Heywood Festival - photograph © Ceri Houlbrook

About the project

The recent revival of popular interest in folklore, from calendar customs to folk horror media, demonstrates that individual and community identities are interwoven with the perceived concept of Englishness, expressed throughout mainstream media, social media platforms and podcasts.

However, diversity of the content and the wider cultural context have yet to be captured or understood within the multiple identities that make up multicultural Englishness today.

The National Folklore Survey aims to capture an accurate snapshot of the folklore of multicultural England, producing new knowledge, insights and understanding of contemporary English folk culture at a time when many individuals and communities in England feel what historian and broadcaster David Olusoga calls ‘a conflicted sense of identity’.

The project runs from January 2025 and will be completed by December 2026.

It isn’t the first time that a folklore survey of England has been attempted.

But by using quantitative research methods, we hope that, this time, we will obtain a rich dataset that can be used by the academic, policy, and heritage sectors and wider general public to better understand the folklore of England, and to raise awareness of the value of folklore as a cultural asset and as a source of resilience and community identity.

We hope that findings will directly inform the work of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, via the planned ratification of UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage; the AHRC-funded Folklore Without Borders network that is working to develop greater diversity within folklore studies; and the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) via our knowledge exchange with project partners The Folklore Society, The Folklore Library and Archive, and the Folklore Museums Network.

Images: Saddleworth Rushcart 2022 © Sophie Parkes-Nield; stone circle © Frans van Heerden; Covid rainbow © Andrew Robinson).

Our approach to ethics

This research project is developed from a point of diversity and inclusion.

We acknowledge that academic research on the folklore of England and the people that live and work there has rarely interrogated the many different cultures that contribute to a sense of English identity, and this research project aims to redress this. We are members of the Folklore Without Borders network that seeks to understand how to embed greater equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) within UK folklore studies.

We intend for this research project to challenge previous notions of Englishness, and to combat tired and damaging stereotypes. We know that folklore can reflect the essence or core of an individual and a community, and we will respect the information we are offered. All data gleaned through the survey as conducted by Ipsos UK will be anonymised. For those contributing to our focus groups, consent must be freely given and can be withdrawn at any time.

This research project will also be subject to the rigorous approval of the Sheffield Hallam University ethics committee, with approval required before the research can take place. This includes the subcontracting to Ipsos UK for the conducting of the survey, but also our own testing with focus groups with staff, students and the wider English public.

Finally, we will continue to review and adapt our ethical approach as we progress through the project, understanding that this not fixed but should grow and develop with us.

Meet the project team

  • David at Bakewell

    Dr David Clarke

    PROJECT LEAD

    Dr David Clarke is one of Britain’s leading authorities on folklore and contemporary legend. He is Project Lead for the AHRC-funded National Folklore Survey for England and from 2008-13 acted as consultant for The National Archives during the release of the Ministry of Defence’s archive on UFOs (often referred to as ‘Britain’s Real X-Files’). He is an experienced journalist and broadcaster and has appeared in and acted as consultant for numerous radio and television programmes including BBC Timewatch and Netflix Encounters. He is the author of seven books including The Angels of Mons (2004), How UFOs Conquered the World (2015), UFO Drawings from The National Archives (2017) and Space Age Folklore (forthcoming 2026).

    Dr Clarke’s undergraduate degree was in Archaeology and Medieval History and his PhD in Folklore was completed in 1999 at the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language (NATCECT), School of English, University of Sheffield. In 2018, he co-founded the Centre for Contemporary Legend research group at Sheffield Hallam University with Dr Diane Rodgers and Andrew Robinson. He is a member of The Folklore Society and represents Europe on the council of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR).

  • Dr Sophie Parkes-Nield

    POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER

    Sophie Parkes-Nield is a morris dancer, a researcher in folkloristics and, writing as Sophie Parkes, a writer of novels, short fiction, life writing, and music journalism. She completed a PhD in creative writing and folklore at Sheffield Hallam University in 2024 with a practice-based thesis in which she interrogated the representation of the calendar custom in the contemporary novel.

    Her historical novel, Out of Human Sight, was shortlisted for the NorthBound Book Award at the 2021 Northern Writers' Awards and was published by Northodox Press in 2023. In 2017, Sophie won the Arvon Award at the Northern Writers’ Awards for her collection of short stories influenced by English folk song.

