Fen Britons

The Fens in the east of England are important wetlands, home to Fenlanders and the site of cultural contestation and expression in politics, painting, poetry, prose and art history. The Fens were Commons, then enclosed into private property, critiqued by Fenland native John Clare at the time and later by Karl Marx, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. In the nineteenth century Clare wrote poetry and prose for the Fens and against enclosure of the Commons. Clare’s contemporaries, John Sell Cotman and Peter de Wint, and recently Nick Tearle, depicted the Fens in painting. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries prose writers described the Fens with greater or lesser appreciation for their distinctive wetland features, politics and history, beginning with Dorothy Sayers’ classic detective novel The Nine Tailors (1934), Graham Swift’s wetlandmark Waterland (first published in 1983) and his 25th anniversary introduction of 2008, Robert Macfarlane’s ‘new nature writing’ of his essay/story ‘Ghost Species’ (2008), Vittoria Di Palma’s art history (2014), Becky Owen-Fisher’s poetry (2017) and Stella Tillyard’s historical romance The Great Level (2018). Recently the Fens have become the focus and site of ‘re-wetting’ and recreating ‘paludiculture’ in one of the largest restoration projects of its kind in Europe.