Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
Looking for signs of hope that heritage and culture will be safe in the hands of future generations, Sherds spotted a number of media reports recently that claimed to know the minds of young people. Recent surveys have stated that Zoomers (Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012) are currently into churchgoing, barn dancing, and buying telescopes.
Claims of a 50% rise in overall church attendance in the last six years came in a YouGov survey entitled ‘The Quiet Revival’, published in April 2025. This showed dramatic growth among young adults, with 16% of 18- to 24-year-olds saying they go to church at least monthly (up from 4% in 2018). Generation Z is especially drawn to Roman Catholicism, to the point where the numbers of those identifying as Catholic and Anglican are now nearly equal.
In the US, where a similar trend has been identified, commentators have suggested that churchgoing is most frequent among conservative-minded young people who are seeking encouragement and reinforcement for their traditional values. Others have offered the view that young people have a strong sense of social justice and are joining church communities out of a desire to participate in social work, such as running food banks and shelters for the homeless.
Possibly both are true – and both highlight a yearning to be part of a physical community, experiencing the real world rather than a virtual one. This also explains the headline in The Times on 25 April 2025, which reported that a revival in so-called ‘barn dancing’ was ‘helping Gen Z to beat loneliness’. The report goes on to describe hundreds of young people meeting once a month to ‘stomp, clap, kick, and swing themselves silly’ at the Round Chapel, ‘a beautiful Grade II*-listed building in the heart of Hackney’.
The event in Hackney is just one of many organised by the folk band ‘Cut A Shine’, which reports a massive uptake of folk dancing among young adults, with several sold-out events taking place every weekend. ‘The audience used to just be a bunch of our mates but it’s primarily 25- to 35-year-olds now’, says Joe Buirski, Cut A Shine’s director and banjo-player, while dance-caller Jo Bowis thinks that young people have taken to social dancing for in-person connection: ‘holding a stranger’s hand is not only normalised but obligatory’.
What, then, of the boom in telescope sales? Again, it was The Times (on 21 March 2025, the spring equinox) that reported on Gen Z’s ‘new obsession with astronomy’. The retailer Argos says it sold more telescopes and binoculars in January than in the whole of the previous four years, probably because Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were all visible in a rare ‘planetary parade’ for much of that month. All told, sales of telescopes and binoculars at Argos are up 1,380% year-on-year, and stargazing events, as well as hotels in dark-sky areas of the UK (such as the Isle of Skye), were fully booked.
Astronomy ‘influencers’ such as astrophotographer Josh Dury, 27, have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for their pictures of the Northern Lights illuminating Stonehenge, meteor showers, or distant nebulae. The Royal Observatory Greenwich reports a record number of 3,500 entries for their ‘Astronomy Photographer of the Year’ contest.
But there is clearly an emotional and spiritual dimension to this interest, which links back to the trends in churchgoing and social dancing. Josh Drury says it is the connection with the past that is so appealing to young people: ‘the depth of the universe means we’re not looking at things happening now, we’re looking back in time at distant galaxies and nebulas which are hundreds if not millions of years old. It’s an antidote to the modern world – total escapism and one which completely changes your perspective.’
To which Sherds would like to add that it brings us closer to an understanding of the mindset of our ancestors, whose daily gaze upon the dipping of the sun below the horizon, the vivid colours of the sunset and twilight, and the awe-inspiring phenomena of the night sky, must surely have inspired much early myth, ritual, and monument creation.
Maintaining Morris
Morris dancing, much derided in the past, also seems to be undergoing something of a revival, with record-breaking crowds turning out to encourage morris dancers on May Day, welcoming the start of summer. Stockport claimed to have set a new UK record for the number of participants in its Day of Dance this year, with more than 1,000 morris dancers from across the UK filling the streets with ‘a whirlwind of bells, sticks, and folk music’.
Is this anything to do with the fact that morris dancing is no longer an exclusively male activity? According to the 2023 Morris Census (run every three years by a consortium of morris dance organisations), the proportion of female members in the UK (at 50.6%) has now surpassed the number of male members. The number of non-binary/ other dancers (such as the Bristol-based queer-friendly morris side Molly No-Mates) is now 0.8%.
Colin Andrews, an administrator at the Morris Dances & Teams Database, listing all morris teams worldwide, told the BBC that morris was almost exclusively male in the 1970s, but that many morris sides recognised that it was ‘a case of going mixed or folding… [they] just weren’t getting enough new members’. Though it sounds like an oxymoron, he said that morris is ‘an evolving tradition’, and that teams are developing their own interpretations of the dance.
Perhaps for that reason – its dynamic character – morris dancing has never been recognised officially as part of the UK’s legally defined and protected intangible culture. Indeed, the UK has come relatively late to the recognition of ‘living heritage practice’, having only signed up in 2024 to the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.
The Department for Culture, Media, and Sport is now promising a public consultation on what should be included in an inventory of living heritage, and its press release offered some suggestions of the types of activity that might qualify, including the Notting Hill Carnival, Eisteddfodau, folk music and dance, Hogmanay and Highland dancing, Gloucestershire’s cheese-rolling, tartan-weaving, Welsh love spoons, basket-weaving, thatching, and the art of creating tweed.
Nominations will be accepted under seven categories: oral expressions (which could include poetry and story-telling); performing arts; social practices (including festivals and customs); nature, land, and spirituality (including practices relating to nature and the environment, such as hedge-laying); crafts; sports and games; and culinary practices. It will be interesting to see how many nominations the DCMS receives – they could be inundated, but equally, given the rebellious and radical nature of many practitioners of intangible heritage, there might just be a mass refusal to be pinned down and defined.
Fights against felling
Unlike Tolkien’s humanoid Ents, our trees have yet to learn how to march and fight in their own defence, so humans must, for the time being, take on the role of tree guardians. In the light of a number of recent tree-fellings that have caused outrage (such as the Hadrian’s Wall sycamore and the Enfield oak), it is heartening to learn that good progress is being made to map every tree in the UK – though confusingly there seem to be two separate systems on the go.
The private company Bluesky International has created the proprietary Bluesky National Tree Map, which claims to be the only tree dataset to include every tree in the UK and the Republic of Ireland more than 3m tall, whether in urban or rural areas, and as single trees, small clusters, woodland, or forest. Meanwhile Forest Research, the government agency, has just launched what it claims is a ‘groundbreaking’ map, though this one only includes the non-woodland trees in England that make up 30% of the nation’s tree cover.
Both are based on laser-detection and satellite imagery, and both have similar aims: to improve the protection and management of trees, which are vital for carbon storage, to expand nature-rich habitats, and to support the legally binding government target of increasing England’s woodland canopy to 16.5% of total land area by 2050.
