Commons, carnival, space and rave
‘What the fuck do you think an English forest is for?’
– Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth
The city is a spell cast in steel, stone, tarmac and glass. It is a network of ideologies concreted into architecture, buildings and roads that direct our actions and organise our thoughts. Each building is a box built not just of bricks and mortar, but of a series of practices, associations and taboos, the designation of what is acceptable, the design of normality. Block by block, line by line, the city constructs reality.
I’m boiling the kettle for my thermos, gazing from my window on the eleventh floor, watching the building site opposite me. The temporary fence went up a few months ago, declaring not first possession of the land, but a repossession of its purpose. Today, lorries arrive with heavy stacks of steel, and, to a background of clanking and high-whining metal saws, cranes turn and lift prefabricated blocks onto hollow houses: the air is claimed by concrete, space turns into place.
The shape of this building site is a microcosm of the shaping of the city as a whole. As new places are created, new boundaries are established, and with concrete margins come social taboos and legal frameworks, which either include or exclude certain sectors of society. Power is organised through space.
The kettle boils and I pour the steaming water onto a brown nest of organic matter at the bottom of the thermos, screw on the cap and head out. Down at street level I join the exodus from work, walking down the Bethnal Green Road to the Tube. The market is dismantling, corrugated metal casing is being pulled over the shop fronts, burly men and women in boiler jackets, with ID tags wrapped around their biceps, guard the doorways to pubs. The streets are battening down the hatches. Because squeezed between the rock of one week and the hard place of another, the weekend here has a seismic pressure: it goes off like an earthquake.
When I return home tonight the armies of weekenders will have cried havoc to the streets. The roadsides will be littered with the bullet casings of nitrous oxide gas, a drug you inhale through party balloons, sold on the kerb when the police aren’t looking. The pavements will be sticky with the sugary melodrama of drink; bodies cored of their consciousness will lurch and sway and stumble and fall, there will be shouting, arguments and fights. The air will be thumping with the turboed bass of expensive cars speeding up and down the road, and, here and there, the people will be pressed, arms behind their backs, against the walls and billboards, lit by the flashing blue rave lights of the police. This is normality; but because we have neither the money, nor the inclination, nor the correct shoes, we’re off to the woods.
Passage clogs as we enter the Tube: we pass into the city’s intestines like a mudslide. As one, we mass forward through the stone pipes until we pan out onto the platform, slowly filling up the space. A train arrives and we pack ourselves against the wall of strangers, the doors shut and we lurch forwards through black tunnels.
Tightly insulated by other humans, encased in steel, buried by concrete and earth, I consider the nature of space. Space is the arena of action and interaction; it is where our lives play out. But after sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s book The Production of Space was published in 1974, a new wave of academics began to view space not just as an impassive backdrop to the theatre of society but as a protagonist in the play. They were interested in how the organisation of space affected its inhabitants, how space created a paradigm for power: ‘[Social] space is a [social] product … the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action … a means of control, and hence of domination, of power.’
The way space is divided (or, in other words, the way place is constructed) has a direct influence on the people who operate within it – it affects their habits, customs and ideologies. The decision of who and what space is for directly shapes the structure of the society within it: what is allowed, what is encouraged and what is forbidden. Lefebvre created the term ‘Third Space’ to discuss this interaction between how places were conceived (mapped and designed) and how they were perceived (how they affected the lives of those that lived within them); Third Space is the place where real life occurs amid its theoretical design. His theories were influenced by philosopher Michel Foucault, who had developed the notion of heterotopia five years before. For Foucault, ‘spatial politics’, the interaction of societies with the places they created, was the ‘central theme of modernity’.
Foucault spent his life studying the history of how centralised power achieves control of the masses through the compartmentalisation of society. He believed that social constructs, or values, were both reflected and directed by the built environment, creating moral vagrancy by building walls of acceptable behaviour. His phrase ‘carceral archipelago’ referred to the city as a network of insulated institutions, which created a general architecture of prison-like control. In London and all other major cities today, the CCTV, the gated communities and the spikes that councils attach to pavements to ward off homeless people are prominent examples of the architecture of a carceral archipelago. Foucault’s thinking moved from the exterior ‘architectonics’ of control to the interiorisation of their methods, which he called the ‘technologies of the self’. Margins and boundaries are established in the minds of citizens through advertising, media and education, which assert the dominant ideologies of society. In the carceral archipelago, ‘the judges of normality are everywhere’.
After half an hour of being pressed into the personal space of strangers, light fills the Tube, the underground has gone overground and we stream past the gardens of terraced houses towards Loughton, three stops from the end of the line. Just over the boundary into Essex, Loughton is the place where the fields start, where urban architectonics fall away into wide space, where you can spot the totem spirit of the plains: the brown hare.
