Joyous photos from the heart of the UK’s radical free festival movement
Common Grounds — The photographer has been capturing British counterculture for the past half century. A new exhibition looks at his archive sitting at the intersection of music, community and grassroots protest.
After half a century at the frontlines of British counterculture, photographer Alan Lodge has no intention of slowing down now. Although sometimes introduced as an historical curio, his work is steeped in the tradition of artist-activist, with the camera as his weapon of choice.
Now Lodge traces his journey along the fringe, mapping a landscape of resistance across the UK in the new exhibition, Common Grounds: Counterculture & Confrontation Since 1976. The show weaves together more than 100 photographs with personal archives, moving images, and 35mm slide projections alongside documentation and legal correspondence from Lodge’s encounters with the police and judicial systems.
“The common factor behind all of it is policing, especially police surveillance,” Lodge says. “The alternative cultures I associate with are policed because it’s not the mainstream, and anything unusual or untoward is always looked at with suspicion. “Whether you’re covering a free festival, protest, or environmental action, they’re always there, a policeman with a camera watching you.”
Lodge got his start in the early-1970s as an emergency paramedic in the London Ambulance Service. He and his comrades created a charity called Festival Welfare Services, providing medical assistance across the nation’s flourishing free festival scene that had reclaimed the British countryside as the people’s playground.
“A free festival is basically a land squat,” Lodge explains. “All the land was taken from us in the Enclosure Acts in the 18th century, so the only way that you can gather is on someone else’s land. That’s what we were doing at Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, and the 28 other events throughout the course of the summer. People gather together without rules and regulations, working it out amongst themselves. It’s kind of like a village, and if you’re a nomadic type, you move every week.”
Lodge sees himself in the tradition of the Diggers, a 17th century group that believed that the land belonged to the people – and not to the aristocracy. “As soon as you get together on land, you suddenly start punching above your weight,” Lodge says. “We had something of an anarchistic existence, and I mean that positively, where people look to each other for assistance, and not the state. A lot of people came out from squats in the city to associate with the free festivals, which is why after the Miner’s Strike, they came for us.”
Knowing the photograph was more than art or reportage – it was evidence that could be used in a court of law – Lodge took aim, using his work to both chronicle history and fight the system. “I photographed the excessive violence to prove wrongdoing, because the police would always say, ‘That didn’t happen. You’re exaggerating,’” he says. “I can still remember a senior officer’s face when he saw all these wet prints that I had developed in the back of my truck and washed in a mountain stream, of a police action that he denied had taken place.”
Half a century later, the themes of Lodge’s life’s work – collective identity, civil liberty, dissent, environmental responsibility, public space, and state authority – have moved from the fringe to the very centre of contemporary British life. “The problem with history is that the winners write it. I find that problematic,” he says. “All you’ve got to do is raise your eyes to the scene, and there’s no correlation between what’s written about and the photograph they’re showing you and what you can see for yourself. People are starting to wake up now.”
Alan Lodge: Common Grounds: Counterculture & Confrontation Since 1976 is on view through December 12, 2026, at Bonington Gallery in Nottingham.
Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.
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