The Red Heaven project is an evolving archive of conversations, using the mode of oral history, about the radical and utopian 19th and 20th century reformers, whose legacy to us in the 21st century is the social starting point that we take for granted in thinking about modern Britain.

The recorded interviews are oral histories to the varying extent that they place each guest in context, exploring their connection to the significant people or movements under discussion. Each guest’s disposition is therefore integral to the conversation. The connection will vary: from living in the same community; to sharing a common belief, interest or network; to family relations; or to a private passion, academic specialism or career vocation. The ambition of the project is to follow in the footsteps of Studs Terkel, the most celebrated chronicler of modern America, by using conversations to establish a complex and persuasive overarching narrative.

It is all too easy to forget that fair wages, decent housing, women’s suffrage, universal education and access to the arts were not always agreed desiderata. The subjects of these interviews fought to tackle societal attitudes in different ways, but as the series has developed so has the sense of overlapping themes: currently interviews are tagged under the headings of Arts & Crafts, Arts & Literature, Politics & Culture, Social Reform, and Social Theology.

The series grew out of communal play writing, which is explored in Episode 19, about two dramas, A Pilgrim’s Song and Red Heaven. The first tells the story of the creation of the English Hymnal, overseen by the liturgist and Christian socialist, the Reverend Percy Dearmer, and edited by the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. The second surveys the life of the Red Vicar of Thaxted, Essex, the Reverend Conrad Noel and his friendship with the composer Gustav Holst, which led to the Whitsun Festivals. Two further categories emerge from these plays, Ecclesiastical Arts & Music, which tracks how reforms to church ritual and liturgy sought to break down class divisions, and the Folk Revival, which follows the rescue archaeology of song and dance collectors in the Edwardian period and then the later phases of the renaissance from the 1950s onwards.

At the heart of the project is the unsentimental, but heartwarming (if unfashionable) belief in the power of association or friendship to ameliorate society’s ills, of personal initiative preceding and prompting structural change. In concordance with this principle, the Red Heaven interview archive is run out of a non-profit and on a totally voluntary basis.

Simon Machin on behalf of the Separate Star CIC team