Simon Costin, The Museum Of British Folklore

December 2, 2024

by the gentle author

Simon Costin is giving a lecture at the Bloomsbury Jamboree, next Sunday 8th December at 1:30pm. Click here for tickets.

When I first came across a reference to Simon Costin’s notion to create the Museum of British Folklore, I knew it was a stroke of genius. So you can imagine my excitement when I visited him and his benign round face appeared behind the door, like the full moon emerging from a cloud.

Growing up Devon, I was always captivated by the romance – Dare I say it? The magic – of the folk traditions (like the Ottery St Mary tar barrel rolling) that surrounded me. Experiences coloured by my mother’s reminiscences, recounted to me of her own childhood in Cornwall in the nineteen thirties, and the cherished moment in our family history when my grandfather as bank manager in Helston was chosen to lead the Floral Dance in and out the houses. Consequently, these inexplicable social rituals have always delighted and fascinated me with their egalitarian poetry. Mostly unsanctioned by the church or the state, they are the celebratory culture of the working people.

“Is this your life’s work?” I asked Simon, broaching the burning question as soon as our conversation had settled down sufficiently for it not to be impertinent. And he broke into a wide emotional smile to reply with the answer I was hoping for, murmuring under his breath,“Yes.” Although Simon is a serious fellow with an distinguished career in design including five years as Alexander McQueen’s Art Director, he showed me the face of a child. Specifically, a boy who went on holidays to Cornwall and fell in love with a museum in St Ives that displayed Staffordshire Figures and Corn Dollies, awakening a lifelong passion for our vernacular culture.

As an adult, delighting in the folkloric traditions and travelling the country to participate in many of these seasonal events, especially the Jack in the Green Festival in Hastings, Simon discovered that in spite of all the cultural imports – especially from America – which might appear to homogenise our country, the native culture is thriving. When Simon first attended the Jack in the Green Festival , there were two thousand people but last year the crowd numbered over twenty thousand. And so, frustrated by the lack of any central focus to research and learn more about this culture, Simon was inspired to create the Museum of British Folklore with the purpose of celebrating and recording the indigenous culture of these Isles, and afford it the dignity it deserves. This was when his life changed.

“I’ve always loved museums,” declared Simon, casting his eyes around his house, crowded with all manner of intriguing and charismatic curios, “primarily as repositories of knowledge. You can take what you will and interpret it how you please.” At first, he visited curators of existing museums with folklore collections to learn the lie of the land, but soon he realised he needed to create a presence at the festivals, as a means to hear the response from those in the fields and byways – “to learn the language of our intangible heritage,” as he put it.

So Simon decided to set out touring the country in a caravan, and with the help of luminaries from the worlds of folklore and fashion, he spent six months planning an elaborate party for five hundred guests at Cecil Sharpe House to raise the funds. Then with his caravan painted with fairground scrolls and in an outfit consisting of a stove pipe hat designed by Stephen Jones and a long coat designed by Gareth Pugh, he set out on an eight month quest to meet the dyed-in-the-wool folkies of Britain.

“How do you manifest folk culture?” he asked rhetorically, proposing the central dilemma,“It’s the challenge with all these things, that’s why these events can be neglected, because there are no artifacts.” Simon’s solution is to involve the participants in these festivals working alongside visual artists and photographers, using his acute eye and experience as an Art Director to bring the language of contemporary art to the representation of these elusive phenomena.

“We’re looking for material,” Simon announced to me, recklessly inviting contributions to the museum. But this is such a huge subject – which has barely been tapped – that I think he will find himself inundated with wonders for inclusion in the Museum of British Folklore, though I guess that is exactly what he wants.