Stonehenge 1970s Counterculture

This book collects Homer Sykes’s photographs of counterculture activities at Stonehenge in the 1970s. Sykes first made his reputation photographing British folk festivals, and later went on to work as a photographer for several magazines and to document various counterculture movements. These photographs document the hippy, neopagan, and New Age communities that gathered around Stonehenge each June for several years at the Stonehenge Free Festival. The festival finally came to an end in 1985, when 1,300 police descended upon a caravan of six hundred travelers approaching Stonehenge, arresting 537 people in “the UK’s largest mass arrest since the second world war,” beating and hospitalizing dozens of peaceful civilians in an incident known as the “Battle of the Beanfield.”