(Images from Bloomsbury Festival, October 2024: performance and workshop with The Dragon Café Singers and members of the public, led by Vivien, with Martina Schwartz (who accompanied on accordion & arranged the music) at Holy Cross Church, Cromer St, Camden, 19 th October; ‘Sing Ballads of Bloomsbury’ performance at church of St Giles-in-the-Fields, 23rd October.)
In January 2024 I began an MA by research in Music at the University of York, part-time over two years. During this time I started working with the Bloomsbury Festival as a music director, researcher and community musician on a project entitled ‘Strange Doings in London – the songs and ballads of St Giles’, culminating in October 2025. This work will be the core of my
MA. The Festival is a celebration of arts, culture and science taking place annually in October within the Bloomsbury ward of London.
The MA will enable me to document and reflect on my creative practice as a community choir leader, arts & health researcher and singer of early music. Through this blog I hope to share some outcomes of my research.
In 2024 my work with the Bloomsbury Festival included several events: researching and performing broadside ballads with the choir of St Giles-in-the-fields, for the launch of a new book, ‘St Giles-in-the-fields – The History of a London Parish’ by Rebecca Preston and Andrew Saint.

Singing a broadside ballad at the book launch, 11th May 2024
I also led workshops and performances with the Dragon Café Singers for the Festival, culminating in ‘Sing
Ballads of Bloomsbury’, a musical introduction to the history of St Giles-in-the-fields, for which I was musical director, which was performed and streamed live on October 25th 2024. This event heralded the launch of a year-long heritage project ‘Strange Doings in London – the Songs and Ballads of St Giles’ which will lead up to special events in the Bloomsbury Festival in October 2025.
Click here to watch the live stream recording of ‘Bloomsbury Festival 2024’.
The working title of my MA is: ‘The Body and the Museum: voice, narrative and embodied practice in memory institutions today – a proposed new approach’. It’s about working with choirs, musicians, groups of volunteer researchers, walking guides, museum and library staff and others, to explore song collections in museums, libraries and archives, including digital resources (known collectively as ‘memory institutions’). The aim is to create inclusive experiences, including ‘ballad walks’ which engage body and mind in a relaxed and social way, with songs, particularly ‘broadside ballads’, incorporating stories of people and places. With the ‘Strange Doings’ project we will delve into the archives to discover ballads from the neighbourhood of Seven Dials in the parish of St Giles-in-the-fields, an area with a dense and tangled history in the heart of London and the centre for broadside printing in the nineteenth century, to create ballad walks and performances bringing the history of Bloomsbury to life.

‘Part of the Rookery, St Giles. March, 1844. Watercolour over graphite sketch by John Wykeham Archer. © The Trustees of the British Museum: 1874,0314.113. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.)
Broadsheets or broadsides were the most common form of printed material from the 16th to the 19th century, with millions of copies produced. Printed on sheets of inexpensive paper, on one side and not folded, they covered newsworthy events, royal proclamations, sensational court reports, and especially ballads. Written by hacks and sold cheaply by hawkers on the streets, broadside ballads covered multiple newsworthy themes, and can be said to have served the function of modern newspapers or social media. Executions were a popular subject for broadside ballad publishers, since these were public events, attracting huge crowds. Execution ballads were stock-in-trade for the printers of Seven Dials. In 1849 husband and wife Frederick and Maria Manning became the crime sensation of the century for their murder of Patrick O’Connor. Their double execution at Horsemonger Lane Gaol was witnessed by a crowd of over 30,000 people including Charles Dickens, a resident & famous chronicler of St Giles. Up to 2.5 million broadsides telling the story of this crime were sold by competing printers throughout Britain.
I am interested in how ballads can give us a sense of connection to people, events and things from
the past, how doing ballad walks in groups can promote a sense of meaning and social connection in the present, and how this can inspire the writing of new songs.
I led my first ‘ballad walk’ in summer 2017 for the Historically Informed Summer School in East Yorkshire, taking participants on a walk through Hull, designated ‘City of Culture’ in that year. An important element of my practice is to collaborate with co-leaders with deep knowledge of local stories, and dig into the archives for songs that give voice to those stories. My co-leader was Mike Covell, a Hull-born leader of popular walks and prolific writer on local history. One of the songs I found was ‘Oh! Hull is a Wonderful Town O’, a slip ballad printed by J.Ferraby, on the Market Place in Hull, sometime in the mid 1800’s. It was possibly written by George Bailey, a comic actor at the Theatre in Humber Street, Hull.
The ballad would have been sold as a single sheet, or ‘slip’ by ballad-hawkers who would sing and
sell their wares at fairs or markets. The song describes Hull in the early C19th from the point of view of a visiting rural lad, wide-eyed with wonder at the novelty of streets brightly lit with new gas-lights, thronging with crowds and filled with the sounds and smells of a bustling port.
I shared the song with Hull musician and artist Charles Huckvale, who joined us on the walk, and
sings the ballad here:
I am looking forward to sharing the outcomes of my research into ballads and stories of Bloomsbury here during 2025.