BBC Radio 4

Dance is one of the UK's most popular activities. Many of us regularly attend dance performances, there has been an explosion of dance in schools, while Strictly Come Dancing is a national obsession.

So here, dancer, writer and broadcaster, Deborah Bull, offers up a social history of dance in the UK. She looks at what we know – or have imagined – about the dances of ‘Old England’; at how we’ve danced to find love; how we’ve danced to find competition success; how we’ve danced to find ourselves; and how we’ve danced to lose ourselves and find refuge during some of the darkest moments in our national history.

Along the way, she dusts down her own dance shoes to try out some Northumbrian rapper sword dancing and some Elizabethan courtly dances. She will whirl around the floor to the Viennese waltz, loosen her hips in the twist and swing with the jive.