The sun is out, the air smells like spring, and seven strange men are about to hoist me up on a chair.
“Don’t worry about the fact it’s held together with parcel tape,” one of them cheerfully reassures me. I hadn’t noticed the tape – I’d been distracted by the garlands of tulips and blossoms festooning the chair – but now he mentions it, it does feel rather rickety. But an accordion blasts and with a jangle of bells I am thrust aloft. A crowd of strangers – half tipsy, half bemused – cheer as I frenetically wave the handkerchief I’ve been given like a talisman against gravity. I am rotated full circle – the chair holds – then replaced, relieved, on solid ground. “That was round one!” Two more precarious spins to go.
Venture down to Greenwich on a sunny Easter Monday and you will find the pubs overflowing, the Thames sparkling in the background and the tourists flocking to the line from which the world derives time itself. If you’re lucky with your timings (or good at listening out for jingling), then tucked behind the Cutty Sark or the Naval College you might also find the Blackheath Morris Men, ushering in the spring. And spring cannot be ushered without the longstanding tradition of lifting random women up on chairs.
This, I am told by a Morris man (who is described on the group’s website as an “absurdist poet, badge maker and collector of arcane metal bands with names like Deathgoblin”), is an ancient fertility ritual, although “both my daughters have done it and neither of them are pregnant yet”. This is a relief, as he does not look old enough to have daughters older than 12. We are celebrating Ēostre, the pagan goddess of spring who may have been made up by Bede in the eighth century, but is a great excuse for a dance.
There are staves. There are hankies. There are waistcoats emblazoned with the Blackheath Morris Men crest: a shield bearing the blue curve of the Thames, a golden anchor as a nod to London’s docks, and a red helmet that is definitely (one dancer is at pains to make sure I understand) a visual joke about erections. They chivvy my husband to try on a spare waistcoat, which – two pints of real ale down – he eventually does. Surprisingly, it suits him.
And, of course, there are bells, buckled below the knee for the men and clasped to the shoes of the women. Oh yes, there are women here too, wearing red dresses and ribbons rather than phallic waistcoats. They’re from Dacre Morris, down the road in Lewisham, and they’re not about to let the Blackheath men have all the fun. Morris dancing is more egalitarian than I realised. It is also less of a rural phenomenon than you might imagine, as I discover when a Dacre dancer starts listing the troupes in London and runs out of fingers. “You’re never more than 20 feet from a Morris dancer in London!” interrupts a man behind her. He is wearing a canary-yellow pinstriped suit and has brought his own pewter tankard from which to drink his beer. But then: “You can’t listen to me, I just make things up.”
I suspect making things up is integral to what’s going on here in Greenwich – an inkling that is confirmed when I get a chance to chat to Blackheath “squire” James Pugh, the least tipsy and most nominally in-charge member of the group.
“We’re not just trying to preserve the past in formaldehyde, we’re bringing it along with us,” he tells me. That includes a certain degree of artistic licence – such as when the group performed at a country fair and swapped their staves for inflatable unicorns. The Blackheath chair-lifting ritual, however ancient they claim the origins might be, goes back around 40 years. “I honestly don’t know where it came from. I imagine someone had read about something somewhere and said, ‘Let’s do this.’”
This is apt, because no one knows when Morris dancing began; the earliest reference dates from the 15th century when someone paid some Morris men seven shillings to entertain the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. But the idea of celebrating the renewal of the year with a dance under the open skies evokes something much older – dating back further, even, than the possibly fanciful goddess Ēostre. We do know Morris dancing fell out of fashion after the Industrial Revolution, and was revived in 1899, predominantly thanks to the folklorist Cecil Sharp. How much today’s dances resemble what came before is a matter of fierce academic debate.
Technically, the start of the season is St George’s Day (there is a joke to be made about people in London getting impatient and rushing around early). But if the reactionary “English identity” league – the types who paint flags on roundabouts – want to claim this pastime for their political ends, they’ll have a fight on their hands. The dancers I meet in London have degrees and postcodes that put them firmly in the “educated metropolitan elite” bracket. Some of them aren’t even British. Pugh explains that, just as traditional Morris sides enlisted farmers and rural workers in the surrounding area, so Blackheath draws on its own local community. The group was founded, its website proudly professes, by an “unholy conclave of anarchists, arts students and construction workers sometime in the late 1960s (memory of the precise year, like much from that time, remains hazy)”.
They understand what they are doing is about creation as well as memory. I ask about the history of Morris dancing and get an answer about Terry Pratchett, the fantasy author and acute chronicler of the human experience, who returned again and again to Morris dancing in his Discworld novels. In one, a group of bell-clad amateurs dance their way out of an altercation with deadly supernatural forces – the dance is not about entertainment, but survival. In another, we are told that “the Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse. It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it’s springtime and with any luck the carbon dioxide will unfreeze again. The imperative is felt by deep-sea beings who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycles of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep.” (In their defence, the sheep was probably already dead.)
Then there’s the “Dark Morris”, Pratchett’s entirely dreamt-up corresponding custom, danced as the summer fades (“They welcome the winter because of the new summer deep inside it!”). The Blackheath group claim never to have danced it (the world might end if they did), but elsewhere the fictional phenomenon has escaped Pratchett’s imagination and swept the Morrisphere, where it’s performed for real in all its macabre glory. This is the mix of tradition and invention from which cultural identity is built.
There are other innovations too, not all of them involving unicorns. Sometimes you’ll find the Blackheath Morris Men accompanying a cart of straw around the English countryside at a summer rushcart festival; sometimes dancing “at bus stops in Brixton”. They even performed in that peak celebration of British culture old and new: the 2012 Olympic closing ceremony. Curious viewers can, the squire assures me, check out the video of them “dancing across a stadium and threatening Eric Idle with sticks”.
He reminds me that the dancers practise on Thursday evenings in Greenwich and are always open to new members. Would my husband perhaps like the chance to earn his own waistcoat? Alas, I say, we live north of the river.
[Further reading: At the Cambridge and Oxford Boat Race, England’s blazered elite float off down the river]
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This article appears in the 15 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Angry Young Women
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