Welcome to the A&H Common Lands Reading List, first released in 2023 and updated across 2024 and 2025. Common Lands is an ongoing programme which takes inspiration from the stories of people, place and collective action, inspired by histories of access to land, land ownership and the duty of care for nature.

You can purchase copies of all recommended books via A&H’s Reading List on Bookshop.org.  – an online bookshop with a mission to financially support local, independent bookshops.

Highlights include:

Rights, Boundaries and Walking the Land:

The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us, Nick Hayes

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Land and How to Take It Back, Guy Shrubsole

Documents of Contemporary Art: WALKING, Editor Tom Jeffreys. Includes artists Ingrid Pollard, Jade de Montserrat, Steve McQueen and Laura Grace Ford.

Life writing, nature and landscape:

A Flat Place, Noreen Masud

I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain, Anita Sethi

Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside – Finding Home in an English Country Garden, Marchelle Farrell.

Babylon, Albion: A Personal History of Myth and Migration, Dalia al-Dujaili

The Ghost in the Garden: in search of Darwin’s lost garden, Jude Piesse

The Outrun, Amy Liptrot

H is for Hawk, Heater McDonald

Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience, Natasha Carthew

The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams, Jason Allen-Paisant

Chronic Illness, Disability and Nature:

Moving Mountains: Writing Nature through Illness and Disability, Edited by Louise Kenward, including Barbellion Prize-shortlisted writer Khairani Barokka and Kerri Andrews, author of Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

Some of Us Just Fall – On Nature and Not Getting Better, Polly Atkin

Colonial Pasts and Reimagined Futures:

Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections, Corinne Fowler

Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales, Darren Chetty, Grug Muse, Hanan Issa, Iestyn Tyne.

Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature. Edited by Durre Shahwar & and Nasia Sarwar-Skuse. Contributors include Kandace Siobhan Walker, Hanan Issa and Maya Chowdhry.

Black Earth Rising: Colonialism and Climate in Contemporary Art, Edited by Ekow Eshun. Featuring Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Macarena Gómez-Barris.

The Land and I, Nabil Anani, Institute for Palestine Studies, Edited by Amer Shomali. Includes Nabil Anani, Abdul-Rahim al-Shaikh, Rana Anani.

Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain, Corinne Fowler

Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race, Kathryn Yusoff

Ecosystems and Climate Crisis:

The Lost Rainforests of Britain, Guy Shrubsole

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, Edited by Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale, Polly Stanton

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt

With A Bird: A Reader of Avian Kinship, Edited by Marjolein van der Loo. Includes Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Suzanne Walsh, Daisy Hildyard, Ai Ozaki.

Common Lands is a new programme approach for Arts&Heritage, driven through a themed national programme. 

For 15 years, A&H has worked across the UK to forge connections between artists, communities and historic sites and museums. Throughout our existence, we have supported heritage sites and museums to emotionally engage existing visitors and new communities in their varied untold or marginalised narratives by working with artists to creatively explore collections and sites, whilst centering a diverse range of perspectives.

Recent much appreciated Transition funding from Arts Council England has helped us complete vibrant collaborative projects connecting parks and proto-museums (Vanley Burke, Gary Stewart, Friends of Handsworth Park & Museum X); historic archives and theatres (Liz Gre and the Royal Shakespeare Company) and verdant heritage sites (Luke Fowler at YHA Ilam Hall with NT Ilam Park) as the last projects of our Meeting Point programme. It has also  allowed us time to reflect on our past achievements, spend time identifying what is now needed from an arts organisation, and freed us up to imagine potential new futures.  

Emerging from this time of consolidation and planning is an exciting new approach; our first thematically driven national programme: Common Lands. This is the working title for our two year programme for 2023-25. Retaining the best of our collaborative learning approach and continuing to forge new partnerships between communities, heritage organisations and artists, Common Lands will use as its inspiration the stories of people, place and collective action, inspired by histories of access to land, land ownership and the duty of care for nature. 

Recently we have expanded our definition of heritage to include organisations that hold intangible cultural heritage or have responsibility for the safeguarding of environmental heritage. Common Lands will focus on these aspects of our heritage and crucially will pivot to create projects that are driven by a broad range of communities, that increase opportunities for sharing knowledge and perspectives and promote the learning of new skills. It will embed care and foreground co-created projects nationally that create small positive tangible incremental change.