and open spaces — and what that fight looks like today. BOOK HERE
The Folk Trail
A midsummer heritage walk with live music, poetry and morris dancing in the Surrey Hills landscape.
Saturday 20th June, 10:15am – 6pm. Starting and finishing at The Parrot, Forest Green, Surrey.
A 5-mile circular walk with music, morris dancing and story — set in the landscape that inspired the beloved British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Join us this summer solstice weekend in the Surrey Hills — tracing the footsteps of one of England's greatest composers, celebrating his love of folk music and landscape with live music, poetry and morris dancing along the way.
Starting and finishing at The Parrot, Forest Green, where Vaughan Williams once collected folk songs from local singers, the route climbs to Leith Hill Tower before descending to his childhood home for cream teas and folk music.
WHOSE GREEN AND
PLEASANT LAND?
A community-led performance exploring land, power and belonging
The programme culminates in a bold piece of community-led theatre, inspired by Vaughan Williams and E.M. Forster's 1938 pageant England's Pleasant Land. This new work brings together local theatre groups, choirs and musicians, woven together with spoken word drawn from oral histories across the Surrey Hills.
Created in collaboration with theatre company Damn Cheek Productions, with live music led by Maya McCourt, contemporary electronic music by Jack Kingslake and spoken word by Rosie May Jones — it asks the urgent question: who does the countryside belong to?
CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION
The work is being created through a process of deep community engagement — workshops, oral histories and conversations with groups across Surrey, including young people facing homelessness, people with disabilities, and elderly residents. Continuing the conversation about land, belonging and access that is as urgent today as it was in 1938.
Supported by:
