Welcome To Pleasant Land
The first year of Pleasant Land is now over, although the site will remain online - please feel free to explore.
Between April 2003 and March 2004 we travelled around England, meeting people, asking them about their own Englands and asking what Englishness is these days. Every month we sent digital postcards to people who had filled in the Questionaire. As our travels have finished for now, we are no longer sending out postcards, but you can look at the Postcards by clicking on the thumbnails opposite. We are not collating responses to the Questionnaire any more, but if you'd like you can still fill it in for fun.
If you would like to find out more about the results of our research and the Pleasant Land project as a whole, you can read more about it on the Vivarium website, click on resources. To find out more about Third Angel, or join our mailing list, please visit us here: www.thirdangel.co.uk
Thank you for visiting, Third Angel
Over the next year Third Angel will be travelling around England, talking to people, asking questions, visiting places and generally collecting evidence in an attempt to find out what is going on today and what living in England and being English is really about.
Third Angel will be creating unique digital postcards in each of the places visited, which will pop into emailboxes, once a month, for a year. This is an exclusive online offer and only available to the lovely people that help us with our research.
More About The Research
All of the information we gather will be collated, perused and assessed.
Then two different things will happen to it.
The first is that it will feed into our map of England, which can be found on this website.
On our journeys around the country we will be gathering evidence and stories and lots of interesting stuff about England and then putting it onto the map.
But we need suggestions of places to go and warnings of what we might find there.
Secondly, in October 2003 Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery and Studio Theatre will be hosting an installation by Third Angel. This will be based on our findings in the next few months as we travel about and try and discover what sort of stuff we really are made of and whether we can hold our heads up high or slink off shaking them in disappointment.
The findings and statistics from this questionnaire really are essential to our making this work.
We are very interested in what you have to say.
So, please take a little bit of time, don't go back to playing minesweeper, and fill in the Questionnaire.
Thank you.
Pleasant Land - Some Background
It began with the Census. There wasn't a 'Scottish', 'Welsh' or 'English' box to tick. Only 'British' or 'Irish'. People in and from Scotland and Wales wanted their own boxes. We noticed that Scottish and Welsh friends referred to themselves as, surprise, Scottish and Welsh.
We realised that when we were abroad, we would say we were from England, as if to locate ourselves more precisely. But when asked our Nationality at home, in Britain, we always said British, as if we thought this more inclusive. We began to wonder why.
We asked ourselves if we were ashamed of being English? We asked ourselves what 'English' meant, and what 'Englishness' was, anyway?
Someone said something about England having an identity that was a reaction to Not English - meaning, we think, that over the last century (or longer?) the Colonies, and now Wales and Scotland, have been breaking away from England, wanting independence. Not wanting to be English.
We asked people if they knew the difference between England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Often, they didn't. We asked ourselves what our England was, what we liked about our country, what we didn't? We wondered if other people would recognise Our England, or we, theirs.
Someone said something about national identity causing wars. Someone said something about long baths and not touching one another.
We wondered if we could see England from another point of view. We wondered what England means to you. We wondered if we could have our minds changed.
Pleasant Land is a research project by Third Angel, designed in collaboration with DED Associates, commissioned by Shooting Live Artists.
Shooting Live Artists is produced and funded by The Culture Company, Arts Council England, The BBC and The Studio of the North with support from the European Regional Development Fund.
Third Angel is funded by Arts Council England, Yorkshire and supported by Site Gallery, Sheffield.
Some material on this site is reproduced by Permission of Geographers' A-Z Map Co. Ltd. Licence No. D0303. This product includes mapping data licensed from Ordnance Survey®. ©Crown Copyright 2003. Licence number 100017302.