The Lost Folk

Event information

Join us in the Field System Gallery for a reading and Q and A with folklorist and The Lost Folk author, Lally McBeth. The ticket, which is the same as the book's cover price, includes a signed copy of the book and a reserved seat!

By its nature, folk is ephemeral: tricky to define, hard to preserve and even more difficult to resurrect. But folk culture is all around us; sitting in our churches, swinging from our pubs and dancing through our streets, patiently waiting to be discovered, appreciated, saved and cherished.

In The Lost Folk, Lally MacBeth is on a mission to breathe new life into these rapidly disappearing customs. 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.

Lally graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2013 with a First Class Honours in Fashion History & Theory, and has since divided her time between being sensible and silly. Her work wanders the line between the real and the imaginary, taking in history, folklore, performance, ritual, and artifice along the way. She is interested in the links between high and low cultural artefacts and how these lines are often blurred in archives. Lally founded The Folk Archive in 2020, and co-founded Stone Club with Matthew Shaw in 2021. Lally’s first book The Lost Folk is published by Faber.