Keep London weird

He emerges from the Thames around the Globe, near the concrete edifice of the Uber shuttle boat dock. A man, a creature, a king of pine and ivy, with a crown of holly reaching supplicant towards the heavens; beautiful, terrifying, a little absurd. Despite the dull, brackish sky, he shines verdant in his robe of evergreen, his glossy leaves reflecting the lights from outstretched phones and the nearby Pizza Express. The ever-growing crowd is jubilant, restless: Twelfth Night is upon us, and the Holly Man is here.

The order of proceedings has the quality of a forgotten language, an almost-understanding: the wassail, then the mummers’ play, then the King Bean and Queen Pea, then the molly dancing and the kissing wishing tree. The procession ends at Soap Yard in Borough, a collection of old warehouses transformed into a slick, upmarket piazza of chain restaurants and cafes. Here, the large crowd swigs mulled cider and whirls each other around, laughing, cheeks flushed. A horse made from scraps of fabric clacks its teeth to the rhythm of the fiddle player. Everybody seems to be having fun, aside from the volunteer stewards employed to keep the crowd from bottlenecking. A mix of tourists who’ve wandered into the scene, middle-class parents of toddlers, local Bermondsey residents and tote-bagged-and-baseball-capped 20- and 30-somethings, it’s a far cry from the older, more traditional scene you might expect from an event inspired by medieval pageantry and pre-Christian folk customs. 

But in both diversity and age demographic, the Bankside Twelfth Night celebrations are far from an outlier. In the past year or so, a folk scene has blossomed in the capital, attracting young Londoners — the kind who might otherwise be found at Dulwich Hamlet games or queuing for a table at the Plimsoll — to the weird and eerie. Its manifestations are diverse: more overtly traditional events, like the Twelfth Night festivities or community wassailing, as well as updated iterations of folk music and film events, hosted by organisers such as Broadside Hacks and OffBeat in former working men’s clubs. The demand is such that tickets can be hard to get hold of and events are frequently oversubscribed. But where, in the ultra-modern, ultra-expensive landscape of contemporary London, is there room for genuine strangeness? And why do its inhabitants seem to crave it? 

In folk music, a new wave of artists are reviving traditional ballads that speak about poverty, political disillusionment and societal turmoil. Campbell Baun, the founder of Broadside Hacks — a promoter and record label which stages sold-out folk nights and weekenders at venues such as Hackney’s Moth Club — describes the events as “an inclusive space, where people feel like they can do their thing to an audience of like-minded people.” The crowd at Hacks gigs are overwhelmingly young and in-the-know. The men tend to look like Baun, with his neat moustache, gold-rimmed glasses and silver hoop in one ear, while the women favour tiny fringes and delicate tattoos poked by friends in their painting studios.

For Daniel Evans of Shovel Dance Collective, an acclaimed nine-piece folk band at the vanguard of the capital’s new folk revival, this is precisely the problem. “My most sort of cynical and boring answer is that it’s [part of an] aesthetic cycle.” But Baun disagrees. The acts Hacks puts on are often from those same circles — often multi-disciplenary artists, often queer, often under 35 — which he feels is part of the appeal. “I think there's people that [initially] identify with the people more than the music,” he says, “and then through that avenue get into the music.” Besides, “old people do buy tickets as well”, he adds. 

Baun is also keen to emphasise that the music at Hacks isn’t necessarily avowedly political: “the fact that it’s music of the working class makes it political, but I don’t think that means it has to be overtly political in the way it’s played.” Instead, he thinks the appeal, in a transitory city like London, is that it provides a “local identity, as opposed to a national one”. Participation in the new folk scene means “you can still be English and still feel like you have an identity, but it doesn’t have to be one the whole country subscribes to. It can be something that's much more local.”

