Twentieth-century Britain was subject to regular bouts of 'pageant fever'. Communities of all sizes and character across England, Scotland and Wales staged theatrical re-enactments of events from local and national history with thousands of men, women and children involved as performers, organizers and spectators. This was national costume drama on a grand scale. Over the course of the twentieth century many hundreds of events were mounted by communities and institutions, ranging from small churches and village communities to large cities such as Liverpool and Manchester. In addition, institutions as diverse as the Army, the Church of England the Women's Co-operative Guild also staged historical pageants. The fever was especially intense at certain times, notably the Edwardian era, the 1930s and 1950s (encouraged by the Festival of Britain and the 1953 Coronation), but the tradition never fully died out and there were revivals in the 1970s and during the millennium celebrations. A distinctive feature of historical pageantry has been the involvement not only of communities but also of prominent individuals, such as G.K. Chesterton and G.M. Trevelyan. Drawing on oral and written evidence, this project is a landmark intervention. It will provide an authoritative treatment of a subject that has largely escaped academic scrutiny despite the rich insights that these apparently ephemeral events can give into popular understandings of the past. The project also offers key insights into the role of 'heritage' in leisure activities, the interaction between local, national and imperial identities, and the character of community life. Differences and similarities between the regions and nations of Britain, and continuities and changes over time, are central to the project and will be explored in depth. The comprehensive coverage of local events - based on geographically dispersed sources - will support, stimulate and publicize the activities of local historians and historical associations, and provide a useful resource for all those interested in the history of communities and institutions, including schools. It will recover the stories that communities and institutions told about themselves. It will result in a comprehensive database of historical pageants, a monograph envisaged as the key book on the subject, and an edited volume of essays situating the British movement in its international context. Every historical pageant for which any significant record exists comes under the scope of the study and the interactive publicly-accessible resource at its centre. The website will include general commentary on the pageant movement, representative images of pageant-related ephemera, and oral testimonies from witnesses to historical pageants. It will allow interaction between the public and the project, enabling individual users and local history societies - some of whom will be actively involved in the project - to contribute their own memories and memorabilia. It will feature interactive maps, allowing users to locate pageant venues and to track the incidence of performances and themes over time. The website will be an important tool for historians, as well as scholars of literature and drama, historical geography and cultural studies. Through the database, these users will be able to access and process a vast body of information relating to the content, organization and experience of historical pageants, allowing the exploration of, for example, the evolving depiction of specific historical events and themes, the authorship of pageant scripts, and constructions of popular memory. The database will also encourage wider use of pageant-related archival holdings by academic and other users. The project will thus enhance academic and non-academic understandings of an important twentieth-century phenomenon, drawing together a remarkably rich collection of visual, oral and textual resources, much of which is on the verge of being lost.

The proposed programme of follow-on work enhances the impact of the earlier AHRC-funded research project, 'The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain 1905-2016' (RoP). This project drew on documentary, visual and oral history sources to provide an authoritative treatment of a subject that had largely escaped academic scrutiny. Historical pageants were one of the most important and ubiquitous channels of popular engagement with the past in twentieth-century Britain: communities of all sizes came together to stage theatrical re-enactments of local and national history, often involving thousands of performers and tens of thousands of spectators. The original RoP project considered the social organisation, dramatic content and wider cultural significance of historical pageants, using locally held sources across the country to examine how communities and institutions told their own histories. The central output was a free-to-use, fully searchable online database that now contains details of more than 650 pageants (www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/). In collaboration with project partners in Bury St Edmunds, Carlisle, St Albans and Scarborough, the RoP team also produced a series of successful exhibitions, workshops and other events, stimulating public engagement with the research. Involving one existing and four new project partners, as well as other collaborating organisations, the follow-on activity will extend and deepen the non-academic impact of the research. It will do this by deploying techniques of public engagement that were not exploited in the original RoP project, including dramatic and musical re-performance and the use of film. It will also result in the first national-level exhibition on historical pageantry. The key elements of the follow-on project are: 1. A 