Only ten minutes’ walk away, they will be gathering for dusk and performing the strange ritual of spring, the magnificent bouncing dance where the females choose an eligible mate by punching the various bachelors in the face. The hare is a weird, slippery animal and has bewitched the lore of the countryside for centuries. With its smeuses and smoots, it is a trespasser of fields, and it is as hard to define as it is to confine. Old big-gum, aunt sally, old bouchart, the swift-as-wind, the cat of the wood, the stag of the stubble, wee brown cow, the turpin, the trickster, the hare is almost always described by reference to what it is not. Bugs Bunny, who is not a bunny but a jack rabbit, the North American brown hare, is the most famous of hare tricksters, a folkloric archetype who leads the powerful members of society in a wild chase before it slips through the net to freedom. In folklore, the hare permeates the partition of gender – the Welsh thought that it was male one year and female the next, and in the Tudor era the bucks were widely believed to give birth to young. In every way, the hare defies enclosure.
But as we gather provisions for the night in the local supermarket, we see squadrons of sentinel hares lined up on the shelves, cast in palm oil and cocoa and wrapped in foil. Dressed as bunny rabbits, the hare’s pagan wildness is watered down for the consumer of Easter treats, tamed into product. As we head down the high street, we pass the Lopping Hall, with its frieze of woodsmen, reminding us that Loughton is not just our gateway into Epping Forest, it is the reason there is a forest at all.
In 1864, William Whittaker Maitland, the High Sheriff of Essex, inherited Woodford Hall and with it the property rights of 1,120 acres of Loughton, including much of the common ground of Epping Forest. He had plans to develop the land, to improve it by building or farming on it, so up went the fences around five square kilometres of woodland, activating the cult of exclusion. The space was redefined by the fence line, and commoners who had previously had rights to lop wood on the land were now excluded. Two years later, Thomas Willingale and his two sons were caught in Epping Forest, lopping branches as their ancestors had done since time immemorial. Arrested and convicted under the 1820 Malicious Trespass Act, all three were sentenced to two months’ hard labour, during which one of the sons died of pneumonia.
Perhaps because of the death, perhaps because of how recently the land had been enclosed, the case became a cause célèbre among the champagne socialists of London society. Back in the city, the chattering classes had become increasingly interested in the concept of space and how it was used. London was densely populated and much of the squalor and disease prevalent in working-class areas such as Bethnal Green was blamed on the density of living conditions, the lack of space. These were the aesthetes of London society, and included artist and writer John Ruskin, philosopher John Stuart Mill and Arts and Crafts supremo William Morris. With a quaint sincerity that would be crushed under the boot of today’s neo-liberalism, their arguments were built around the concept of beauty – as William Morris wrote in the magazine Justice: ‘The grip of the land grabber is over us all; and commons and heaths of unmatched beauty and wildness have been enclosed for farmers or jerry-built upon by speculators in order to swell the ill-gotten revenues of some covetous aristocrat or greedy money-bag.’
Octavia Hill was a central member of this group. As a young artist, her talents had been spotted by Ruskin who offered to train her as a copyist; they spent long afternoons in the National Gallery, copying the masters and talking politics. To Hill, space was an external dimension that had a direct influence on the interior wellbeing of a person: on mood, on self-esteem and on health. In a working-class world of heavy drinking, hard labour and domestic squalor, she saw that the provision of space could alleviate the pressures on the self: ‘But to me it brings sad thought of the fair and quiet places far away, where it [light] is falling softly on tree, and hill, and cloud, and I feel as if that quiet, that beauty, that space, would be more powerful to calm the wild excess about me than all my frantic striving with it.’
Amid the soot and smog of the working-class districts, Hill was insistent that the poor should have places where they could catch a breath of fresh air. In 1865, she set up the Commons Preservation Society, still running today as the Open Spaces Society. A year later, they offered Thomas Willingale their support and raised £1,000 to contest the case, fighting to maintain common rights over the land. Willingale died four years into the case, ostracised and unable to find work among a community who were Lord Maitland’s tenants. But his case was taken up by the Corporation of the City of London and in 1879 Parliament finally passed the Epping Forest Act, which stipulated that the forest would always remain ‘unenclosed and unbuilt on as an open space for the recreation and enjoyment of the people’.
The Commons Preservation Society went on to save Hampstead Heath from gravel extraction, Wimbledon Common from building development and, without their campaigning, the public would not have been granted access to Hampton Court Park, Regent’s Park or Kew Gardens. As perhaps her crowning achievement, in 1895 Octavia Hill co-founded the National Trust.
At the crossroads, we meet the line of the forest. In early spring, the new leaves of the beech trees are lime-green, furry and translucent. They seem to hold light as well as filter it and, with the sun slowly setting, the trees are lit like Chinese lanterns and our faces are washed in a green glow. Fallen trees lie like sunken whales, drenched in luminous pools, and the air that streams through our noses is cool and refreshing. Breathing seems like drinking and the effect is psychotropic: it drugs us. The Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, has recently arrived on our shores, backed by peer-reviewed science journals that have proved that trees, through their essential oils, release chemicals called phytoncides which boost the immune system for up to thirty days after immersion. In the woods, you thrive on the essence of trees.
We follow a meandering brook to the main path and then cut left up a hill. The trees around us are the record of centuries of common rights; they have been copparded six foot in the air, so that more poles could spring from the trunk and provide firewood for the locals. The scars of constant cutting have formed great gnarly, knobbled basins of wood, from which long, snaking brontosaur necks stretch up to the sky. At the rotten birch, we take a faint pathway through briar and thorn and arrive at the fire pit. We stumbled upon this space a decade ago, a patch of earth blackened by previous fires, and when we’d pulled some cut logs around it, it became a place we returned to. Over the years, we’ve found evidence of other use: beer bottles and spliff ends, and once a coronet of roses left in the centre, with gold ribbons streaming from the holly bushes, a wedding perhaps.
