Thoughts on Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice 2018: Has the Dominant Materialism Killed Some Magic in the World? | Andy Worthington (original) (raw)

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So the sun shone this morning, and it looked like a lovely sunrise at Stonehenge on the summer solstice. According to the BBC, however, the number of attendees was just 9,500, considerably less than in some years since Managed Open Access to the great temple on Salisbury Plain was reintroduced in 2000, after 16 years in which access to Stonehenge on the summer solstice was prevented through the existence of a military-style exclusion zone.

In part, this was due to the solstice dawn taking place on a Thursday morning. Attendee numbers are highest when it falls on a weekend, but other factors may also have been involved. It now costs £15 to park a vehicle for the solstice — “£15 per car, live-in vehicle and non-commercial minibus (up to 19 seats)”, as English Heritage describe it — and security has been ramped up in the last two years, primarily, it seems, because of the government’s delight in keeping us in a perpetual state of fear — and racist fear, to boot — by pretending that every aspect of our lives is subject to a potential terrorist threat, even the summer solstice at Stonehenge.

“As with last year’s event”, the BBC explained, “Wiltshire Police confirmed it had stepped up security with armed police on patrol.” Yes, that’s right. Armed police at Stonehenge. What a horrible and unnecessary policy. Supt. Dave Minty, Wiltshire Police’s overnight commander, conceding that there had been no trouble at all, and that “behaviour at the stones was ‘brilliant’, with no arrests made”, nevertheless said of the security situation, “People seem to have adapted really well to the heightened level of security and they’ve been really patient with it.”

I have to say that personally I would have found it hard to be so patient, but that’s perhaps one of the reasons that I wasn’t at Stonehenge this year. I attended Managed Open Access every year from 2001 to 2005, and enjoyed the odd sunny solstice like this morning, an experience that does genuinely provide some sort of connection to the temple’s long-lost makers, as well as having some good times with various travelling companions, selling my books Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield, and on occasion consuming quite alarming amounts of brandy coffee.

Overall, however, it was difficult to reconcile the Managed Open Access experience with memories of where it had come from. Back in my youth, Stonehenge — or, more particularly, the fields opposite Stonehenge — were the site of an extraordinary manifestation of British counter-cultural impulses — the Stonehenge Free Festival.

The festival, which began with the vision of a young man who took the name Wally Hope, and occupied land by Stonehenge in the summer of 1974, with friends who all called themselves Wallies, grew year on year, and by the time of my visits as a student in 1983 and 1984 was a month-long settlement that was the size of a small town.

The festival was many things — an open-ended acid rock extravaganza, and a place of hash and hot knives and magic mushrooms — but primarily it was an anarchic gathering of the tribes, featuring an extraordinary collection of old coaches and commercial vehicles, transformed into mobile homes, which were the core of a travelling community that, from May to September, held free festivals at numerous locations in England and Wales.

Under Margaret Thatcher, who took office in 1979, unemployment increased massively, and life on the road was seen by many young people as the only way out of dead-end nothingness in the many towns her economic policies were destroying, as she set about decimating British industry, empowering the banking sector and encouraging individual greed. Through a combination of the dole and grass-roots entrepreneurship, the festival scene provide some sort of viable alternative, but it was, of course, seen as a threat by Thatcher and the British establishment.

As well as providing an escape route from dead-end towns for spirited young people (a process that had a tendency to create new recruits wherever the travelling convoys went), those on the road also included veteran social agitators, largely informed by the 60s counter-culture, but also seizing potently on land rights issues going back, for example to the Diggers and the Levellers of the English Civil War. On the road, the agitators were joined by anarchists, and by a particularly potent sub-group — former military personnel who had seen through the lies the state had told to recruit them, and who were, with good reason, regarded as genuinely dangerous — and there were also environmental activists, opposed to Britain’s embrace of US nuclear weapons, opposed to the existence of nuclear power stations, and committed to an environmentally aware future that was at odds with the oil-guzzling dinosaur of late 20th century capitalism.

One traveller group, the Peace Convoy, had spent some time at Greenham Common in Berkshire, where a group of extraordinary women set up a renowned Peace Camp to resist plans to base US cruise missiles on an RAF site, and some of them later became involved in another peace camp outside the proposed second base for cruise missiles, Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. This camp was actually evicted in February 1985 in the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in modern British history, and from then until the Beanfield the evicted convoy was harried from place to place before meeting their destruction at the Beanfield — very clearly revealing that, while a narrative of protecting Stonehenge from so-called “dirty hippies” might work with the public, it was the convoy’s political and environmental impulses that had the war-mongering polluter Margaret Thatcher most rattled.

While Thatcher’s brutal assault on travellers brought the festival to an end, and was enormously destructive of the travelling community that was set upon at the Battle of the Beanfield, dissent as a whole was gleefully undiminished. From out of nowhere, an Ecstasy-fuelled rave scene developed, and was followed by a road protest movement that saw the land as sacred, and, prohibited from travelling freely, instead took root in the landscape, resisting road expansion plans with extraordinary passion and bravery, involving dining tunnels, living in tree houses, and locking themselves onto heavy plant machinery.