30-minute documentary film, produced in partnership with the Windrose Rural Media Trust, telling the history of pageantry across Britain and including re-performed pageant scenes and music, as well as existing footage; 2. A programme of activities at Eversley, Hampshire, and St Albans, Hertfordshire, co-organised with project partners and engaging both adults and children in re-performances and other activities connected with pageantry, alongside new exhibitions focusing on those localities; 3. A local history fair at Cecil Sharp House, London, organised in partnership with the English Folk Dance and Song Society. This will bring together local historians and heritage sector organisations, many of whom have an active interest in undertaking research into, and staging exhibitions about, historical pageantry. It will also include an element of re-performance, and will take place alongside an exhibition in the same location, focusing on the links between historical pageantry and the folk arts; 4. The production of a 30-page Guide to the study of pageants, aimed at local history and heritage communities and available online and in hard copy; 5. A series of activities at Axbridge, Somerset, in partnership with Axbridge Pageant Association, during its preparations for the 2020 Axbridge Pageant; 6. A 'roadshow' of events in three locations - Glasgow, York and Dorset - at which members of the project team will share the results of their research, including the film and Guide, with project partners and other collaborators, and help to build further capacity for local history research into the pageant tradition. Through these activities, the follow-on project will extend the reach of the RoP project, while also promoting independent and collaborative research at a local level into an important and stimulating aspect of modern British community history.

The Central & Eastern England Regional Centre for exploring the FWW spans Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. It will mark the centenary of the FWW through collaborative histories, creative performance, source exploration, practical experiment and digital sharing. We aim to connect academic and local experience, and to build productive community engagement and research partnerships with the capacity to stretch and even surprise all involved. In developing objectives and a programme of activities for the Centre, the team worked through the University of Hertfordshire's Heritage Hub to consult heritage and arts organisations, history groups and community associations in the region. Reflecting on this process, we selected themes that will bring new angles to familiar stories and inspire an extensive programme of community engagement at regional and (inter)national levels: food; theatre; military tribunals; learning disability; supernatural beliefs; military intelligence; childhood: * FWW food production, supply and consumption highlight international and local economies, creating a powerful tool in exploring memory, scale and present-day relevance. * FWW theatre offers participants another experiential route into a past more commonly shaped by war poetry. * Military tribunals link national institutions of war with individual lives on the Home Front; as conscientious objection (CO) emerges as an 'alternative' perspective to trenches, tribunals put CO in broader context. Reconstructing their proceedings has considerable research and engagement potential. * The theme of learning disabilities draws on Hertfordshire's distinctive institutional history of asylums and challenges us to think broadly about communities. * Beliefs in ghosts, angels, mediums and fortune-tellers provide important insights into the lasting psychological impact of disorientation, fear and huge loss of life. * Academically FWW intelligence is an under-researched area but, because of the resonance of intelligence in popular culture, it is one that is likely to stimulate community interest. * The impact of the FWW on those born since 1919 allows the Centre to address inter-generational relationships and re-think the meanings of 'legacy'. Geographical communities are significant to the Centre, but so is the inclusion of communities of interest, belief, practice, circumstance or experience. Through co-produced research, the Centre will develop intellectual and cultural contexts to enrich historical understanding of the FWW. It aims that by 2016 community organisations that have already embarked on research (with or without HLF funding) will have incorporated at least one new question or perspective; that people living in the region who have not yet thought about the centenary will have contributed to it; that the regional dimensions of the conflict will have come into focus; and that audiences and topics of research will have diversified. Micro-histories, documents and artefacts will emerge from local projects to benefit researchers across the board. The Centre will maximize these effects by connecting discrete projects through face-to-face events and digital communities. It will manifest the sheer variety of FWW heritage in Britain today and record it for the longer term. The centenary of the FWW is an opportunity to probe in innovative ways the historical significance of a period which resonates strongly in contemporary Britain. Looking forward from 2013, the precise form of centenary activities, the relationship between academic and public histories, and the influence of the state and other bodies in shaping memorialisation, are still uncertain. A conjunction of meticulous research, living tradition and multiple end uses, is creating a situation that is itself a fascinating subject for analysis and an occasion for profound dialogue about the nature of scholarship and heritage in 21st-century Britain.