In the past few years, our charitable work has included regular music sessions at local pubs the Minerva (long supporter of the charity and sometime funder) and the Whittington and Cat.

We also delivered free concerts at the Hull Maritime Museum in partnership with Hull City Council, Hull Culture and Leisure (HCAL) and the Hull: Yorkshire’s Maritime City project, as well as at other venues and museums in the region, including:

The Stuns’ls, from Cornwall, at the Whittington & Cat in February 2020
  • Supporting local waterways charities by organising fundraising concerts
  • Supporting the relaunch of the Keyingham Folk Club by revamping its Facebook page, helping with promotion and organising a fundraising concert
  • Supporting local community charities by holding free concerts
  • Supporting a charity shanty concert at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, in aid of the RNLI
  • Supporting a local veterans’ support charity by helping organise a fundraising concert
  • Supporting a local sight support charity with its fundraising concerts

Just before the pandemic hit, in February 2020 we held a ticketed fundraising concert at the Whittington and Cat to promote traditional and contemporary maritime music; it featured three local acts and showcased a touring band from Cornwall called the Stuns’ls. And in March 2020 we staged a spectacular fundraising showcase of regional folk and roots music at Hull Minster. It featured some 15 acts and reached an audience of more than 1,000 people over the day, offering our core stakeholders access to free high-quality folk music.

Spare Hands could be considered as the musical arm of the charity, with two out of the six members on the board of trustees and a third playing an integral part in the organising of the Hull Folk and Maritime Festival.

The band support many of our activities and regularly promote our work by giving interviews and performances on local BBC and community radio stations.

The Hull Folk and Maritime Festival 2019

A new team of trustees and festival committee members drove the planning and the festival took place over the weekend of June 26-28th 2019. The festival had three stages: the Minerva main stage, the Syntan maritime stage and the Marie stage. The festival organised a flotilla of historic barges and boats and displayed them on the Hull marina dock side, a key feature of every festival to date with some serving as a performance space for singarounds, workshops and as pop-up museums. The weekend was hampered by poor weather; however, the event was still able to go ahead. The main stage operated as normal, but the Syntan stage moved performances down into the hull of the barge. Numbers for the event were estimated at 4-5,000. The participatory element of the festival was a success with three full days of themed singarounds in the Whittington and Cat, including maritime music, tunes sessions and traditional and contemporary folk music. Acts that played the event included:

Ellie Pollard, performing at the Hull Minster Maritime Concert in March 2020
  • Sam Martyn
  • Jim Radford
  • Monkey’s Fist
  • Shiznitz
  • The Hull Folk Collective
  • Spare Hands
  • Tim O’Connor
  • The Smugglers
  • Hillbilly Troupe
  • The Caistorways

Achievements

  • Working with new trustees to ensure the 2019 festival went ahead
  • Continuing the partnership with Hull City Council and HCAL to put on free maritime concerts
  • Forging partnerships with the Hull: Yorkshire’s Maritime City project
  • Working with Hull Minster to put on our record-attendance free concert
  • Developing websites for Folk in Hull and the maritime festival, as well as a better social media strategy

We are currently developing a plan for an event later in 2021 with a view to the full festival returning in 2022.