Though we didn’t know it when we first sat down here, the circle is on the border of an Iron Age camp, a large tract of woodland barricaded by steep earthworks, now sunk into the topography of the wood. Here, Iron Age men and women kept their cattle, and 500 years later, as the story goes, Boudicca and her allied Iceni and Trinovantes tribes gathered here before devastating Londinium, only twenty years old, in ad 61. The space is broad and, with the canopy of the trees so high above us, walking through it feels like being inside an organic acropolis: it is a space inside, and a place aside, from the woods.
The architectonics of the wood, the structures and how they operate on the mind, are entirely different from those of the city. Nothing tries to sell you anything, nothing forbids access, no spaces have been designed or designated. Here, the mind unbelts. The grid has been replaced with a calm chaos, the straight lines of roads and rationalism are sunk in the smooth curves of beech boughs, wooden flights of fancy and the dazzling spray of bright green, free-flowing thought.
In 1989 the philosopher Edward Soja published the first in a series of books and essays that advanced the concept of Henri Lefebvre’s Third Space. For Soja, ‘Thirdspace’ is a conversation between ideology and architecture open to all who inhabit it. It is both imagined and real, both abstract and concrete, and builds a space where the borders of society can be constantly challenged. In Soja’s Thirdspace, groups who are marginalised by the ideologies imposed by place can interact on an equal footing with the centres of power that created them. Thirdspace can become an area of: ‘radical openness, a context from which to build communities of resistance and renewal that cross the boundaries and double-cross the binaries of race, gender, class and all oppressively Othering categories’.
Thirdspace is not imposed from above, but created from within. Its central concept is its slipperiness, its openness to change, the permeability of its borders of definition. It is in constant flux, an ‘open-ended set of defining moments’.
It is a theme picked up by bell hooks in her book Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, where she talks of ‘heterotopic marginality’ as a place, and mindset, of resistance against unequal power distribution. Is there a place on earth where a white, middle-class, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied man like myself can stand before any member of a marginalised group, and be truly equal? Is there a place outside of the histories and politics that have given me power and privilege, simply by taking it from others? Inside the structure of the carceral archipelago, whose grid has been fashioned by men of power and constructed along lines that serve their ideologies, certainly not. But outside of this grid, with none of the signage and architecture of power, perhaps spaces can exist that reflect the needs of all those that use them. For all this radical thinking, Thirdspace sounds a lot like the oldest use of space in history: the commons.
We have been clambering through the woodland, gathering fallen branches. Bit by bit, we return to the circle, where a friend has already laid a nest of twigs over a tealight. We arrange the night’s firewood in loose piles and roll the sawn birch logs a little closer to the centre, a circle drawn in proportion to its members. As the night draws in, the tealight will rise to a furnace and forge a temporary place out of space. Its margins will be dictated not by stone but by light, creating a place that is permeable to any who come its way.
Over the years we have met many people who have simply stepped out of the darkness, drawn by the dance of the fire. Homeless people have appeared at the bushes, streams of night-time joggers, middle-class hippies practising ayahuasca ceremonies, an impossibly young traveller from Russia, local Loughton lads. We have no property here, no right to exclude, and so the circle simply widens and the ambience changes according to the sum of its parts. With no signage, no directives to appropriate, proper behaviour, there is no normality here, no baseline to conform to.
This is a place for every occasion and every mood. This is the place you can come to when your best mate’s dad dies, when your friend announces the baby in her womb, when you don’t want to pay sixty quid to get into a club on New Year’s Eve, where can you howl and whoop and sing your throat raw without offending your neighbours, and where you can get profoundly and marvellously high.
I unscrew the thermos and breathe in the dank steam. The water is brown, infused with the psychoactive capacity of psilocybin. All mushrooms are magic: more animal than plant, theirs is a weird kingdom that sprouts from the damp darkness of the underworld. They are transformative: some can turn oil spills and plastics into digestible material, some can absorb heavy metals and remove radioactive isotopes from the soil, and at least 200 species of them can tear down the fences of the self, and open the mind to new space. And like the phytoncides of trees, their effects have been shown to outlive the trip.
They have been used in couple-counselling and to mitigate the psychological effects of PTSD and a growing body of evidence suggests that ‘micro-dosing’ could help alleviate the symptoms of anxiety and depression. They have been shown to open the mind to new experiences, wider understanding, a feeling of inherent unity and sacredness to life that pervades experience long after the rush has died down. They are, of course, extremely illegal: as of 18 July 2005, Section 21 of the Drugs Act outlawed possession of magic mushrooms. Today, if caught, your newly liberated soul can be reincarcerated for seven years, two years longer than the minimum sentence for possession of an illegal firearm.
