This New Year’s Eve, environmentalist and author Lisa Schneidau did something she had never done before. She welcomed in 2026 with giants. “At a certain time of the evening, they started appearing from all over the town. Then everyone flooded out of their houses and congregated into a massive procession of giants and lights and drums and music. It was absolutely extraordinary.”
Schneidau’s fairytale experience happened in Lostwithiel, the Cornish home town of the art collective The Lost Giants (TLG), a group of craftspeople and artists reviving the British tradition of making giants and beasties and goliaths. The giants she celebrated with were made of wooden frames and cloth, papier-mache and card, but were full of life.
In medieval times, it was common for workers’ guilds and villages across the UK to create enormous mascots. Now, thanks to a growing interest in community activism, folk and craft, these processional giants are making a spirited comeback. In recent years, TLG has made giants for events ranging from the annual lantern parade in a Cornish town to a harvest procession at Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset gallery. This month, it has issued a public callout for an environmental group that would like to collaborate with it to make its very own beastie.
TLG was founded three years ago by theatre designer Ruth Webb and her sister-in-law AmyWebb, a designer and illustrator. Schneidau joined the collective last year after spending most of her career working at various wildlife trusts. Ruth has a long history with giants, having lived with one since childhood. Her father, John Webb, ran the Cornwall folk festival for years and, after encountering these magical creations at European festivals, he had his own giant called Peter, made by Michael and Wendy Dacre of theatre company, Raven Tales. Peter was the first giant to parade the streets of Lostwithiel in 1990, Ruth’s hometown, on New Year’s Eve.
Processional giants have always existed in British life – the Salisbury Giant, who was created by a tailors’ guild in the 1400s is the UK’s oldest existing giant – but Ruth thinks the seeds for the current revival were sown in European cultural exchange programmes during the 1980s.
“Town twinning meant that British people saw traditional village giants come over from Spain and France,” says Ruth. “Dorset and Cornwall became a stronghold for making these statuesque giants, full of human character. At the same time a lot of British outdoor theatre companies, such as Welfare State International, were riffing off the agitprop theatre popular in the Americas, using puppets and creatures to make political statements.”
TLG’s creations are products of both these influences combined with the renewed interest in seasonal celebrations that has driven the folklore revival in British culture. The collective has made an uncanny sisal mountain goat called Ooelle with a third eye who loves a festival procession, but it has also brought Old Crockern, the vengeful guardian spirit of Dartmoor, to life with plaited reeds from the River Dart, and a squadron of animals including fish, squirrels and geese who marched on St Paul’s Cathedral in October 2024 to demand the Church of England commit to rewilding some of its land. TLG’s giants are still traditionally made by groups of local people and artists pooling skills, materials and ideas, but they often have a very modern ecological, activist message.
“For those that don’t have a large voice or who feel lost or helpless, giants can show our collective desires and strength,” says Ruth. “Just the scale of them allows us to think past ourselves as individuals. I think there’s a need for that at the moment. Adopting a persona or putting on a mask lets us behave differently and say the unsayable in the folk world – a processional creature has the same effect.”
Schneidau met Ruth at the wild camping protests on Dartmoor in 2023 and she said Old Crockern’s impact on the campaign was powerful: “Crockern at the protest was like this silent witness. It gave personhood and agency to the land.”
This year, TLG was awarded a grant by the Ffern Folk Foundation, which it is using to create the Big Folk Archive, an online photo archive of giants on its website, and to fund a new giant for an environmental campaign group based in the south west. It is looking for applicants now. “It’s quite an unusual question in today’s world, but we need them to explain why a giant would be important to their group,” says Schneidau. “We’ve been approached by people cleaning up their local river or trying to save woodland, and we ask them: ‘What’s the spirit of your land?’”
Ruth says any group that wants a giant also needs to be practical. “It has to be about a community. Making a giant offers a really different space. We’re making something together, we’re bonding, which is really important for any campaign, isn’t it? That you like each other enough to put all the slogging hours in than it takes.”
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