Opening this month at Bonington Gallery is Common Grounds: Counterculture & Confrontation since 1976, a retrospective of the work of Alan ‘Tash’ Lodge. One of the UK’s most prolific photographers of alternative lifestyles, Alan’s work gives a vivid first person insight into the new age traveller movement and the 90s free-party scene, raising questions about the right to gather, policing, surveillance and community.
The year is 1974, and a young Alan Lodge and 8000 hippies are having a cup of tea in ‘the Queen’s back garden’.
In this spacious park in the Berkshire countryside, the People’s Free Festival is enjoying its third annual gathering. The antecedent of the festivals we know today – minus the painful ticket prices, corporate branding, and metal barriers – within the field a makeshift village of tents and vans has been set up while people mingle, chat, dance and share food.
Organised by members of the London Squatters Movement, in just three years the festival had grown from an assembly of just a few hundred, to a movement of several thousand people looking to enjoy and experience a peaceful community existing without walls and rules. Many participants lived a nomadic existence, travelling in convoy throughout the UK in vans and buses, and gathering a few times a year to socialise and organise future events.
In a now infamous example of police brutality, by the sixth day, the Thames Valley Police were also drawn to the site as 800 officers entered the field, truncheons drawn, to disperse the attendees with haste, and force. Calls for a public enquiry were made and then quashed, and future attempts to relaunch the festival fell flat.
People have gathered for either a party or religious observance for the last five and a half thousand years. Suddenly we're not allowed to do it by law. Why?
For Alan, his encounter with an officer on the day not only left a physical scar, but changed the direction of his life: “I thought he'd come up and say, 'Now, come along, move on’. But he just took his stick out and whacked me round the side of the head. I fell off my log, split my tea, and I've never been the same since,” he says.
It was after this event that Alan decided to pick up a camera. Over the next fifty years he would go on to document dozens of free festivals, parties and protests, not just as an observer, but as a participant in those communities.
The freedom to gather, and the conflict that inevitably comes with it, is central to a lot of Alan’s work. Wanting to highlight the true nature of these alternative lifestyles, his photographs depict scenes of domestic travelling life, caravans, dancefloors and street takeovers, providing intimate snapshots of a now bygone
Notably, Alan was present at the ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ in 1985, when Wiltshire Police stormed a gathering at a Stonehenge free festival. Using tactics developed during the miner’s strike, the raid resulted in countless injuries and damage to live-in vehicles, culminating in what is considered to be the largest single day mass arrest since the Second World War. Alan’s photos provide an eye-witness testimony to the devastation caused to the community, showing riot police swarming the site, smashed up vehicles, and travellers being dragged away.era while also telling stories of rebellion, diminishing rights, and police violence.
“Land is completely fundamental to gathering, which is something as old as we've ever done – hence Stonehenge, because I think people have gathered for either a party or religious observance for the last five and a half thousand years. Suddenly we're not allowed to do it by law. Why?”
At the heart of the communities Alan has photographed is a desire for and gravitation towards self-sufficiency. The free festival movement was a fertile space for communities to explore means of self-government and live outside of prescribed capitalist society. People learnt and shared skills – barter systems were often used and welfare units set up amongst the convoys.
“You have common problems that you solve together: ‘You fix my motor, and I can bake you a cake’,” he explains. “I believe that's the strength of community, when you develop these things between yourselves.”
Alan’s philosophy on this topic stretches to anarchy, the meaning of which he says has become distorted over time: “I simply mean the original Greek word: government without authority. It doesn't mean 'do what you like'; it means fitting in with your neighbours and working it out,” he explains. “If people work out that they can do so much between themselves, without vested interests and politics as we understand them now, they're out of the job, aren't they?”
Following the Battle of the Beanfield, with their homes wrecked and morale diminished, the once tight knit travelling community began to disintegrate. The 1986 Public Order Act made much of the lifestyle a criminal offence, as police were given the power to break up any group of twelve or more vehicles intending to reside on a piece of land. Alan had also found himself known to the police as a ‘troublemaker’ for photographing police operations, for which he says he felt both honoured and alarmed.
Owing to a ‘deep lack of optimism’ with the Traveller movement, in 1990 he decided to study photography at Nottingham Trent University, choosing the city for its centrality and proximity to the Peak District. By luck of fate, here he found himself within the flourishing rave scene, in particular with the Nottingham-based DiY Soundsystem who took part in and organised free parties in the countryside.
“It wasn’t the village I was used to, because they’d set up and then go away again. But the infrastructure and what they were providing was much the same. There were some people from the traveller scene, there were some younger, modern ones playing this electronic stuff,” he says. “Sometimes you’d see the same bus or marquee, but instead of a rainbow flag on the top it was now a fluorescent one.”
Rave culture of the early 90s took a similar approach to occupying land as the new age traveller movement, with collectives organising parties in isolated rural areas in jeopardy of being shut down under the Public Order Act. Fortuitously, there was one important loophole for a while.
“What if you don't reside there?” posits Alan. “What if you stay up all night? So they just got around the law. I don’t think they meant to, but it was just the consequence of their behaviour. They wanted to do things in the middle of the night, there was this new music and pretty lights set up – that was never envisioned when they wrote the Public Order Act.”
In May 1992, Castlemorton Common Festival took place in Worcestershire and quite spontaneously culminated in what is now known as the biggest illegal rave to have ever taken place in the UK. A convoy of travellers decided to park up in the Malvern Hills, having been moved on during numerous other attempts to hold a bank holiday free festival, but media coverage and a now infamous answering machine message led to an estimated 20-40,000 ravers turning up, along with various sound system collectives.
Having been at the Beanfield seven years earlier, Alan says he was on guard for a repeat crackdown, but the police were outnumbered and the festival lasted seven days, with the ravers petering out after the weekend and the Travelling community sticking around to put the land right. In 2024, one of Alan’s photos from Castlemorton was included in The Guardian’s roundup of ‘era-defining music photos’. Depicting a group of ravers against a bright blue sky, the photo emits a carefree gaiety that epitomises the early days of rave music and seems somewhat vacant in today’s party scene.
Predictably, Castlemorton led to what Alan calls the ‘second turn of the screw’, with the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 targeting events with music that is “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” Music and gathering became confined to more regulated spaces such as clubs and ticketed festivals, where behaviour could largely be monitored and profit could be made.
Over the past thirty years, Alan’s work has kept its rebellious roots as he has continued to document people demonstrating freedom and holding power to account through protest, Pride parades, union strikes and environmental gatherings, but underpinning it all he says is the issue of policing and surveillance.
“I still call it troublemaking,” says Alan. “It’s been my ambition to try and say ‘this isn’t just history’, and to ask ‘how are you going to organise your society at large? Or are you content with this one?’”
With a catalogue of 300,000 photographs, each containing a well of social history behind them, Alan describes the process of whittling down his life’s work into one exhibition as ‘most stressful’, but the photos on display are guaranteed to provide a thought-provoking vision of alternative communities, power structures and ways of living that have been eroded.
Alan Lodge Common Grounds: Counterculture & Confrontation since 1976 launches at Bonington Gallery on 24 September and runs until 12 December 2026, with a selection of documentaries being screened throughout the exhibition period.
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