Magic mushrooms, however, are tricky to police. They are a commons drug, what philosopher Ivan Illich would call ‘vernacular’, referencing a legal term from ancient Roman law, vernaculum, that designated anything that was not a commodity. You can farm them and sell them, you can go on the dark web and buy them, but you can also just go for a walk and pick them: they grow free and wild, often on the estates of the most powerful men of society. And for this reason there are certain sections of the Act that provide for property owners – if you are caught in possession of magic mushrooms on land that you own you can claim to be disposing of them safely, which (in medical terms at least) would certainly include digesting them: to this day there is no evidence of harm from the occasional use of magic mushrooms, either short or long term.
We sit and pass round the tea, taking small sips until it disappears. The fire is crackling and no longer needs our nurture. It turns on the blacklight of the woods: old stories, half-remembered childhood legends and folktales that lie dormant in the light of the day now shine brightly in the firelight. Rationalism is a long way away and when night falls there are no concrete walls or electric lights to protect you from the atavistic – the boggarts, changelings, giants, ghosts and monsters step out from behind the line of fiction, and dance in the dark space around us.
Because of the work of Octavia Hill and the Commons Preservation Society, we still have about one million acres of common land in England. They are green and pleasant spaces, where people walk their dogs and where some still take their cows to pasture. But their true value, the social structure they embodied, the philosophy of ‘commoning’, has largely disappeared.
The commons are physical, but ‘the Commons’ is metaphysical. In practice, before enclosure, the Commons were a paradigm of social ties and community values that were used to regulate a particular local resource. Their terms and conditions, rights and responsibilities were determined by the people who used them, and every year they would vote in ‘reeves’ to oversee these values. The laws were not imposed by distant landowners, but, like Soja’s Thirdspace, they were the sum of the people involved.
Though modern commons can still include areas of land or water whose rights and duties belong to the locals, their core philosophy has now transferred to the virtual world of the internet, to online operating systems, networks and platforms whose rights and duties belong to a global community. Wikipedia is one site that follows an open-source philosophy, encouraging users to contribute content; and, just as the old commons were organised by reeves, so Wikipedia is managed by experts to improve the quality of the resource. Wikipedia has signed up to the Creative Commons licence, one of several public copyright licences that enable the free distribution of intellectual or creative resources – on their website today, they have over 1.1 billion works on offer, from photography, to art, to writing, educational resources, software, music and scientific journals and they belong, right now, to you. To attach a creative commons licence to a piece of work turns it from commodity to vernaculum.
The philosophy of commoning has thrived on the internet just as it has died on the land. It encourages a system of social interaction that foregrounds co-operative, inclusive values, sharing, over the ideology of privatised profiteering. The social platform Twitter is just one example of the modern commons. In 2013, when an American police officer was acquitted for shooting the teenager Trayvon Martin, a community organiser called Alicia Garza wrote an open letter on Facebook stating: ‘our lives matter, black lives matter’. A year later, this phrase had become a hashtag and migrated to Twitter. During a march in Ferguson, Missouri, the police confronted protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets and assault weapons; they created free-speech zones, gag zones and press pens; and they utilised a spurious rule allowing them to arrest anyone loitering for more than five seconds (later declared unconstitutional by a Federal judge). But they could do nothing about the solidarity expressed on Twitter: the message that Black Lives Matter was projected without filter to a global audience. Likewise, the historic attempts to silence women, from physical violence to the Non-Disclosure Agreements of the modern age, have been seriously weakened by the collective vocalisation of the #MeToo campaign on Twitter: plain thoughts are broadcast loud and clear in the public sphere. Twitter, for all its drawbacks, has taken the marginalised, subjugated sectors of society and brought them, by commons consensus, to the centre of society. It is Thirdspace.
Something that feels like fear is hollowing my stomach. The light of the fire is starting to kaleidoscope. Its sparks slow and seem to float upwards with red dragon-tails tracing their motion. Form blurs, vision echoes, distinction slips and slides. The textbooks call this derealisation, the phase the mind slips into before an epileptic attack, as if the world is seen through a foggy pane of glass. But what mushrooms offer is the opposite of derealisation; they seem to lift the veil. When mushrooms take hold of your perception, you enter a transitory moment that can last up to six hours, that presents the world as a series of realisations, or epiphanies.
Something shifts behind my eyes to change the scene before them: like an optical illusion, when the background suddenly flips to the fore, the image remains the same, but a new form leaps forward. Overlooked in the humdrum drone of normality, it has been there all along, but now it is unmistakable and unforgettable. The hectic patterning of the woods has clarified into something sacred, sentient and slightly scary: I see the grimacing face of Pan.
My gut churns, my bowels turn, my blood is rushing like an electric kettle coming to the boil, except someone left the lid off and so it just goes and goes and goes. I’m on my feet and away from the group. I have wandered into Boudicca’s acropolis, that hangar of beeches that now stand above me with the heavy presence of humans. Their canopies sway like the arms of festival crowds, thick streams of invisible wind combing through them, animating them. The light of the fire is behind me, but I see, or perceive, its light flying like burning arrows through the trees, warp-speeding through the darkness. The world has become intensely vivid.
