Big Ideas: On pilgrimage in England

The 1930s saw a resurgence of interest in local knowledge and
traditions, and intense debate about how it might be possible to
'go modern' while honouring the past. Alexandra Harris looks back
on her research for Romantic Moderns, remembering how she
followed modern British artists and writers as they went 'on
pilgrimage in England'. She also shows how that pilgrimage led
her far back into Roman and Anglo-Saxon history in a quest to
find out how the English weather has been differently imagined
across the centuries.


Alexandra Harris is a Senior Lecturer at the University of
Liverpool, a BBC New Generation Thinker, and a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature. She won the Guardian First Book
Award and a Somerset Maugham Award for her first book, Romantic
Moderns: English writers, artists and the imagination, from
Virginia Woolf to John Piper. Her literary history of English
weather will be published this autumn.