Green Holiday Camps in England

Since around 1984 a new type of holiday camp has provided green holidays in England for individuals and families who share an interest in alternative kinds of events.

These activities include: singing and dancing, spontaneous music-making, composition, songs, natural voice, harmony singing, dances of universal peace, circle dance, free dance, dance of life, movement, contact improvisation, Sufism, astrology, 7 words, yoga, children’s events, teenage activities, sport, hiking, canoeing, camping in circles, communal cooking, family constellations, performance, circus skills, meditation, Tibetan bowls, doo-wop, barber shop, Taize, find your voice, building fires, camping skills, karma yoga, bhajan, fireside singing, drumming, hanging out in the café…

Typically, each season half the people are new and half are old friends – and over the years these friendships deepen and become central so that strong, stable and very diverse communities have been formed that unites adults, teens and kids – often throughout the years. The deepening occurs because we face challenges together – the tests of living outdoors, cooking on open fires, living closely with others and supporting each other through emotional periods. This is life, and sometimes it’s difficult, yet there is great satisfaction derived from sharing all these new experiences and getting on with the joy of the many workshops – there’s nothing like singing to raise the spirit!

It is quite possible that the story has its roots in 1954, the year Jack Kerouac published On The Road. He was the first ever backpacker and began the process of making popular a new ethos in western consciousness centred around freedom of the individual. This new way found expression in music, fashion, speech patterns and attitudes to relationships, work and home that startled the conservative majorities in society. With Bob Dylan, The Doors and The Beatles, a million voices joined together in claiming the right to a new way live. Festivals were to be seen springing up everywhere and the richness of human experience bopping into a new dimension.

Twenty years after these first festivals, a newly conceived type of gathering was nudging its way into existence: camps. They had their background in festivals and green gatherings and yet were fundamentally different in their purpose, which was education and personal development and in their approach, which required that people took an active part in what went on. In 1983/1984 the first camps were introduced as weekend events whose purpose was to learn astrology and circle dance and were facilitated primarily by Palden Jenkins and Colin Harrison in the garden of author and playwright Jeremy Sandford. From these came the Glastonbury Camps, the first major weeklong events of this type.

Around this time the expansion was really quite vibrant with a strong feeling of excitement and expectancy in the air. Dance Camps were developed - Marion Violets in France, Dance Camp Wales, a bit later Dance Camp East and the Oak Dragon’s Nanteos Camp that coincided with the Harmonic Convergence. A small yet important addition to this list was the first UK Dances of Universal Peace Camp in Bristol, led by Amida Harvey. A few months later, also in Bristol, the first Unicorn events took place - a weekly group of people sharing a wide range of healing and teaching techniques as a way of developing a wider awareness of the wealth of new perspectives and also as a training in group facilitation.

The following year, in 1988 this theme was taken into the format of a camp and the first Unicorn Solstice Camp was held at Sancreed, which lies in the most south-westerly tip of England, at the heart of a fistful of ancient monuments that make this a truly remarkable area for students of the subtle forces of the earth. A few years later the Unicorn Land Trust was created to buy our site and so be able to plant a small tree-sanctuary and learn how to care for the Land.

In 1996 a revisioning of the Unicorn Camps took place after which the various camps no longer came under one umbrella of management. While Raaja Fischer was a couple of years away from his German camps, and with Jilly and Mark focusing on Sancreed, Nickomo, James, Bob and Jenny became the core-group for the DUP and Voice camps.
Nickomo was at that time a member of the acappella group ‘The Beachpersons’, which included Chrys Blanchard, Jackie Roxborough, Nick Petts, Rasullah Clarke and Tony Wrench, each of whom were also workshop leaders in their own right. All the members were very experienced with camps, and had often spoken of running a camp together with Voice as its main focus. The other Unicorn core-group members were keen to make this idea a reality, and so Unicorn Natural Voice Camp was born.

It began in ’97 as a four-day event, built around the teaching and performing talents of the Beachpersons, with the help of some of their friends and contacts from the newly established Natural Voice Practitioners Network. Although the Beachpersons stopped performing together in 2000, they still contribute individually to the quality of the camp, which has grown to become the phenomenally successful event that has become the regular summer holiday for so many singing friends each year.

James Burgess 2008