I sense the ferns unfurling around me, the ivy writhing up the trees, their leaves ruffling like the feathers of a waking bird. Around my bare feet, the earth is moving; I feel the shield bugs clambering through the leaf litter, the clumps of harvestmen arachnids skittering in tangled webs across the earth. Beneath them, the wet soil is squirming with worms, woodlice and millipedes and, suddenly very still, I sense the presence of the insects asleep beneath me, the hibernating nymphs, larvae, pupae, the unsprung embryonic stag beetles, encased for six years in the Epping loam, which will soon crawl out of their grave-cradles and fly drunkenly around the woods. I sense the seeds, the tiny dots of energy with the unrealised space of trees contained inside them and the white webs of mushroom roots that net like neurons through the soil, that can feel my footsteps on the earth, and as the kettle finally comes to a boil, the blood beneath my skin fizzing like champagne, the bottle bursts, the cork flies out and I am drenched in a frothing foam of laughter, because finally I can comprehend with my whole body and soul the words that William Morris once wrote beneath an elm tree in Uffington in 1890: ‘And all, or let us say most things, are brilliantly alive.’
I awake, several months later, in a grove of green light. Somewhere in the distance I can hear the thump of heavy bass and the shrieks and screams of a funfair. Long grass towers over me, ferns over them, and, high up in the sky, the swaying tops of the trees. I am lost in time and space, idling in the Wychwood.
Wychwood is Hwiccewudu, the old realm of the Anglo-Saxon Hwicce tribe, which once stretched from Bath to Stoke-on-Trent, through Birmingham and down to West Oxfordshire, to what is now called Cornbury Park. When William the Conqueror snatched up England, he forested about 120,000 acres of this region as a deer park and from then on it proved very popular with the hunting tribes of England. Henry III hunted here, Edward IV, James I (who hunted everywhere) and then from 1770 onwards, the Duke of Beaufort, having just discovered his love of chasing foxes, moved his retinue sixty miles from Badminton every year, to perform the selfless act of pest control in his neighbour’s woods.
These woods form some of the most ancient tree cover in England, and are these days protected under the designation of a SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest). However, before its protection, under a succession of owners the forest had been cleared to make way for arable fields, to raise money for various building ventures and aristocratic debt relief, and now only about 0.5 per cent of its original extent survives. On the fascia of the cornice in the chapel, under the pediment of the Clarendon wing, is a quotation from Virgil, deus nobis haec otia fecit: ‘a god has made this place of leisure for us’.
The Royal Forest was officially out of bounds for commoners, but they had used it nevertheless, to graze their pigs and cattle and poach venison. But every Palm Sunday they were allowed legitimate entry into the woods to perform the age-old ceremony of ‘Spanish water’. They would seek out a magical well deep in the woods and mix the wild liquorice that grew around it with the healing water to take back to their ailing relatives. The well flows with chalybeate waters which are so rich with iron that it is rimmed with a reddish-orange scum, as the salts build around its mouth. These days it is fenced and the tradition has died, but its name lives on in the festival that takes place here annually, and the reason for my visit: Wilderness.
Wilderness is a four-day music and cultural festival held every year in Cornbury Park since 2010. The year I arrive, 30,000 people are camping and raving behind the miles of temporary metal fencing. It is the absolute cream of English festivals and marketed towards the fat cats of society. It isn’t just music on offer, but lakeside spas, yoga and mindfulness, theatre, comedy, debates, TED-style lectures, wild swimming, a champagne garden, a Rioja terrace and banqueting halls with celebrity chefs; it is the apotheosis of what has become known as a boutique festival and is to the festival scene what glamping is to camping: it’s gorgeous. David and Samantha Cameron are regular visitors, Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England, has been spotted amid the crowds, and for all its chinos, pink shirts and Ferraris on the lawn, it has been christened Poshstock by the press.
I have finally risen from my druid dell in the Wychwoods, and have been walking the long hunting chases that run through the forest, towards Newell Plain. The plain is a vast hole cut out from the forest and today is a mixture of rough grassland and ploughed earth. In 1790, a group of Methodists from a neighbouring village came here for a picnic. They returned the next year, and the next, with more and more picnickers, and by the early 1800s the picnic had turned into a fair. It is impossible to say when and how this happened, but it says something about how people saw their common ground – though officially the property of the Crown, it was poorly policed and since it belonged to no one exclusively, like the firepit in Epping Forest, no one had the right to exclude any other. A combination of word of mouth and an intrinsic sense of right to the land led people to this plain, ready to lose themselves in a carnival spirit.
The scant descriptions that remain of the fair are enough to set the scene: 500 coloured lanterns were erected, the Duke of Marlborough’s yeomanry band played, the Vauxhall Dancing School were there, there were freak shows, jugglers, and George Wombwell was a regular, with his menagerie of exotic beasts that included elephants, giraffes, leopards, panthers and ‘the real unicorn of scripture’, a rhinoceros.
Because the fair was free, it was open to members of all stations of the Georgian hierarchy, from the navvies working on the railway line, the commoners of Cornbury, to the gentry and the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough themselves, who lived down the road in Blenheim Palace and had recently purchased the neighbouring estate of Cornbury. They made their appearances at the fair in a wagon with attendant coachmen and footmen dressed in scarlet liveries, white stockings and plush cockades, no strangers to the joy of fancy dress. Yet by the 1830s the forest rangers had become increasingly exasperated by the fair ‘bringing the neighbourhood vast numbers of idle and disorderly characters’ and on 25 September 1830, it was announced that the fair ‘shall be DISCONTINUED’.
