About

The National Street Choir Festival is a long-standing annual weekend of song that aims to create a connection and sense of community between choirs nationwide. It has been held in a different location, predominantly in the North of England, each year. The Festival celebrated its 25th anniversary in Manchester in 2007.  Last year the wonderful Whitby Community Choir did a fine job of hosting,  and in 2010 the festival returns to Sheffield, the city where it all began.

The festival was created initially to promote the development – through song – of a society free from all forms of oppression, exploitation, exclusion and violence. The festival is organised each year by a choir in a different town or city, with the aim of bringing our ideas and music directly to local audiences. The hope is to encourage more people to sing relevant songs – collectively, publicly and powerfully – as a contribution to progressive change. Over the last 28 years, the Festival has expanded to include not only choirs with a political agenda, but those community choirs who sing a wide repertoire, for the love of singing (itself a political act!)  The range of participating choirs, and thus repertoire, has expanded to include world music, folk, pop, rap and soul, as well as the original protest songs at the heart of the Festival.

The Festival runs over an action-packed weekend with choirs from all over the British Isles participating and singing in various corners of the chosen city or town. It opens on Friday evening with registration and a welcome event.

Saturday starts with a group rehearsal followed by an outdoor massed sing to the public. All participating choirs join together to sing a chosen repertoire that has been rehearsed independently prior to the Festival. The object of this is to engender a community spirit that is shared with the local people. Each choir is then able to busk in the host town or city to share their particular musical style with local people. In the evening there is a concert where each choir performs to the other choirs and local people. This is an exciting and supportive experience and will be held in 2010 at Sheffield’s City Hall.

On Sunday there is a wide range of vocal workshops for the participating singers and members of the public to attend, and after the workshops, a final gathering and sing draws the Festival to a close.

The first National Street Band Festival was held in Sheffield in 1983. At the 1991 festival, held in Hackney, London, street choirs joined the bands and the event was renamed the ‘National Street Music Festival’. Bands and choirs continued together until the festival at Morecambe in 1997 when two separate festivals were mounted – one for bands and one for choirs. While the band festival faded out, the choirs continued from strength to strength as an annual event, now termed simply the ‘Street Choirs Festival’. The number of choirs attending has grown from eight in 1983 to twenty-six in Whitby in 2009. The festivals are part of the wider movements of political and community song, which includes many individual folk singers and songwriters, including Frankie Armstrong, the Copper Family and Billy Bragg – a patron of the festival.