Essential information
| Type |
Events and festivals
|
|---|---|
| Location | |
| Date and times | Saturday 21 November 2026 | 10am-6pm |
| Prices | Free for Cutty Sark ticket holders |
Cutty Sark's Sea Shanty Festival is back! Come and enjoy joyful maritime music in celebration of the tea clipper's 157th birthday.
The Sea Shanty Festival features the vocal talents of bands and artists from across the UK and beyond. Get ready for a unique day of fun and festivity.
To get an idea of how much fun last year's festival was, watch the video below.
Meet the performers
The Silver Darlings
The Silver Darlings are an all-female sea shanty crew from Southend-on-Sea in Essex. They sing shanties, songs of the sea and ditties nautical. They love the story-telling aspect to shanty-singing and are passionately committed to ensuring these songs remain in the public domain and are not lost at sea!
Sonny Brazil
Sonny Brazil is a folk singer and Squeeze Box player from the southeast of England. Raised in South East London and Brighton, Sonny dwells among the Bargee Traveller Community, living and playing music as they have for centuries on the inland waterways of England. Sonny lives entrenched in the world of English folk culture, working as a crew member on the Thames Sailing Barges and living on the canals; they are one of the founding members of the folk collective Goblin Band described by Martin Carthy as, "The band we've been waiting for".
Upping The Shanty
Upping The Shanty is a group of women who meet in Faversham to sing shanties and songs of the sea from a woman's perspective. They are a friendly bunch and over the three years or so they have been together have sung at local festivals and pubs. They also write their own songs collaboratively in response to the Coasts in Mind/MOLA project. The group began when Claire and Lindsay asked Christine to start a women's shanty group - and since then have been on a journey of sharing laughter, fun, occasionally tears, and a whole lot of great singing!
The HogEye Men
The HogEye Men have almost 20 years of experience as a group singing shanties and maritime songs to audiences around the country, including a monthly residency on Cutty Sark since 2019. They are respected as London's primary exponents of these unaccompanied working songs from a past age.
The group blends strong voices and subtle harmonies to give audiences a taste of the true nature of the traditional shanty form, while also offering them a selection of more up-to-date tales of the sea.
London Sea Shanty Collective
The London Sea Shanty Collective are a community choir of women and men of all ages and backgrounds from around the world, committed to social justice, equality - and the joy of singing together.
Be it here or abroad, in national institutions, private functions, clubs, pubs, churches, on street corners or under sail, they love keeping shanties and songs of the sea alive, arranging, and sometimes updating, traditional songs, while expanding the repertoire with our own compositions. It's a love they're delighted to be sharing with you again, thanks to the incomparable Cutty Sark and the tireless crew of the Royal Museums Greenwich.
- Visit the London Sea Shanty Collective's website
Swinging the Lead
Looking for lively entertainment? Then you must see Swinging the Lead. With their own unique style of performing traditional shanties and contemporary maritime songs with a lively, upbeat, foot-tapping twist, you are cordially invited to join the fun of a Swinging the Lead performance. Resident Shanty Singers on the famous tea clipper, Cutty Sark, at its dry berth in Greenwich since 2011 and regularly performing at festivals in the UK and Europe. With more than 15 years’ experience of singing Shanties and Maritime Folk songs, Simon, Andy, Pete, Paul and TC are firmly established and highly respected within the Sea Shanty community.
What’s on
See more events at Cutty Sark.
