Access Folk is the public name for Defining Ethnomusicological Action Research through the Regeneration of Folk Singing in England, a research project based at the University of Sheffield under Professor Fay Hield. It is funded through the UK government’s Research and Innovation Programme (grant reference MR/V023837/1), specifically the Future Leaders Fellowship Scheme, which supports early-career researchers. As part of their broader stated aim of increasing participation in folk singing, Access Folk have run two Knowledge Exchange projects. In the first European Knowledge Exchange which ran from April 2023 to March 2024, established arts organisations from five different European countries discussed strategies for reaching new and more diverse audiences. Findings were then summarised and published online. The second knowledge exchange project, Folk Arts and Policy in the UK’s Devolved Nations and Regions, and the Isle of Man, ran from April to November 2024. It aimed to explore “what the implementation of the [UNESCO ICH] Convention might mean for folk arts on these isles and how it connects with the cultural policy climate that folk arts organisations and grassroots scenes are already working within” (episode 1). Folk Arts, Policy and the Convention is the resulting public output from this project.
Folk Arts, Policy and the Convention is primarily a three-episode podcast supported by a 12-page PDF of show notes, and a colourful five-page “graphic,” which presents as an extended poster of key words and phrases. A full transcript (auto-generated and not time-stamped) is also available in English. The show notes and graphic are available in many British native languages; however, being a monoglot, this reviewer only accessed those in English. The geographic area of focus is the United Kingdom (Wales, Scotland, and England, including Cornwall), Northern Ireland, and the Isle of Man. The show notes concisely outline key definitional areas and provide links to the organisations involved and further reading.
The episodes are all slickly produced, rivalling anything that can be heard on BBC radio. They have been attentively arranged and expertly crafted with a pleasing mixture of music and conversation, which will hold the attention of the curious lay-listener as well as the academic. Each episode is perfectly timed running for between 45 and 53 minutes. I have listened to each episode three times learning something new with each repeat. My only grumble is that the full range of documents and translations was difficult to succinctly navigate and would have benefitted from a central index.
The first episode gives some background to the creation of this resource: on 7 March 2024, the United Kingdom ratified UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (hereafter ICH). This convention was designed to extend the concept of culture beyond built heritage, to encompass craft, ritual, cooking, dance, music, and other creative practices. The United Kingdom was rather late to the table, as UNESCO’s ICH convention was implemented in 2003; by the time the United Kingdom ratified it in 2024, they were the 183rd signatory. The UK’s first step to implementation was a public consultation, which ran from 23 December 2023 to 29 February 2024. Folk Arts, Policy and the Convention was therefore created and released at a strategically important time in the development of understanding of ICH within the United Kingdom. Indeed, the results of the UK government’s public consultation were made public in April 2025, only 3 months after the release of Folk Arts, Policy and the Convention.
Episode 1 of the three-part podcast focuses on the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. Ethnomusicologist Esbjörn Wettermark first talks to Breesha Maddrell of Culture Vannin, the trading name for registered charity The Manx Heritage Foundation. Culture Vannin is the Isle of Man’s national arts organisation championing the Manx language as well as musical and creative culture more broadly. Then, Esbjörn meets Ciarán Ó Maoláin, the club secretary of the Armagh Pipers Club. This charity supports traditional music playing, particularly the tradition of playing uilleann pipes, in Northern Ireland. Wales and England, as seen through the lens of two folk arts development organisations, are the focus of episode 2. Esbjörn converses with Danny KilBride from the Welsh folk arts charity Trac Cymru and then with Katy Spicer from the English Folk Dance and Song Society based in London. This is another registered charity and the biggest organisation in England for the promotion of traditional culture. Episode 3 turns to Scotland, and the opinions of Steve Byrne from Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland, a charitable non-profit co-operative network that promotes the musical and creative traditions of Scotland. The final episode concludes with a round table discussion with the above-named professionals plus Dan Woodfield from Lowender, a Cornish cultural advocacy charity and arts development organisation.
What is most gratifying about this series is that the full complexity of the bureaucracy of cultural policy in relation to traditional arts in the United Kingdom is laid bare. While there are some theoretical discussions about ICH (predominantly in Episode 3), the main emphasis is on how organisations are funded. Except for Lowender and the English Folk Dance and Song Society, each organisation is in a different region and therefore has to navigate a separate funding obstacle course with region-specific legislative rulings. Wales, for example, has the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, while the Isle of Man is a whole nation biosphere, a UNESCO category that includes culture and heritage. Whatever the funding source, the money comes with strings attached, imbued with the funders’ own objectives and demands. Many of the leaders’ frustrations towards funding management bureaucracy were quite apparent, particularly regarding the demands around statistics reporting. Leaders were also saddened that they never appeared to experience any direct benefit from such arduous reporting requirements. Boldly, Ciarán Ó Maoláin from the Armagh Pipers Club refuses to collect much of the data asked of him and instead works out the relative areas of economic deprivation that participants come from based on their addresses. This, he argues, is a much less intrusive form of data collection than that derived from questionnaires that ask for personal details, including sexual orientation and ethnicity. He argues that the benefit the Armagh Pipers Club brings to individuals in areas of relative economic deprivation should be celebrated, and wonders why there is not more focus on helping individuals in this category.
There is a slight irony that a series focused on arts which are not “part of an institutionalised art form” (episode 1), covers organisations that are usually funded by bigger institutions, which are directly or indirectly funded by central government. This is perhaps the elephant in the room, in that government support has historically been vital, or at the very least highly influential, for the flourishing of folk culture in a revival context. This is true in England as well as other nations such as Ireland, where the nationalistic agenda behind such support is more widely known (for example, see Foley Reference Foley2013).
Within England, there is a long history of the UK government funding wider engagement with folk culture. As just one example, the popularity of the seemingly decentralised community barn dance or ceilidh today can be traced back to a generous WWII reconstruction grant given by the Government to the English Folk Dance and Song Society (Middleton-Metcalfe Reference Middleton-Metcalfe, Roud and Harrop2021:264). While some individuals may have negative memories of being subjected to folk culture in a school setting, educational programmes such as the BBC’s Singing Together broadcast (1939–2004) exposed many individuals to folk culture. Many of these went on to set up folk singing clubs in the 1960s, the current demise of which prompted the very creation of the Access Folk research project in the first place. The UK government’s financial support for folk culture was, and probably still is, vital for fostering broader participation and engagement within a revival setting.
What emerged from Esbjörn’s interviews is that none of the leaders expected the UK’s belated decision to ratify the convention to translate directly into a folk and traditional culture cash injection. However, they were all cautiously optimistic that the ICH ratification would lead to a shift in policy-making decisions, stemming from a much-needed validation of folk and traditional culture in a UK context.
Since the release of this podcast, the UK government has started to codify its own interpretation of ICH. It has opted for the more general “living heritage” title and, in contrast to other nations, cultural items will not have to be transmitted even across one generation to qualify. Most alarmingly, it has downplayed the need to financially support safeguarding, explicitly stating that it has no intention of nominating UK ICH items to the UNESCO list “at least for the first few years following ratification” (UK Government 2025). While these developments continue, Access Folk’s podcasts provide a useful insight into political and cultural attitudes towards tradition or folk, helping to explain the idiosyncratic approach of the UK government towards the process of ratifying ICH.
