‘Real change comes from below!’: walking and singing about places that matter; the formation of Commoners Choir

This article details the first event Commoners Choir performed: a singing and walking project, Magna Carta, about the rights of lay people to access land for leisure and recreation. Using original songs, the project conceives both singing and walking as political acts of protest and commemoration. Situated within new walking studies, it argues that 10 AQ1 the choir’s walking is embodied and politically ‘artful and wilful.. Drawing on radical walking collectives and practitioners from British psychogeography such as the Loiterers Resistance Movement, Wrights & Sites and Phil Smith , it explores how Magna Carta affected the choir as they connected, through song with the rural spaces where the choir 15 performed. Using a small-scale sample of interviews with choir members, the piece explores the experience of the Magna Carta project. To capture the subjective and reflexive nature of both the action of the protest and the psychogeographical response to space as an output, the article is written using a deliberately creative mélange of lyrics, histories, happenings, symbols and images to offer a ‘thickness of description of Magna Carta as a walking event.