What's On
Whose Green and Pleasant Land?
A contemporary, community-centred pageant-performance exploring land, power and belonging.
Sunday 4 October • Leith Hill Place, Leith Hill Lane, Dorking RH5 6LY
- House Opens – 11am
- Morning Pageant- 12pm
- Afternoon Pageant – 2:30pm
Whose Green and Pleasant Land?
Created by Damn Cheek and Rosie May Jones and commissioned by the National Trust, Whose Green and Pleasant Land? is a world-premiere pageant-performance bringing together local residents, community groups, choirs, musicians, storytellers and theatre-makers from across the Dorking district.
About our pageant
In 1938, Surrey residents gathered at Leith Hill Place for England’s Pleasant Land, a community pageant created by local writer E. M. Forster and composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Through music, performance and spectacle, it explored the story of England’s rural landscape across a thousand years of history.
Nearly 90 years later, Whose Green and Pleasant Land? revisits many of the same questions for a new century.
A celebration of place, people and possibility, Whose Green and Pleasant Land? combines music, drama, movement and spoken word in a spectacular community performance created with and by the people of the Dorking district.
Developed through collaboration and co-creation, the pageant brings together a rich mix of local voices, experiences and perspectives. Professional artists provide the creative framework, but the stories and the performances belong to the community. The result is both a celebration of this place and a conversation about what it means to live here.
Inspired by the landscapes, heritage and communities of the Surrey Hills, the pageant explores identity, belonging, power, stewardship and social justice. It looks back at the forces that have shaped this landscape while asking urgent questions about its future:
Who has shaped this land? Who gets to access it? Who feels they belong? And what responsibilities do we have to those who come after us?
Through live performance, music and storytelling, Whose Green and Pleasant Land? transforms local voices into a large-scale theatrical event — a living portrait of the Dorking district and the people who call it home.
Oral histories gathered across the Surrey Hills sit alongside live music led by Maya McCourt, contemporary electronic composition by Jack Kingslake, a new script by Tony Earnshaw, and newly commissioned spoken word by Rosie May Jones.