    Sophie's interest in folk music has seen her publish the official biography of one of her all-time musical heroes, Eliza Carthy. Sophie continues to write about music and musicians for titles including Songlines and Rock'n'Reel.

    Sophie is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University and Leeds Arts University, teaching on both BA and MA Creative Writing programmes.

  • Dr Diane A. Rodgers

    PROJECT CO-LEAD

    Diane A. Rodgers is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication and Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). She co-founded the Centre for Contemporary Legend Research Group (CCL) and led several international conferences, recently becoming President-elect of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR). Alongside acting as Co-Investigator on the AHRC National Folklore Survey for England, she is also working on the AHRC Curiosity project, ‘Dracula Returns to Derby’.

    Her research champions the universality and diversity of folklore as an evolving and adaptive process and, in 2022, she completed her doctorate with a thesis titled Wyrd TV: Folklore, folk horror and hauntology in British 1970s Television. Her research examines the convergence of folklore and the media, and how the presentation of folkloric narratives impacts upon audiences, and wider society, in terms of behaviours, attitudes and beliefs. She has recently published chapters in The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (2024), Folk Horror on Film (2024) and Nigel Kneale and Horror (forthcoming 2025). She has a forthcoming article in the Journal of British Cinema and Television about stone circles on screen, and is writing her first monograph under contract with BFI Publishing.

  • Professor Owen Davies

    PROJECT CO-LEAD

    Owen Davies is Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire and Vice President of the Folklore Society (he was President 2020-2023). He has published widely on the history and folklore of witchcraft, magic, ghosts, medicine and popular religion.

    His most recent books are Art of the Grimoire (Yale 2023), and Troubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum (Oxford, 2023). He has extensive experience of public engagement and working with the heritage sector.

  • Dr Ceri Houlbrook

    PROJECT CO-LEAD

    Dr Ceri Houlbrook, Senior Lecturer in Folklore and History, is the Programme Leader for the MA Folklore Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. Her primary interests are ritual practices, popular beliefs, and how they adapt to contemporary society. She has written three monographs (The Magic of Coin-Trees, Unlocking the Love-Lock, and Ritual 'Litter' Redressed), co-written two with Owen Davies (Building Magic and the upcoming British Folklore: A journey through the past and present), and co-edited several books and journal special issues. In addition to her scholarly work, she writes folklore-inspired fiction.

  • Professor Christopher Bader

    PROJECT CO-LEAD

    Christopher D. Bader is professor of Sociology and chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department of Chapman University in Orange, California. Dr. Bader is co-director of the Association of Religion Data Archive (www.thearda.com), the world’s largest archive of religion data.

    He is the author of six books and co-author of the forthcoming Paranormal Britain: Alternative Belief Systems in Britain (Bloomsbury). He has published over fifty peer reviewed journal articles.

Meet the project partners

  • The Folklore Society

    folklore-society.com

    The Folklore Society (FLS) is a learned society devoted to the study of traditional culture in all its forms. It was founded in London in 1878 and was one of the first organisations established in the world for the study of folklore.

    The Folklore Society’s interest and expertise covers such topics as traditional music, song, dance and drama, narrative, arts and crafts, customs and belief. FLS is also interested in popular religion, traditional and regional food, folk medicine, children’s folklore, traditional sayings, proverbs, rhymes and jingles, and their aims are to foster the research and documentation of folklore worldwide, and to make the results of such study available to all.

  • The Folklore Library and Archive

    folklorelibrary.com

    The Folklore Library and Archive is custodian of a number of special collections of national and international significance to the study of folklore and its related fields, including The Ray Loved Archive, The Devonshire Folklore Collection, The Venetia Newall Archive, and The Charlotte Sophia Burne Notebooks.

    Through partnership with Devon Libraries, the Folklore Library and Archive is physically based at Crediton Library, in the South West of the UK, but the organisation is also working hard to digitise all of the public domain materials in their special collections, and to provide finding guides for each collection to assist in the location and request of information on non-public domain materials that they hold.

  • Folklore Museums Network

    folkloremuseumsnetwork.org.uk

    Founded by Dr Peter Hewitt in 2020, the Folklore Museums Network is a subject specialist network promoting folklore collections and intangible cultural heritage across the museum sector. The Network estimates that data resulting from the National Folklore Survey will directly inform displays and interpretation in one third of all museums in England.