Sea shanties and seafood bring new life to Falmouth (2024)

It’s late in Falmouth and outside on the bay sailing masts rattle in the quiet, dark blue night. But things are a little livelier inside the Pennycomequick pub, an 18th-century tavern and one of the town’s oldest drinking spots. The Barrel Seagals, an all-female sea shanty group, are singing to a hushed crowd, chanting the story of the Bencoolen, a merchant ship that sank off the coast of Bude in 1862. The boat is still writ large in local folklore: the barrel, which was hoisted on the mast of the ship, can still be seen from the beach. Then the music segues into dancing, drawing all generations, that continues long into the night.

The evening is part of the Falmouth Sea Shanty Festival, a weekend-long celebration of British maritime culture that was founded more than 20 years ago. Bolstered by the TikTok craze for sea shanties, the festival now sees the town’s pubs and outdoor stages fill with people hoping to witness the strangeness and cultural solidarity woven through the maritime songs.

The festival is part of a broader cultural renaissance that’s taken place in Falmouth over the past few years, as an influx of new restaurants and drinking spots have opened up. And so, having spent school holidays on the south coast of Cornwall, contending with the rain, the rockpools, the freezing cold beaches and beer-battered commercialism, I am curious to see whether Falmouth can deliver a real sense of folk heritage to the British seaside holiday.

At first, the town’s main drag, with its colourful bunting thrashing in the wind, seems quiet. We pass by old antique shops and careening wooden masts in the harbour, all overlooked by Dunstanville Terrace, where imposing Cornish villas once housed officers of the British empire’s early mail service. Soon we hear the first dirge-y tones of shanties drifting through the air. They make the town feel otherworldly, like walking through a ship in a bottle. Moving between the pubs and outdoor stages, which quickly fill up, we catch rousing, well-harmonised renditions of the canonical shanties “South Australia” (which is thought to date back to the 19th-century Australian gold rush) and “Leave Her Johnny”, a song that sounds like it’s about a woman but is actually about a ship (“Oh, times are bad and wages are low/Leave her, Johnny, leave her!”).

The next morning I sit down with Alan Ramsden, one of the original Shanty Festival organisers, and a singer with the Rum and Shrub Shantymen, to watch the sea shanty parade process along the high street. Scores of singers float by carrying banners and instruments, singing rich harmonies. “I always got woken up every morning by the trample of [the] boots of the guys who worked on the docks,” he says of growing up on the street. Since then, the port has de-industrialised, Falmouth University has expanded, and many of the old pubs along the high street have closed down.

The shanties make the town feel otherworldly, like walking through a ship in a bottle

The songs are often as much about the loss of maritime industries as they are about celebrating them, Ramsden explains. Strictly speaking, shanties aren’t just nautical-themed songs but have a specific call and response format used for heavy work on a boat. A shanty, from the French “chanter” (to sing), was originally a work song meant to bring some entertainment to dreary work. They would eventually become valuable to foremen who wanted to speed up work onboard, says Marek Korczynski, a professor of sociology at the University of Nottingham and author of a book on British work songs.

Cecil Sharp, the great English folklorist, played a part in popularising the songs, as well as bowdlerising them – cleaning them up for the Edwardian middle class – Korczynski says. The tradition was revived for a new generation in the 1950s and ’60s by performers like Pete Seeger and Stan Rogers. Although the songs were often from Britain or Ireland, they were also distinctly international, with influence from Black sailors and dockworkers coming from both the Caribbean and the American South.

These songs were not typically sung on land. And certainly not on a stage sponsored by a local brewery. As Korczynski points out, they were often used as a way for sailors to express dissent – at the rations, at a cruel foreman, or at the pay. The shanties sung in Falmouth are tinged with a kind of melancholy for a shared culture that has long vanished. So, what’s driving the revival now? Says Korczynski: “It’s the camaraderie of shared physical labour, as manufacturing jobs get outsourced elsewhere, all we’re left with is these songs.”