Looking back on those days, I find myself now thinking that they are like some sort of ancient history, too far off to touch, like events viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, and largely brushed away by the turbo-charged neo-liberalism of the last 20 years, the cannibalistic exploitation of western countries’ populations by their own governments, in cahoots with property speculators, and the triumph of a smug landlord culture, in which the exploitation of tenants by astonishingly greedy and self-centred landlords is portrayed as some sort of marker of success — as of course, it would, when money is the only arbiter of any value, and the lack of any kind coherent and communal belief in the future has led to society degenerating into nothing more than a bunch of well-dressed, braying jackals preying on those less fortunate than themselves in a competition to establish whose sense of self-entitlement is the most dominant.

Of course, resistance still exists, as the anti-fracking campaigns show, and as numerous examples of dissent show, from the protests against the DSEI arms fair in Docklands, for example, to the weekly vigils against US spying at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, to the regular Grenfell protests, and ongoing opposition to austerity, to Brexit, and, imminently, in support of the NHS on its 70th birthday.

However, over the last 20 years, some crucial aspects of life have, I fear, been lost. I often hear, for example, that festival culture is thriving more than ever before, but while this is demonstrably true in some ways — there are more festivals than ever before, demonstrating that the hippies’ dream of people escaping the cities to enjoy themselves in the countryside with music and freedom has, on one level, had an enormous resonance — on other ways a strangling, suffocating materialism — and a culture of surveillance and self-obsession — runs through almost everything we experience these days, including much of our supposed leisure time.

Take Stonehenge, for example. The irony, of course, is that in the festival years only a few hundred committed people made their way to the stones from the field across the A344 for druidic rites and nakedness and worship of the stones and the solstice, whereas, since the Law Lords ruled in 1999 that the exclusion zone around Stonehenge was illegal, and English Heritage was required to open it up via Managed Open Access, the temple itself has now become a one-night party site that, in many ways, is an open-air rave, albeit without music, for the youth of Wiltshire and the surrounding counties. Or, looked at another way, the solstice at Stonehenge has become just another spectacle in our “100 things you must see before you die” culture, in which empty spectacles masquerading as something deep and essential — and which also generally involve endlessly forking out money for tickets, for merchandise, for parking, for catering — define so much of what passes for an actual culture.

It also disappoints me that the pagan year that so many of us seized upon in our youth — in which the solstice, the equinoxes and the quarter days (at the start of February, May, August and November) seemed to provide a genuine alternative to the commercial corporate year — has also become debased by the commodifying culture that monetises everything, and tries to infantilise people into being mere consumers.

I also can’t help wondering if, in general, most of the types of paganism taking place today are anything more than a form of Cosplay, sadly reflecting, yet again, how almost everything in modern society had been commodified and de-politicised. More darkly, I also worry whether, as the kind of class consciousness that very much existed in the free festival years has been hunted down, and replaced with something troublingly selfish and atomised, the very notion of a pagan Englishness, originally conceived as an effort to be in touch with the land beneath our feet and the changing seasons, and a counter-cultural statement, is now more likely to be infected with nationalism, racism, xenophobia and the malignancy of Brexit isolationism.

I don’t know the answers to all my questions and musings above, but I do genuinely fear that we are being deliberately debilitated by a crushing corporate culture that wants us only to be endlessly diverted by empty spectacles, and to spend, spend, spend with our every breath — and although I know I have, and always have had a tendency to over-think things, and to constant question everything, I am regularly assailed by the sense that our current society has, at its heart, a complacent vacuousness that both bores me and depresses me.

It doesn’t help that I was at the O2 on Greenwich peninsula last night for a gig — by the New Zealand musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, my son’s favourite band — which was a very good gig, but only after we’d first endured the fake streets and fake palm trees of the O2’s corporate mall, and had then made our way through layers of airport-style security to get into the O2 arena, where, having arrived implausibly early, we had discovered that there was literally nothing to do — if you didn’t want to buy overpriced burgers or overpriced alcohol sold by prominent multi-national brands, whose advertising was also plastered everywhere — because the entire infrastructure of the O2 is like being stuck in the world’s most boring airport.

Moreover, despite the evident creativity on display on the stage, I found it impossible not to mentally calculate how much money was being made from the 10,000 or so people in attendance, each of whom had paid £65 plus £9.50 in booking fees per ticket, and to end up feeling like I had basically spent an evening being milked by an endless swarm of corporate predators.

Of course, Managed Open Access at Stonehenge doesn’t have corporate sponsors to go wth its heightened security, and, as I note above, not all festivals have taken conspicuous security and the wall-to-wall fleecing as consumers as the model for a positive and memorable experience, but too many have, because the security apparatus of modern life, and the requirement to extract the maximum amount of cash from consumers at every possible moment defines us here and now.

I not only don’t want this, I actively want to resist it, in as many ways as possible, and I want others to do so too, because, after all, all those things that we were fighting against in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s — structural inequality, systemic unemployment, the establishment’s complete contempt for the environment, and, let’s face it, the dullness of the prevailing culture — are even more prevalent and corrosive now than they were then.

Note: For my previous reflections on Stonehenge and the summer solstice, see Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present, It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Stonehenge Summer Solstice 2010: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart, Happy Summer Solstice to the Revellers at Stonehenge — Is it Really 27 Years Since the Last Free Festival?, Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice: On the 28th Anniversary of the Last Free Festival, Check Out “Festivals Britannia”, Memories of Youth and the Need for Dissent on the 29th Anniversary of the last Stonehenge Free Festival, 30 Years On from the Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Where is the Spirit of Dissent?, Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice, 30 Years After the Battle of the Beanfield and Summer Solstice 2017: Reflections on Free Festivals and the Pagan Year 33 Years After the Last Stonehenge Festival.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

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