Brand new museums don’t come along very often but that is what Simon Costin is trying to create with his idea for a venue dedicated to British folklore.
He has been passionate about the subject ever since he was a child and avidly read a book called Folklore, Myths and Legends in Britain, which was published by the Reader’s Digest in the mid-1960s.
Family holidays in south-west England included a visit to a museum in St Ives that featured examples of British vernacular art such as corn dollies, Staffordshire figurines and Nailsea glass canes.
The museum is no longer there, but Costin’s passion for the subject remains. For the past 15 years or so Costin has been researching folklore heritage in Britain as well as attending some of the many folk events that are held across the country. He has unearthed lots of fascinating traditions that have remained largely hidden from mainstream culture.
Costin says folklore can be many things, including the slang people use and the stories they exchange. It can be a roadside shrine to commemorate a killed pedestrian, or the public outpouring of grief when a celebrity or public figure dies.
Festivals are an important part of folklore and events such as the Jack in the Green festival, an annual four-day celebration of Morris Dancing held around May Day, are both an important part of Britain’s history and a living cultural tradition.
Costin’s plan to create a museum to highlight traditions such as these started to gather pace in 2008 when he began gauging levels of interest.
“I went to talk to people – museum directors, and various practitioners and curators – to see whether or not I was actually mad or whether this notion that there could be a Museum of British Folklore was valid and had potential. After a six-month period it was obvious there was a big gap.”
Costin was interested in why the subject he loved so much did not have a higher profile and why a museum dedicated to folklore hadn’t been developed before. “I was curious to try and work out why it had been overlooked by the general museum fraternity and I suspect that there are a whole number of reasons,” he says.
“But I think that one of the main ones is that there is not a lot of stuff. Apart from costumes and the odd artefact, a lot of it, because it has never been valued or it is sort of intangible heritage, is discarded. In terms of museums and galleries, how do you put the subject into context without material objects?”
In 2009, one of the project’s supporters, Hilary Williams, the director of the Ditchling Museum, suggested Costin took to the road to promote his plans.
So he took time out from his work as a designer and set off in a purpose-built caravan. The tour worked on a number of levels, as a mixture of evaluation, outreach and publicity.
“Just actually talking to people and gathering stories was one of the most important things about the tour,” says Costin. “And support along the way was fantastic – I was quite touched and overwhelmed by that.”
The tour also confirmed his view that the creation of a Museum of British Folklore was long overdue.
“What we have been finding a lot with what we are doing is that there are areas of British culture that have just not been examined in the way they should have been, which is perfect for us as it gives us a very strong remit for what we are doing.”
Costin seems to be a canny operator, and he is gradually gathering supporters for the museum. As well as Williams from Ditchling Museum, Alice Rawsthorn, whom Costin worked with when she was the director of London’s Design Museum, is a supporter. And exhibition designer Calum Storrie has agreed to advise the museum.
Temporary exhibitions
Costin has also been developing a series of temporary exhibitions to spread the word about the new museum. This started in October 2010 with a small project in Caithness in Scotland linked to a festival to celebrate the Gaelic language.
For this, Costin designed a giant book with six plasma screens built into the pages that looked at Gaelic poems, songs and folktales, which were re-enacted with shadow puppets.
“When I was in a Peabody Trust flat years ago my neighbour was from the Orkneys and she used to tell these wonderful stories of how they didn’t have TVs and they would make puppets cut out of paper and would hang a sheet in front of a window and do shadow puppet performances. That memory always stayed with me and resonated.”
The book toured schools and community centres and people were encouraged to add stories. “It was a really good kick-start to the exhibition programme.”
The Caithness project was followed by an exhibition about the history of fireworks (15 October-11 December 2011) at Compton Verney, which has a folk art collection itself.
And in March this year the first temporary exhibition at the revamped Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket, Suffolk, will be organised by Costin. It will focus on the folk archive collected by Doc Rowe, who has been recording and filming cultural traditions and vernacular arts since the 1960s.
In October there will be a folklore and photography exhibition at the Towner in Eastbourne and next year Costin is developing a show about the Barbara Jones archive at London’s Whitechapel Gallery.
Jones was a graphic designer, writer and broadcaster who organised an exhibition for the Whitechapel Gallery in 1951, Black Eyes and Lemonade, that explored popular British art such as toys, souvenirs and printed ephemera.
Costin is slightly amazed at how well the temporary exhibitions have gone: “It’s extraordinary really – I thought a lot of people would say ‘No, it does not fit in with our programme’, or ‘our curators would not agree to having a guest curator’, but everyone, bar none, has taken the idea.”
As well as promoting the work of the planned museum, the temporary exhibitions are providing good experience for Costin.
“I have enjoyed it and I am learning tons. With a lifetime of going to exhibitions and having that designer’s eye, looking at why something has been put into a particular context, what it says by being put next to something else, all those things have always intrigued me so I am now getting the chance to explore that properly.”