The fair was banned until 1833 but returned for another decade, when it was banned again. But people kept coming back. The very last fair, in 1855, saw a dozen special excursion trains offloading revellers from London on the newly built railway line, who would crowd through the forest, ramble up past the great manor house and return at the end of the day, soaked in gin. When the 7th Duke of Marlborough, Winston Churchill’s grandfather, finally bought the rights of Newell Plain in 1856, Jackson’s Oxford Journal reported: ‘It is understood that his Lordship will allow the fair, under certain restrictions, to be held another year, although the spot is now assigned as private property.’
But he didn’t. By the following year he had fortified the commons against incursion, dug deep trenches through the approach roads to stop the wagons and policed the woods with his own gamekeepers, who had been sworn in as special constables. He was, of course, the local magistrate, so anyone caught on this former common ground went before his judgment on the bench. The fair was finally dead.
Today, the Wilderness website proclaims: ‘for four days this August, no one belongs here more than you’ (providing, of course, that you have purchased a wristband). Since 2010, Wilderness festival has resurrected the site for carnival, selling the perquisite of wildness back to those that can afford it. On top of the minimum ticket price of £180, you can choose the boutique camping, which offers a hierarchy of comfort, from bell-tents to gypsy wagons. Prices here start at £829 and rise to around £2,499 for a cute little gypsy wagon with a double bed.
This weekend, within the compound, a friend of mine is interviewing a hero of mine, the writer Jay Griffiths, and has sourced me a wristband for a day’s entry. So I leave Newell Plain, follow the perimeter fence round to the entrance of the festival, join the queue, collect my wristband – and gain my legitimacy.
The festival is a riot of colour and wonderment. Brass bands are processing in full pageant regalia, teams of mad scientists in oversized spectacles run around with clipboards talking theatrical gibberish, there are people on stilts, acrobats, jugglers and fire-breathers. Everywhere you turn, the world is a kaleidoscope of micro-experiences, palmistry, theatre, operatics, tiny tents of quiet wonder amid the noise of carnival.
This is the fingerprint of the organisers of Wilderness, the ‘boutique festival’ experience, first perfected at Secret Garden Party, the grungier, druggier, hardcore-ravier older sister of Wilderness. It still places music and theatre at the heart of the entertainment, but fills the interstices of the main stages with a jumble of hare-brained eccentricity.
It is a fairy-tale vision: far beyond fancy dress, everyone seems to be in some state of anthropomorphic metamorphosis. People in long dress-coats turn to reveal plush fox tails, people in top hats have the ears of hares poking through the rim, there are peacock feathers, pheasant feathers, owl masks, there are badgers wearing skin-tight fuchsia jumpsuits and wildcats in Edwardian bodices and fishnet tights.
This is therianthropy, the ancient practice of becoming animal, a shamanic shape-shifting that stretches through the mythology of werewolves and satyrs and fauns, past the Egyptian hieroglyphs, to cave paintings and amulets tens of thousands of years old. Ever since humans ceased to be animals, we have been ritualising our link with them, bridging the gap between human and non-human. Even in today’s format, with synthetic feathers or a papier-mâché crown of antlers, by dressing up in animal form we strip ourselves of our habitual human veneer, and reconnect to something wild.
I duck into the literary tent and pick a deck chair far back enough so that Jay Griffiths won’t pick up on my saucer-eyed love for her. The tent fills and the talk begins, and it’s quiet and interesting and nothing like my experiences of being on stage at such events. As a writer of the lower order (graphic novels) I have always been put on after peak hours, which usually means when the sun has set, and when the raving has started. At that time of night, people use the literary tent like a saline drip: from the stage, you can see people stagger in from the chaos, and sit in the corner, skinning up, coming down, grateful for the low drone of literary murmur, as if sobriety can be transfused through the ears.
But these guys are pros and the tent is packed, attentive and moderately sober. After the talk, while a long queue forms for the book signing, I mill around the bookshop, scanning the titles. One table is piled high with the twenty-first century’s answer to the self-help book, the ‘Mindfulness’ literature that has masterfully appropriated the experience of existence. In a world dominated by work and productivity, mindfulness reminds us how to appreciate the passing moment. But mindfulness is just idleness without the social stigma, repackaged with a barcode and brand. Idleness, from the Germanic word Idla, meaning worthless, has historically been a term given to any use of time not dedicated to turning profit; it is a slur on a vernacular use of time. It is the bane of the authorities and used to this day to describe anyone who is not doing what they ought to be doing. And since the industrial revolution, with the work ethic firmly installed into our modern minds, the final victory of commercialism has been to sell idleness back to us. This is rentier capitalism of the mind – access to experience is enclosed, monopolised and rented out as a commodity.
The most recent example of this is forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku. As soon as the health benefits of being immersed in woodland became evident in England, what is in fact nothing more than a stroll in the woods became rebranded under the exoticised cloak of Japanese culture, swallowed into corporate consumerism, and is now sold by various companies as a luxurious retreat from the working world. Of course, trees release their essential oils whether you’ve paid for it or not, but here in Oxfordshire, where the public are barred from 90 per cent of woodlands, even a walk in the woods is now something to be sold.
