Illustration of Dave and Howard's point: an event I played at last year was a party-cum-house-concert that was never advertised in any public medium. In a large top floor flat, it must have had more people packed in than Edinburgh and Leith Folk Clubs could ever have fitted into their venues put together (one guy in our band is a civil engineer who specializes in the conservation of historic structures - he spent much of the evening gripping the windowsill calculating floor loadings in his head). Almost all the music played fitted the 1954 definition though none of it was from the British Isles or North America (that might well come, some other time). I can't imagine anybody there would have thought "pity this isn't a folk club".

The impression I get from the early publications of the postwar folk scene is that nobody involved expected clubs to be more than a transient phenomenon. They were right: the clubs had a job to do, they did it, end of story.