Once the temporary exhibitions programme is complete Costin will move on to developing a fundraising programme for the capital project. There are three models being explored: a new build; an existing building with an extension; and a conversion. At the moment Costin is looking at locations in Devon and Cornwall.
The budget could be £10m upwards and Costin wants to raise it from private sources. “I have been talking to some hedge fund people, whose world I know nothing about, and I’ve asked if this is the worst possible time to be setting out on this project and they have said ‘not really’.
"The rich people are still rich and once the Olympics are over there should be a little more money floating around. So I’m not despondent – I can’t be.”
Collection and displays
The collection has been gathered by Costin, who describes himself as a “bit of a hoarder” and is stored in his east London home. He already has lots of ideas for the displays and how to represent areas of intangible heritage that are often quite difficult to reflect in museums, such as festivals, song and dance.
He is hoping to use some of the techniques of contemporary art to convey the excitement and vibrancy of folklore traditions.
“The first time I went to the Jack In The Green festival and was asked to take part, it was so incredibly life affirming, a feeling of being involved in something the community felt strongly about that was larger than the self,” writes Costin on the Museum of British Folklore website.
“I felt so alive after taking part – they’re visceral, noisy and exciting – it sets the blood pumping.”
Folklore means people and stories, a combination that should work well in any museum. If Costin’s enthusiasm for the subject is translated to the displays the new museum will be an exciting place to visit.
museumofbritishfolklore.com/
Simon Costin studied theatre design and history of art at Wimbledon School of Art. After leaving college in the mid-1980s he developed a career as an art director and set and exhibition designer.
His work has been displayed in exhibitions at venues as diverse as a forest in Argyll, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
His lifelong passion for folklore led to the idea to create the UK’s first centre devoted to celebrating and researching the UK’s folklore heritage.
The aim of the Museum of British Folklore is to create an institution that explores and celebrates the UK’s folklore culture and heritage. The project is being led by director Simon Costin.
Mellany Robinson is the projects manager, Jenna Rossi-Camus is the research and development officer and Russell Harris leads its social media work.
The museum is developing a series of temporary exhibitions at museums around the UK. It recently had a show about fireworks at Compton Verney in Warwickshire and future venues include the Museum of East Anglian Life in Suffolk, the Towner in Eastbourne and London’s Whitechapel Gallery.
Costin is looking for a permanent location for the museum in either Devon or Cornwall. The project is being supported by the Villore Fund and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
He has been passionate about the subject ever since he was a child and avidly read a book called Folklore, Myths and Legends in Britain, which was published by the Reader’s Digest in the mid-1960s.
Family holidays in south-west England included a visit to a museum in St Ives that featured examples of British vernacular art such as corn dollies, Staffordshire figurines and Nailsea glass canes.
The museum is no longer there, but Costin’s passion for the subject remains. For the past 15 years or so Costin has been researching folklore heritage in Britain as well as attending some of the many folk events that are held across the country. He has unearthed lots of fascinating traditions that have remained largely hidden from mainstream culture.
Costin says folklore can be many things, including the slang people use and the stories they exchange. It can be a roadside shrine to commemorate a killed pedestrian, or the public outpouring of grief when a celebrity or public figure dies.
Festivals are an important part of folklore and events such as the Jack in the Green festival, an annual four-day celebration of Morris Dancing held around May Day, are both an important part of Britain’s history and a living cultural tradition.
Costin’s plan to create a museum to highlight traditions such as these started to gather pace in 2008 when he began gauging levels of interest.
“I went to talk to people – museum directors, and various practitioners and curators – to see whether or not I was actually mad or whether this notion that there could be a Museum of British Folklore was valid and had potential. After a six-month period it was obvious there was a big gap.”
Costin was interested in why the subject he loved so much did not have a higher profile and why a museum dedicated to folklore hadn’t been developed before. “I was curious to try and work out why it had been overlooked by the general museum fraternity and I suspect that there are a whole number of reasons,” he says.
“But I think that one of the main ones is that there is not a lot of stuff. Apart from costumes and the odd artefact, a lot of it, because it has never been valued or it is sort of intangible heritage, is discarded. In terms of museums and galleries, how do you put the subject into context without material objects?”
In 2009, one of the project’s supporters, Hilary Williams, the director of the Ditchling Museum, suggested Costin took to the road to promote his plans.
So he took time out from his work as a designer and set off in a purpose-built caravan. The tour worked on a number of levels, as a mixture of evaluation, outreach and publicity.
“Just actually talking to people and gathering stories was one of the most important things about the tour,” says Costin. “And support along the way was fantastic – I was quite touched and overwhelmed by that.”
The tour also confirmed his view that the creation of a Museum of British Folklore was long overdue.
“What we have been finding a lot with what we are doing is that there are areas of British culture that have just not been examined in the way they should have been, which is perfect for us as it gives us a very strong remit for what we are doing.”