Although there’s been a recent nationwide folk resurgence, it seems particularly odd, in some ways, that there’s been a London iteration. Folk has always been associated with the rural, maypoles and meadows and milkmaids with straw-dolly hair. The city, in the popular imagination, has always been the counterpoint to the charmingly naive practices of this pastoral idyll: a place of progress, enlightenment, commerce. Nowhere is this more keenly felt than London, with its business improvement districts and its privately owned public spaces, where everything must be gutted and stripped and regenerated. It is a city of sand-blasted brick and freshly laid concrete and the cellophane-shine of estate agent argot. But, like the rivers flowing below the concrete, eddies of strangeness, whirls of odd tales and even odder customs still bubble up occasionally between the cracks in the paving stones. 

London has always possessed a unique reputation for the heathen, the occult, the pagan. For centuries, if not millennia, the capital has been envisaged as iniquitous, its inhabitants barbarous, sinful, a miasma of dissolution hanging thick in the air like smog. Much of Peter Ackroyd’s definitive London: A Biography concerns the capital’s apostatical character: “The pagan customs of London survived into recorded history, just as a latent paganism survived among the citizens themselves.” London has, throughout its history, been referred to as a modern Babylon or Sodom, while Dostoevsky conceived of London as the demon Baal, worshipped by its heathen inhabitants.

Even St. Paul’s Cathedral, a symbol of respectable Christian piety and the very seat of the Bishop of London, was not exempt from this lingering association. In his 1598 tome A Survay of London, John Stow recalls an annual ritual still practised in the first half of the 16th century in which a buck’s head was raised aloft upon a pole and paraded around the church by priests festooned with roses. Stow also notes a persistent rumour that the church was built on the site of “a temple of Jupiter, and that there was daily sacrifice of beasts”; thousands of animal skulls strewn like petals underneath the foundations. It isn’t too far-fetched of an idea — a temple devoted to the cult Mithras was discovered in 1954, and now lies underneath the gleaming carapace of the Bloomberg building. 

The immensely powerful Corporation of the City of London, itself a kind of folk custom made manifest, encapsulates the duality of the city: ultra-commercial, ultra-contemporary, yet simultaneously wreathed in pre-modern mystique. Each year, in October, there is the ceremony of Quit Rents, where the City pays two knives — one blunt and one sharp — 6 horseshoes and 61 iron nails to the Crown. Similarly, the Worshipful Company of Butchers still present a severed boar’s head to the Lord Mayor each December, marching through the streets in velvet caps and vein-dark robes. The imitation hog is carried on a litter surrounded by fruits, its painted mouth agog. The City is also home to the London Stone, supposedly brought to the capital by Brutus, the first king of Britain. Legend has it that “so long as the stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish” — so far, it’s survived both the Great Fire of London and the Blitz, although the church it was situated within was destroyed.

But these ancient institutions are, for the most part, kept away from the daily routine of the city’s inhabitants; a commuter on Cannon Street brushing past the glass behind which the London Stone is cloistered, perhaps, or an office worker hurriedly eating their meal deal in the gardens of St Paul’s. The new wave of London folk, then, is more local, more experiential and, above all, more communal. 

“We don’t advertise, we don’t do any free listings anymore, we don’t invite the press. We don’t invite anybody but the public,” says Dorothy Lawrence, a founding member of the Lion’s Part, the theatre group that runs the Bankside Twelfth Night celebrations. A lifelong theatre actor, her words have a deliberateness about them, mannerisms that command the rhythm of the conversation in the way a conductor’s gestures keep time. The Lion’s Part, she tells me, began in 1995, with actors who met in workshops for the original Shakespeare Company. Back then, the troupe put on mummers’ plays — medieval dramas traditionally staged with amateur actors — in Southwark because the Globe, then newly built, let them have space to rehearse. 

Interest in London folk culture was mostly relegated to small groups, Lawrence says, “and they were doing what they were doing in their little area, say in Chiswick, or in Deptford — there was no social media to join these groups together.” The first Twelfth Night celebration was mostly attended by local residents “and anybody who happened to be passing by on a walk on a Sunday afternoon before. We had to have posters and flyers, and even advertising in local free listings”. It grew from there: in 2024, she tells me, over 1,000 turned up, many of them “tourists and young people”.

