James Piers Taylor is a writer, researcher and climate activist based on the Dengie Peninsula in Essex, where he co-founded and chairs the Dengie Climate Action Partnership, a charity working on climate communication, citizen science, community engagement and environmental advocacy across one of England’s most vulnerable coastal landscapes (this site expresses my personal views and should not be construed to be the opinion or policy of the chairity).
His creative and non-fiction writing explores the relationships between landscape, ecology, memory and social change, with a particular focus on estuarine environments and the communities that inhabit them. Writing from and about the Blackwater and Crouch estuaries, he draws on ideas from bioregionalism, human ecology and environmental history to examine themes including food systems, nature recovery, managed retreat, rural futures and adaptation to climate change. His work appears on the Dengie Bioregion blog, where landscape writing, political economy and speculative imagination intersect. In 2013 he published Managed Retreat a 24-page full-colour tabloid size publication featuring articles, artwork and photography exploring what an east of England bioregion has been, is, and might be – looking through several lenses at the nature and culture of the English orient.
Alongside his creative practice, Taylor has spent three decades working as a curator, archivist and researcher specialising in documentary and non-fiction moving images. He is Documentation Editor at the British Film Institute and has previously worked with the BBC, Amnesty International, Imperial War Museum, Reuters, ITV and ITN archives. His work has focused on the interpretation and contextualisation of historical records, public memory and the changing relationships between people, place and environment.
He is co-editor of Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain (Bloomsbury, 2010) and has contributed essays, programme notes and interpretive texts for a wide range of BFI publications, collections and exhibitions. His writing appears in several resources including: InView, Screenonline, the BFI Mediatheques, Britain on Lockdown and BFI Replay where he has concentrated primarily on archival film and television content related to ecology and rural issues. His academic background includes degrees in Human Ecology, Film Archiving and English Literature.
He has worked with several community projects including the Naturewise Forest Garden, the Meadow Orchard Project, Burnham Community Allotment and the Dengie Hundred Bus User’s group. He is also a participant in the groupings of the Centre for Human Ecology, East Anglian Landscape Network, Long Now London, Permaculture Association and the Wild Essex Imaginarium.
An active long-distance walker and cyclist, Taylor’s creative practice is grounded in close observation of landscape. He lives on the Dengie Peninsula between the Blackwater and Crouch estuaries, whose tidal rhythms, contested histories and uncertain futures continue to shape both his writing and his environmental work.
Select Bibliography
‘Beating the Press? Reporting the R.101 Disaster’ in Yesterday’s News: The British Cinema Newsreel Reader (BUFVC, 2002)
Shadows of Progress; Documentary Film in Post-War Britain (Bloomsbury, 2010)
Managed Retreat – an occasional journal of the English Orient (2013)
Artwork in Glomalin issue 1: Patchwork Orchard (2023)
‘The Animals Film’ in The Animals Film (BFI DVD)
The Living Woodland (BFI Screenonline)
Text in Secrets of Nature: Pioneering Natural History Films (BFI DVD)
‘Too late Now‘, ‘Mining Review 20/9: Marilyn‘, ‘Mining Review 20/9: North Star‘ and ‘Plan for Coal’ in Portrait of a Miner: The National Coal Board Collection (BFI DVD) & (BFI Screenonline)
Text in This Working Life: Steel (BFI DVD)
‘Captured’ in Captured (BFI DVD + Blu-ray)
‘People Apart‘ and ‘The Story of an Air Communiqué’ in If War Should Come (BFI DVD) & (BFI Screeonline)
‘Bernard Braden’s Now and Then’ in Primitive London (BFI DVD)
‘Ave You Got A Male Assistant Please Miss?’ in The Joy of Sex Education (BFI DVD)
Journey into the Weald of Kent (BFI Screenonline)
The New Explorers (BFI Screenonline)
Giuseppina (BFI Screenonline)
‘The Home-Made Car‘ in Lunch Hour (BFI Blu-ray) & (BFI Screenonline)
‘The City: A Film Talk by Sir Charles Bressey’ in Hidden City (BFI Blu-ray) & (BFI Screenonline)
‘The Island‘ and ‘Today in Britain‘ in Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain 1951–1977 (BFI DVD) & (BFI Screenonline)
Genetic Engineering and Farm Animals (BFI RePlay)
GM Nation?: The Public Debate (BFI RePlay)
Re-inventing the Fire (BFI RePlay)
What Should We Do? Nuclear Waste (BFI RePlay)
Acid Rain – The Quiet Killer (Weekend World) (BFI RePlay)
Bob Boote (BFI RePlay)
The Private Life of the Gannets (BFI RePlay)
The New Crop (BFI RePlay)
Salute to Farmers (BFI RePlay)
Wildlife in London (BFI RePlay)
Lewi B – ‘Lockdown Riddim (feat. Grime AllStars)‘ (Britain on Lockdown)
Life in Lockdown: Brits Speak Out, from a Safe Distance (Britain on Lockdown)
The Story of Our Food Supply (BFI RePlay)
Photography
Dengie Bioregion 