During the summer of 1992 I travelled to a field of new-age travellers in Sussex, the Forest Fayre in Gloucestershire and Glastonbury Festival in Somerset. I was searching for the spirt of the ‘New Age’, with its loose coalition of nomadic lifestyles; Neo-Pagans, Hippies, Travellers and Circus Communities; all brought together by shared cultural beliefs, growing ecological awareness, bacchanalian celebrations, Pagan rituals, and the seasons renewal. The origins of this mainly white modern counter-cultural movement can be traced back to the squats and free festivals of the 1970s, such as Windsor Free Festival, whose co-founder Sid Rawle, who went on to create The Glastonbury Green Field, Rainbow Circle and The Forest Fayre Festival in the Forest of Dean, which ran from 1986 until his death in 2010. As the summer of ‘92 unfolded, public opinion becomes divided, partly whipped up by a hostile media. It saw a year of cancelled free festivals and the biggest free Rave ever to take place in the UK on Castlemorton Common. This paved the way for Section 63 (1)(b) of the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, which gave the police greater rights and increased powers to perform unsupervised stop and searches and to remove people from events at which music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” is being played. A primary motivation for the act was to curb illegal free festivals and to stop the traveller festival circuit that had been steadily growing since the early 1990s. The act went further not just curbing the travellers but gypsy caravan sites too. After the summer of 1992 things were never quite the same again.
