Maggie Holland sang her own song A Place Called England on her 1999 album Getting There. She re-recorded it in 2007 for her anthology Bones. She noted on the first album: “It took me a long time to finish this song—and I probably would never even have started it if I hadn’t emigrated to Scotland about six years ago. I tussled with it on long train journeys and hummed it to myself whilst grubbing about in the allotment. I could not have written it without the inspiration of Christopher Hill’s bookThe World Turned Upside Down, Leon Rosselson’s song of the same name, Naomi Mitchison’sSea-Green Ribbons, William Cobbett’sCottage Economy, Hamish Henderson’s Freedom Come-All-Ye, Jean Giono’sThe Man Who Planted Trees, animated discussions with (rightly) proud and passionate Scots like Dick Gaughan (“The first place to be colonised in the British Empire was England”), and many a quiet and gentle gardener; Mr Harding, my aunt Amy Rawling, and my godfather Alan Wells, to name but three.”
The Young ’uns sang A Place Called England on their 2017 CD Strangers. They noted: “A Place Called England was written by Maggie Holland in the late 1990s and is arguably a more resonant and important song than it was then. Dave and Daniel are environmental activists (Daniel became better known as Swampy). Eileen Halliday achieved notoriety in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in the late 1990s by refusing huge amounts of money from Salisbury’s supermarket to buy her house, so they could knock it down and could buy a new store. The Diggers were the radical brand of agrarian socialism at St George’s Hill, Surrey, in 1649.”
The line in the last verse “A Mr Harding sort of England hanging in there by a thread” is a reference to her own 1992 song “A Proper Sort of Gardener”. “A Place Called England” echoes some of the themes of her earlier song about the fertile, living English earth being covered over by concrete, motorways, and greed.
Apart from (St) George and (King) Arthur the names that appear in the song are not famous people but ordinary people Maggie knew or knows. The song has become an important in some of the debates about how we might reclaim a positive sense of English identity.
England is not flag or Empire
It is not money it is not blood
It’s limestone gorge and granite fell
It’s Wealden clay and Severn mud
It’s blackbird singing from the may-tree
Lark ascending through the scales
Robin watching from your spade
And English earth beneath your nails