I duck out of the literature tent and take a walk. Beneath its veneer of unfettered freedom, this festival is no less stratified than the city it offers you escape from. You can bathe in the lakes, but only as far as the line policed by stewards in kayaks. Nakedness is prohibited, which feels unnecessarily restrictive since in 2012 it was here that the world’s skinny-dip record was broken. The path along the lake is partitioned with a banner that says ‘Live your Freedom’, but the banner hides a metal fence that blocks the route to a separate enclosure of hot tubs and leisure facilities, for a more exclusive experience of the lake. The Veuve Clicquot tent serves champagne at £16 per glass and £90 per bottle, and in the evening, the banquet costs £85. The open plain has been enclosed into little boxes of space, segregated by the blandest, least carnivalesque notion going: how much coin you have in your pocket.
Originally, the word ‘wilderness’ was a compound of wild and deer; it was any place where wild animals roamed free. But wild-deer-ness was always more than just a place; it was a state of mind. Frances Zaunmiller, the mountain woman who spent forty-five years living along Salmon River in the Idaho outback, defined wilderness as the psychological expanse where ‘a man can walk without trespassing’. In her fierce and phenomenal book Pip Pip, Jay Griffiths goes several steps further:
wilderness is a ferocious intoxication which sweeps over your senses with rinsing vitality, leaving you stripped to the vivid, your senses rubbed until they shine. It is an untouched place which touches you deeply and its aftermath – when landscape becomes innerscape – leaves you elated, awed and changed utterly. Forget the lullaby balm of nature tame as a well-fed lawn, here nature has a lean and violent waking grandeur which will not let you sleep … It is an aphrodisiac; it is a place of furious fecundity … not virginal but erupting with the unenclosable passion at the volcanic heart of life.
Boom! That’s why she gets the afternoon gigs. But at this festival, Wilderness is a brand, and wildness is its product. Wildness means self-willedness and is the state of being undirected, uncultivated, free from the template of someone else’s design. It links us with the non-human world; it connects us to the animal within. Because wildness is feral, it is sexy and therefore it sells well. But when wildness turns to commodity it is hollowed of its core meaning and becomes only its shell, a facsimile of itself. True wildness is unpredictable, and can lead people to question their position in society.
The Swing Riots of 1830 broke out across the South West only a week after the Gaelic harvesting festival of Samhain. Likewise, the Midland Revolt of 1607 began straight after the spring festivities on the commons. People met up in their hundreds and thousands, got drunk, talked, and, like an analogue Twitter, exchanged like-minded views which led to an uprising. Fifty years earlier, Kett’s Rebellion, which saw 16,000 people storm the city of Norwich in protest at enclosure of their common land, began at the annual feast of Thomas Beckett. The authorities, as ever, labelled the feast a gathering of ‘idle and disordered people’, and perhaps this was the case. But perhaps it wasn’t the inherent nature of the people themselves, but simply the autonomous act of coming together, the sharing of solidarity, that triggered the people to rise against the system that was starving them.
Free festivals, organic gatherings of people on common land, have always been a threat to the status quo. But organised, sanctioned festivals, the bread and circuses of ancient Rome, were seen as a way of allowing people to vent their frustrations in a manner contained by local authorities. An article from the London Magazine in 1738 sums up this paternalism neatly: ‘Dancing on the Green at Wakes and merry Tides should not only be indulg’d but incourag’d: and little Prizes being allotted for the Maids who excel in a Jig or a Hornpipe would make them return to their daily Labour with a light Heart and grateful Obedience to their Superiors.’
They just don’t say it like they used to. These days, such bald honesty has been smothered by a more brand-conscious commercialism, and local authorities have been replaced by global corporations. Wilderness Festival is a subsidiary of Secret Productions Ltd, who are a subsidiary of Mama Festivals who are a subsidiary of Mama and Company Ltd. Among other festivals such as Somersault, Global Gathering and God’s Kitchen, they run venues such as the Garage in Islington, the Institute in Birmingham, the Ritz in Manchester and the Arts Club in Liverpool. They are themselves a subsidiary of Live Nation Entertainment Inc. who have their central offices in Beverly Hills, and whose total assets amount to $7.5 billion. In the words of their own website, somewhere in the world, every eighteen minutes, is a Live Nation event. What we have here is not culture, but monoculture.
Wilderness is, without doubt, a slick festival experience: it’s very well run, the entertainment is second to none, there’s always bog roll in the toilets (no small thing). In itself, there is no harm in a multi-national corporation providing entertainment to people, whatever their financial income; rich people need somewhere to get high, too. But if there is no place for people to come together on their own terms, no space (conceptual or literal) for an alternative, vernacular culture, then this prism of corporate control encloses our landscape and constructs our experience of nature. Here the wild, weird hare of carnival, the totem of the commons, has been tamed into palm oil, foil-wrapped bunny rabbits, reified into product.