Costin seems to be a canny operator, and he is gradually gathering supporters for the museum. As well as Williams from Ditchling Museum, Alice Rawsthorn, whom Costin worked with when she was the director of London’s Design Museum, is a supporter. And exhibition designer Calum Storrie has agreed to advise the museum.
Temporary exhibitions
Costin has also been developing a series of temporary exhibitions to spread the word about the new museum. This started in October 2010 with a small project in Caithness in Scotland linked to a festival to celebrate the Gaelic language.
For this, Costin designed a giant book with six plasma screens built into the pages that looked at Gaelic poems, songs and folktales, which were re-enacted with shadow puppets.
“When I was in a Peabody Trust flat years ago my neighbour was from the Orkneys and she used to tell these wonderful stories of how they didn’t have TVs and they would make puppets cut out of paper and would hang a sheet in front of a window and do shadow puppet performances. That memory always stayed with me and resonated.”
The book toured schools and community centres and people were encouraged to add stories. “It was a really good kick-start to the exhibition programme.”
The Caithness project was followed by an exhibition about the history of fireworks (15 October-11 December 2011) at Compton Verney, which has a folk art collection itself.
And in March this year the first temporary exhibition at the revamped Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket, Suffolk, will be organised by Costin. It will focus on the folk archive collected by Doc Rowe, who has been recording and filming cultural traditions and vernacular arts since the 1960s.
In October there will be a folklore and photography exhibition at the Towner in Eastbourne and next year Costin is developing a show about the Barbara Jones archive at London’s Whitechapel Gallery.
Jones was a graphic designer, writer and broadcaster who organised an exhibition for the Whitechapel Gallery in 1951, Black Eyes and Lemonade, that explored popular British art such as toys, souvenirs and printed ephemera.
Costin is slightly amazed at how well the temporary exhibitions have gone: “It’s extraordinary really – I thought a lot of people would say ‘No, it does not fit in with our programme’, or ‘our curators would not agree to having a guest curator’, but everyone, bar none, has taken the idea.”
As well as promoting the work of the planned museum, the temporary exhibitions are providing good experience for Costin.
“I have enjoyed it and I am learning tons. With a lifetime of going to exhibitions and having that designer’s eye, looking at why something has been put into a particular context, what it says by being put next to something else, all those things have always intrigued me so I am now getting the chance to explore that properly.”
Once the temporary exhibitions programme is complete Costin will move on to developing a fundraising programme for the capital project. There are three models being explored: a new build; an existing building with an extension; and a conversion. At the moment Costin is looking at locations in Devon and Cornwall.
The budget could be £10m upwards and Costin wants to raise it from private sources. “I have been talking to some hedge fund people, whose world I know nothing about, and I’ve asked if this is the worst possible time to be setting out on this project and they have said ‘not really’.
"The rich people are still rich and once the Olympics are over there should be a little more money floating around. So I’m not despondent – I can’t be.”
Collection and displays
The collection has been gathered by Costin, who describes himself as a “bit of a hoarder” and is stored in his east London home. He already has lots of ideas for the displays and how to represent areas of intangible heritage that are often quite difficult to reflect in museums, such as festivals, song and dance.
He is hoping to use some of the techniques of contemporary art to convey the excitement and vibrancy of folklore traditions.
“The first time I went to the Jack In The Green festival and was asked to take part, it was so incredibly life affirming, a feeling of being involved in something the community felt strongly about that was larger than the self,” writes Costin on the Museum of British Folklore website.
“I felt so alive after taking part – they’re visceral, noisy and exciting – it sets the blood pumping.”
Folklore means people and stories, a combination that should work well in any museum. If Costin’s enthusiasm for the subject is translated to the displays the new museum will be an exciting place to visit.
museumofbritishfolklore.com/
Simon Costin at a glance
Simon Costin studied theatre design and history of art at Wimbledon School of Art. After leaving college in the mid-1980s he developed a career as an art director and set and exhibition designer.
His work has been displayed in exhibitions at venues as diverse as a forest in Argyll, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
His lifelong passion for folklore led to the idea to create the UK’s first centre devoted to celebrating and researching the UK’s folklore heritage.
Museum of British Folklore at a glance
The aim of the Museum of British Folklore is to create an institution that explores and celebrates the UK’s folklore culture and heritage. The project is being led by director Simon Costin.
Mellany Robinson is the projects manager, Jenna Rossi-Camus is the research and development officer and Russell Harris leads its social media work.
The museum is developing a series of temporary exhibitions at museums around the UK. It recently had a show about fireworks at Compton Verney in Warwickshire and future venues include the Museum of East Anglian Life in Suffolk, the Towner in Eastbourne and London’s Whitechapel Gallery.
Costin is looking for a permanent location for the museum in either Devon or Cornwall. The project is being supported by the Villore Fund and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.