Outdoor Singing in Modern Britain – A Sensory and Emotional History by Abbi Flint and Clare Hickman, Reader in Environmental and Medical History at Newcastle University, has been published open access in the Cambridge University Press series Elements in Histories of Emotions and the Senses.
The work brings together historical sources and contemporary experiences to explore the interplay between singing, sociality, body, and meaning in the English landscape over the past century. It explores the connections between air and song and between singing and movement, through the context of the early twentieth century open-air recreation movement. This is supplemented by recent literature on singing and wellbeing, and the experiences of a contemporary walking choir captured via interviews in the field. The authors argue that outdoor singing has been part of co-constructed soundscapes of the modern English leisure landscape, and ask what this meant for those who participated in collective open-air singing and rambling. They explore how open-air singing connected with conceptions of the countryside, with a sense of fellow-feeling, and how this might have both reified and challenged normative ways of being in landscapes.
This is the fifth book published at Newcastle University as a result of the UKRI open access policy for long-form publications, with open access costs covered by UKRI funding.
Of the experience, Clare Hickman (co-author) had the following comment:
[T]he process was very straightforward and quick, and it is good to know that non-traditional monographs are included in the UKRI policy.
For further details of the previous books published through this funding scheme, follow the links to the published works and related blog posts:
- Pushing the Paradigm of Global Water Security, published October 2024
- Diaspora Reads: Community, Identity, and Russian Literaturocentrism, published March 2025
- Sustainable Food Consumption in China: Changing Foodscapes, Values, and Practices, published June 2025
- Everyday Islamophobia, published September 2025.
The UKRI open access policy aims to ensure that findings from research funded by the public through UKRI can be freely accessed, used and built upon. The policy applies to peer-reviewed research articles and long-form outputs, namely book chapters, monographs and edited collections.
Full details of the UKRI open access policy and how Library Research Services can support making outputs open access can be found on our UKRI Policy for long-form publications page.
If you have any questions or concerns about the policy, and how this might affect any current or future publications, please contact openaccess@ncl.ac.uk.