Stonehenge '83

STONEHENGE '83

That same summer at the Stonehenge Free Festival, the cultural fusion that had begun at previous festivals was continuing apace as tribes of Punks, hippies and bikers mingled together to form both mental and physical cross-breeds.  A network of summer fairs and free festivals was by this time in place, including the Green Moon Gathering in Cumbria, the Cantlin Stone Free Festival, the Norwich Peaceful Green Fair, the Vines Cross Festival in East Sussex, and the Ingleston Common New Age Gypsy Fair near Bristol. The mother of them all, however, was Stonehenge, the prime alternative Butlins holiday destination for Britain's thriving counter culture that during the solstice was attracting up to 70,000 people.

When travelling between festivals it made sense both for practical and safety reasons to leave and arrive en masse, so all those living and travelling in coaches and buses and so on would always travel in a convoy. The year before, when setting off for Greenham Common from Stonehenge, these New Age travellers had announced themselves as the Peace Convoy. The name had stuck but by now due to the sheer size of the convoy they had attracted the attention of the mainstream media who unsurprisingly was choosing to depict them as unsavoury, lawless hippies; prefixing 'Peace Convoy' with 'so-called'. A process of demonization was beginning.

Meanwhile, over at Glastonbury Festival an entirely different problem was also starting following the introduction of a Local Government Act that required the festival for the first time to have a license; one of the conditions being that numbers get limited to 30,000 people.

The times were once again a-changing and with the prospect of four more years of Conservative rule, not in a good way.