TALK: Un/Common People: Folk Culture in Wessex

The Museum of British Folklore is the UK’s first ever museum dedicated to the seasonal customs and events of the UK. It’s also a collection in search of a home. The museums director, Simon Costin, and Amy de la Haye, who together with Mellany Robinson, curated Un/Common People, will talk about the museum’s collections and its early beginnings in 2009 and give an overview of its many exhibitions, including the first ever to look at UK folk costume, Making Mischief, at Compton Verney in Warwickshire and UAL in London, and also looking at how Un/Common People: Folk Culture in Wessex came to be and what has led to the current resurgence of interest in folklore across the UK.

Amy de la Haye, MA (RCA), RSA is a curator, writer and tutor. She is Professor of Dress History & Curatorship and a member (former joint founder and director) of the Research Centre for Fashion Curation at London College (LCF) UAL. She is Associate Exhibitions Reviews Editor at SHOWstudio; Resident Curator at London’s Fashion Textile Museum (2025-28) and consultant curator for the Museum of British Folklore.

Simon is the director of the Museum of British Folklore and the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall. His creative process is informed museum and archival research and his own art practise. Costin has both exhibited his own work within and curated shows at leading cultural centres such as the ICA, Whitechapel Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and places off grid, like a forest in Argyll. In 2015 he was recognised by UAL, (University of the Arts London) for his outstanding contribution to the creative industries and made an honorary Fellow of the Arts.

Simon and Amy are part of the team of curators of our Wessex Museums Partnership exhibition Un/Common People: Folk Culture in Wessex.