One Town Keeps Its Side, the Next Doesn't: The Unseen Work Behind a Morris Side

There's a stretch of road north of us where you can pass through four decent-sized Hertfordshire towns in under half an hour. Three of them have a green, a couple of pubs with rooms big enough for a practice, and a summer calendar groaning with fetes. None of them currently has a Morris side. Ours does.

That's not a boast. It's a puzzle worth taking seriously, because the difference between a town with a side and a town without one is almost never down to how much people there like folk music. It comes down to infrastructure — some of it visible, most of it not — and to a handful of decisions made by people who probably didn't realise at the time that they were deciding anything at all.

We've been dancing in and around St Albans since 1972, which means we've watched a few sides come and go nearby. Some folded because the dancers aged out. Some folded because they never quite replaced the one person who did the admin. A couple went quiet for a year and simply never restarted, which is the most common ending of all. So this isn't a piece about heritage in the abstract. It's about the boring machinery.

It's rarely about the dancing

Ask anyone who has tried to start a side and they'll tell you the same thing: the dancing is the easy bit. You can teach a willing adult a hanky dance in an evening. What you can't teach in an evening is a reliable Wednesday-night room, a rota of people who'll drive, and a landlord who actually wants you in the building.

St Albans has a critical mass of these things, and it has them because they've been built up slowly and defended more than once. That's the honest version of the postcode lottery. It's not luck. It's accumulated favours.

The pub is the first venue, and the last

Every Morris side we know of has a pub at the centre of it, and not just for the obvious reasons. You need a back room with a floor that isn't carpeted, somewhere to leave a box of sticks between practices, and a landlord who doesn't mind twenty people arriving on a Tuesday in January when the pub would otherwise be empty.

That last point is worth dwelling on. A side that dances in a town centre brings people in on the dead nights. Landlords who understand this are worth their weight in mild. Landlords who don't — or who change every eighteen months because the pub has been sold — are one of the main reasons sides quietly lose their base.

When a town loses its practice room, it doesn't usually lose the side that same month. It loses it two winters later, after a year of moving between hired halls and living rooms, when the momentum finally runs out.

The calendar is infrastructure too

Here's something that doesn't get said often enough: a Morris side is only as secure as its diary. Recurring bookings are everything. The same fete, the same charity day, the same Christmas market, the same three or four pub gardens, year after year — that's what lets you plan recruitment, print a leaflet, and tell a new dancer with a straight face that yes, we will actually be doing things.

Towns that host a decent summer festival tend to keep their sides. Towns where every booking is a one-off, chased from scratch each spring, tend to lose them. The difference isn't the number of events. It's whether the organisers remember you.

Which is why the least glamorous thing St Albans Morris Men does all year is the follow-up email. Not the dancing. The email. Sending it in January, when nobody's thinking about July, is what keeps the bells booked from one year to the next.

Recruitment is a slow tap, not a tap left running

People imagine sides recruit by putting up a poster. In practice, almost everyone who turns up to a first evening came because somebody they knew brought them along, or because they saw us at an event and the timing happened to suit.

So the real recruitment work is being visible at the right moments and being approachable when someone plucks up the courage to ask a question. Beginners' evenings are useful, but they're the shop window, not the supply chain. The supply chain is a member mentioning it to a colleague, a partner being coaxed along, a lapsed dancer from another county finding out there's a side nearby.

Our experience in 2026 has been the same as in most years: the interest is out there, and it arrives in dribs rather than waves. What converts a drib into a dancer is a group of people who make the first three months feel easy. That's a cultural thing, not a marketing thing, and it's the hardest part to replicate.

The invisible ledger

Somebody stores the kit. Somebody insures it. Somebody holds the float for the collection bucket. Somebody has a van, or knows someone with a van, and doesn't mind using it at seven in the morning in December. Somebody answers the emails from the wedding enquiry and the parish council in the same week, in a tone that doesn't frighten either of them off.

This is the load-bearing scaffolding of any side, and it's usually carried by about four people. If a town's folk scene is unlucky enough to have none of those four, it doesn't matter how many people want to dance.

What we still need here

Honesty is part of the job, so: St Albans isn't finished either. We could do with more musicians — a second melodeon or a fiddle who can commit to Saturday mornings would change what we're able to book. We'd like a more permanent storage arrangement that doesn't depend on somebody's spare room. We'd like a reliable summer pitch in the centre of town that doesn't get moved for roadworks every other July. And like every side in the country, we'd like a few more dancers under forty without wishing the rest of us away.

None of that is nostalgia. It's a shopping list.

What other towns could nick

If you're in one of those towns down the road with a green, a pub with a back room and no bells, the lessons from St Albans are unglamorous but portable. Find the landlord before you find the dancers. Get one recurring booking rather than five one-offs. Ask the parish council for the same slot every year and then turn up to it. Keep the first evening friendly and the first three months easy. And accept that the admin is the tradition — the dancing only looks like it comes first.

The bells don't ring because a town is special. They ring because a small number of people kept saying yes to boring things for a long time. That's a lottery anyone can enter.