Lawrence believes that the increased participation is down to people’s longing for a link to their environments, particularly for a generation raised with the terror of imminent, catastrophic climate change. The celebrations, then, are symbiotic with the environmental movement in much the same way as the folk revival of the 1960s and 70s was with nuclear disarmament — albeit one that seems less explicitly political than its predecessor. For its organisers, the festival fulfils a “need to celebrate the seasons in an urban environment, where they’re often considered a nuisance. I think this festival reminds people it’s alright, that the festivals, the seasons, are something to be celebrated,” Lawrence says. In this way, the rise of the contemporary folk movement in the capital seems of a piece with the recent popularity of foraging and wild swimming, ways to commune with nature in a city where that often feel difficult to access. Similarly, Lawrence identifies a resurgence in community orchards as part of the reason why wassailing has seen a revival. “In this modern day and age, it connects with something very ancient in people that’s still there.” 

As Lawrence describes the elaborate process needed to stage the event — advance permits, copious security, reams of paperwork — it occurs to me that the Twelfth Night celebrations offer a riposte to a city that seems increasingly to belong to business and institutions out of our knowledge and control. To dance through the streets, commanding pavements and roads and private squares, is a statement — raucous, strange, untameable — of desire. It is a declaration of intent by the people to reclaim the city, even just for one day.

This concept of identity — both as a city and country — continually keeps cropping up in the conversations I have with those running London folk events. Folk, after all, has a history of being co-opted by the far right, part of a sinister ethnonationalist vision of ‘Englishness’ — Lawrence told me that, for some years, the Lion’s Part refused to portray the character of St George, calling him ‘King George’ in a bid to ward off any fascist would-be adopters. But equally, the folk movement can exist as a way to resist right-wing conceptions of identity, offering an alternative to England’s class-stratified, colonial past — something that London, as its capital and colophon, feels perhaps most keenly.

“I think a lot of young people are feeling a little bit rudderless and a bit lacking in identity, in a way that if you were possibly from, say, Wales or Scotland, you could have a prouder identity,” says Mike Hankin, speaking to me from his converted Norfolk Broads cruiser, his face dappled with the last of the evening’s sun (midway through our conversation he goes to turn the lights on; the boat gets dark, and he isn’t quite sure which bit of the canal he’s currently travelling on). Along with his friend Rita Conry, Hankin runs OffBeat folk film club, whose sold-out screenings at Walthamstow Trades Hall and SET Social are mostly attended by what he terms “trendy folky young people”. 

For Hankin, the appeal of London’s new folk scene comes from the city’s shifting character, its constant impermanence, coiling and snaking and winding away from our grasp like the Thames. “It’s so diffuse that it's quite difficult to take ownership of it,” he says. Folk, in his conception, offers a depoliticised alternative, one that “isn’t necessarily white… and disentangled from colonialism, it’s pre-colonialism”. He likens it to the recent appreciation rediscovered for old-fashioned caffs, for pie and mash and pints of bitter, part of both a genuine interest for and semi-fetishisation of working class culture. Perhaps the idea of a culture which isn’t predicated on conspicuous consumption, on ever-increasing spending, feels particularly prescient in our current economic moment: “there’s a bit of an us and them feeling, I think. And I think that folk culture really helps people feel like they're one of the people, like they’re together.”

The allure of the capital’s folk traditions, then, is the desire for connection, community, conviviality in an increasingly alienated city. Increasing rents have forced you to move flats again, you haven’t seen your friends for weeks, your phone is trembling, ceaselessly, with stories of terrible things happening all over the world. The contemporary folk movement offers a vision of an alternative, a commons. Near the end of the call, Hankin tells me that he hopes we can broaden our definition of folk to one that doesn’t “necessarily fetishise maypoles and shit… Folk is where people can go and drink for cheap, and London [folk] projects should be pubs, working men's clubs, caffs”. Folk, then, is where people meet, talk, gather; an ongoing promise to reclaim community in the city.