Richard wrote:-
"Like Sidders - walk into pub, sit down, sing and play. "

I thought that is what you meant having just read your post (16 Sep 12 - 12:11 PM ) in the Deal Maritime (folk) festival and I think that I can work out what you are after.
What you are seeking is a pub or part of a pub to be set aside in the evenings for you and others to do your own singing (rather than tune playing) quite separate from the main festival events.
May I try to answer your enquiry from two standpoints – firstly the pubs' and then our festival's.

I don't suppose Lewes is very different from many other small towns but the pubs that survive - and seven pubs have closed in the town in recent years – are competing to attract the declining numbers of regular pub drinkers, particularly on their prime busy times of Friday and Saturday evenings. To this end, all Lewes pubs now do meals most with a separate dining area, some have large screens showing sport, mainly football, throughout the weekend and some book bands on weekend evenings. The regular pub bands will continue to provide for the pub's regular customers during our festival weekend. If I were to ask these pub managers to give me a room for one weekend for an undefined number of folk singers, I know what their answer would be.

Then the festival…. We are still in our infancy, rather that the 50 year plus maturity of Sidmouth. This will be our third year. One of the early points made by the committee when it was setting things up for the first year was that if we made a loss, we would not be pursuing a future festival. We suspected that things were going to be marginal but we did not how close we were. If the weather had not been good on the Saturday and we had not collected £300 from the various morris/dance sites then the festival would have been £150 in the red rather than in the black.
We did rather better in our second year, but still we need to cover all our expenses from ticket sales and what goes into the collecting tins. Our outlay is very considerable. The main expense is obviously artists' fees and if you look through the programme above you will see many top – and therefore expensive – names. In addition, unlike some festivals, we try to pay all the support artists at least something for their efforts (unless, of course, they happen to members of the committee, in which case they get nothing!). Do I need to list the others? Insurance, venue rents, printing, programme and poster design, magazine and local newspaper advertising, etc. etc. Running a four day festival does not come cheap and we have no source of income apart from our ticket sales. This means that in the evenings, our main time for obtaining income, there are only admission price events and this is unlikely to change in the near future. There are "free admission with collection" singarounds during the day and on the Sunday evening.

Festivals have taken a hammering in 2012. A number of them decided not to operate this year and others were badly affected by the great deluge that was July. Many found tickets sales down this year. They are going to need the financial support from people buying at least some event tickets to be able to survive.