But there is new energy being injected into the songbook. Claire Ingleheart started writing new shanties inspired by famous Cornish women after visiting the festival 10 years ago. She went on to found Femmes de la Mer, an all-female choir group. The younger generation of shanty singers “don’t want to just be singing about whaling and prostitution”, she says. Ingleheart’s compositions pay tribute to the likes of Ann Glanville, a 19th-century champion rower, and Jenny Mopus, a ferrywoman on the Truro River. Femmes de la Mer’s performances have become some of the most anticipated at the festival.

Artist and curator Rhys Morgan, founder of the LGBTQIA+ sea shanty choir Seaweed in the Fruit Locker, draws upon queer histories. “There’s nothing queerer than a bunch of men singing a load of songs about a bunch of men being alone at sea together,” he says. There are ample sources to draw on: Herman Melville’s novella about the English seaman Billy Budd, with its undercurrent of hom*oeroticism; the fabled romance between two female pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny, and the agreement known as “matelotage”, a quasi-marriage between two male sailors used to protect one’s bounty.

Some of the songs performed by Seaweed in the Fruit Locker also include lyrics in Polari, a secretive slang used by itinerant sailors, travellers and gay pleasure cruisers: “butch” and “naff” are thought to be Polari terms. “Seaweed” refers to a single gay sailor and “fruit locker” to a cabin for gay seafarers. The reception to this new lore, Morgan says, has been overwhelmingly positive. “People seem to really like the subversion of it,” he tells me with a grin.

We break from the shanty singing and retreat to Hevva!, a seafood restaurant that Falmouth local and chef Finn Johnson recently opened on the High Street. Named for a traditional Cornish fishing call used to alert sailors to a shoal of fish, the restaurant has old hardwood floors, candle-lit tables and a short blackboard menu of seafood. Johnson says that local tastes have been changing as a new generation of chefs and restaurant owners have started experimenting with what it means to cook Cornish food, “neighbourhood style”. People are increasingly excited about the possibilities of Cornish produce and suppliers. As Johnson sees it, there’s been a move away from big hotel restaurants that sell themselves on “the location and tend to be overpriced and high-volume, low-quality”.

At Hevva!, we enjoy a rowdy dinner service of dark crab meat in salty beignets, bright green asparagus with choron sauce and red mullet with salsa verde, followed by a restaurant lock-in that is DJ’ed by the chef himself. It is, in its own small way, a rejection of the holiday home economy.

At Johnson’s urging, we take a further excursion the following evening, quitting the high street and climbing up Falmouth’s lush residential lanes to Provedore. Opened nearly twenty years ago, its first incarnation was as an Italian deli. Today, it’s known for after-work cicchetti, or Venetian small plates, which they serve in a sunny courtyard. Negronis and a menu of vermouths accompany appetisers of rich anchovy fillets on slices of toast with red onion and crisp cherry tomatoes and a spiral sausage appetiser with a gamey fennel flavour.

We end at the Old Brewery Yard, tucked away at the narrow end of the high street, which is home to The Chintz, the town’s eccentric co*cktail bar, and restaurant Mine. We sit happily and eat Cornish beef carpaccio and glazed lamb shoulder with garlic cream as a shanty group takes the stage in the red-lit courtyard outside. Dessert is elderflower honey cake and we enjoy a Cornish cheese course while we watch the group sing the rueful “Barrett’s Privateers” to a chanting crowd.

On the final day of the festival, as the sun begins to beat down on Falmouth, we make our way to The Cornish Bank, a well-respected grassroots music venue. In the back garden area, we watch Simon the Shanty Harpist under a bell tent. He turns out to be one of the best sets of the weekend. Left-field, raw and ironic, he plays chilling renditions of traditional songs (including a threadbare arrangement of “Hal-An-Tow”), and sharp, tragicomic songwriting of his own. “They just sold the last of those fishermen’s cottages / You’ll never guess how much,” he croons.

Falmouth’s nascent food scene and its living culture offer a glimpse of a more experimental, urgent attempt at connecting with the region’s rich maritime heritage. British seaside vacations can be deflating, but here, there’s still something to be salvaged.

Joshua Gabert-Doyon is an audio producer for FT podcasts