Stone Club

Event information

Founded by artists Lally MacBeth & Matthew Shaw, Stone Club was set up as a place for stone enthusiasts to congregate, to muse and most importantly to stomp to stones.

Sacha Coward is a researcher, historian and public speaker. He has worked in museums and heritage for fifteen years, running tours focused on LGBTQ+ history for museums, cemeteries, archives and cities all around the world.

Queer as Folklore takes readers across centuries and continents to reveal the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new. From ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the ‘queerly departed’ along the way.

Justin Hopper presents The Great Satanic Swindle: A bizarre true tale of tabloid England. Once, a mysterious stranger arrived in a small Sussex village and told a tale of witchcraft, trapped souls and a life-or-death struggle with Satan himself. A group of church-goers, millionaires and aristocrats stepped in to save him, and things got very weird.

And Lally Macbeth will be talking about her new book The Lost Folk! A fresh and engaging celebration of the customs, places, objects and peoples that make up what we know as ‘folk’ in Britain.

She reminds us that folk is for everyone, and does not belong to an imagined, halcyon past, but is constantly being drawn from everyday lives and communities. As well as looking at what folk customs have meant in Britain’s past, she shines a light on what they can and should mean as we move into the future – encouraging us to use the book as an inspiration, and become collectors and creators of our very own folk traditions.