Join us as David Grocott charts the rich and often overlooked history of these “back to the land” movements in Essex.

‘To the Land: Radical Retreats and Rural Resistance in Essex’

In the nineteenth century, industrialisation rapidly transformed England’s cities and social structures. Many on the radical Left turned away from the factories, slums, and capitalist economies of urban life and looked instead to the countryside.

Not as a place of retreat, but as a site for revolutionary renewal.

This talk explores the political, social, and spiritual dimensions of that movement, focusing on how Essex became home to some of the most ambitious and idealistic land-based experiments in modern British history.

One of the earliest and most significant of these efforts was the Chartist Land Plan. This was an ambitious mid-19th-century scheme to resettle urban workers on small rural plots, offering them both self-sufficiency and a stake in the political system.

Throughout the later 19th and early 20th centuries, these ideals resurfaced in a variety of forms—from Christian socialist communes and Tolstoyan settlements to anarchist farms and the Salvation Army’s industrial colony at Hadleigh. 

Drawing on his research into radical working-class medievalism, David Grocott places these rural experiments within a wider narrative of English dissent and socialist reimagining—showing how land, myth, and politics came together in an enduring struggle over what England could be. This talk suitable for ages 16+.

About your speaker 

David Grocott is a historian and researcher whose work explores the mythologies of English radicalism and the ways in which the past is continually reimagined as a tool for political and cultural change.

His research focuses on how 19th- and early 20th-century working-class movements in England appropriated elite medieval imagery—once the domain of aristocrats and antiquarians—and retooled it to construct a new, distinctly English form of socialist identity.

His current work examines the “back to the land” movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in Essex, where utopian communities sought to build new lives—and new societies—rooted in the soil.

Through these histories, he invites us to reconsider how land, memory, and imagination shape the politics of belonging in England, then and now.