I meet up with a couple of friends. They’re at the festival already, legitimate with their wristbands, but they are keen for the trespass outside. So, dodging the security guards, we plot an inverse trespass, and break out of the festival, over a wall in one of the car parks. For the last hours of the afternoon, we roam free through the ancient Wychwood, dabbing at a small bag of MDMA. When sold as grey crystalline powder, the drug is called MDMA, when sold in pills, it is Ecstasy. But originally, before its commercial value was tested, it was called empathy. Invented in 1912, used extensively as a therapeutic drug to disinhibit patients, it first migrated to England from the disco scene of 1970s New York, where it went on to fuel the rave revolution of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Again, it is extremely illegal.
In an editorial he wrote for the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Professor David Nutt criticised the current designation of Ecstasy as a class A drug. He compared its dangers to those of horse-riding: while one in 350 people harm themselves through horse-riding, only one in 10,000 people experience adverse effects of Ecstasy. For bringing these plain facts into the public sphere, he was instantly dismissed from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. The orthodoxy of drug legislation will permit no alternatives to its perspective, even if they are peer-reviewed and based on clear scientific evidence.
We come again to Newell Plain. We climb a fallen tree and lounge like leopards on its boughs, staring across the plain, absolutely up to our necks in idleness. Ecstasy makes you unambiguously tactile, and I find that I’ve been stroking my friend like a cat, running my fingers through his hair, massaging his neck. It feels like Sunday morning in my flat, but it is Sunday evening in a field. This is what Octavia Hill was talking about when she wanted to turn the cemeteries and waste ground of inner-city London into ‘open-aired sitting room’ – very simply: to be at home in nature.
I can hear the muted roar of the festival through the Cornbury woods. Carried on the wind, it reaches my ears like a faint ghost of the fair on Newell Plain. My imagination fills this empty space with the anarchy of the long-gone, half-cut crowds, the place lit up by lanterns, the elephants and rhinoceroses of George Wombwell’s travelling circus. Before enclosure, this space was Thirdspace. It was a place outside the matrix of commerce and, for several days a year, it upended the hierarchy of power that governed the lives of the revellers. It was anarchy in its purest sense: the culture of this carnival was not designed in an office in Beverly Hills, but by the people who turned up to it. But all that is gone.
These days, multiculturalism takes the blame for watering down the culture of England. The persistent myth of Winterval, the story of how councils are forced to rebrand their Christmas festivities for fear of offending Muslims, is emblematic of how immigrant communities are scapegoated for diluting the culture of England. Though entirely fabricated, the myth was repeated forty-four times by the Daily Mail between 1998 and 2011, forever keen to blame systemic, inherent problems on new arrivals.
The eccentric melee of folk customs, localised fêtes and seasonal carnivals was stamped out long before multiculturalism was even a word. Lammas festival, Oak Apple Day, Jack in the Green, Hocktide, Imbolc, Bealtaine, Lughnasadh and Samhain, any number of forgotten festivals were cut from the culture when the people were excluded from the land.
Hundreds of years of private property laws have morphed into a strict orthodoxy in English society, an unquestioned consensus as to what can and can’t happen in the countryside. If it’s not a walk along a Right of Way, or a picnic in a designated area, if you haven’t paid for it then you’re almost certainly not allowed to do it. This has led to a peculiar and hugely distorted vision of the English countryside: its brand. Watch TV, read the papers, walk into a camping shop and you’d think the countryside is custom-built for enthusiastic middle-class white people in Thinsulate hats and sensible walking shoes. This is the land as it is sold to us, because, today, even leisure is an industry.
But when ‘Rooster’ Byron, the hero of Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem, asks ‘what the fuck do you think an English forest is for’, he’s not talking about a nice walk with a thermos of mint tea. He’s referring to a much deeper, historic use of the countryside, one that predates the cult of exclusion. He’s talking about the wild sabbats on the open plains, the world outside the heedful eye of the patriarchs, an alternative, vernacular lifestyle that operates beyond the matrix of commerce. He’s talking about a place where wildness doesn’t come with a price tag, where freedom is free.
In the tragedy of ‘Rooster’ Byron, it is not the gods who govern his fate, but the bureaucrats at Kennet and Avon Council. The entire play takes place on a small clearing of land in front of his caravan; outside the village, it is also outside its conventions. Byron uses his little circle of land just as Shakespeare uses the Forest of Arden in As You Like It. It is a place of fairies and giants, of magical thinking, where characters can slip off their usual roles and metamorphose into something new. It is a place where myth and folk culture, the stories of the commons, permeate the real world. There is a drum somewhere in the clearing that Byron says was a gift from a pylon-sized giant who claimed to have built Stonehenge. But Byron has no rights to the land, and thus has no rights to his activities on it, so along come the Kennet and Avon Council to evict him.
In the real world, the final nail in the coffin for freedom in the countryside was the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. Like the Tudor and Georgian Vagrancy Acts, it targeted specific types of people, grouped them together and defined them as a threat to the state. It outlawed alternative lifestyles and ideologies, by removing people’s rights to express them in real space. Its trigger was the largest rave in English history, on Castlemorton Common, but its roots stretched into the early 1980s, to Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to obliterate what she called the ‘permissive society’, to a long-established battleground in the fight for space: Stonehenge.
In the early 1900s Stonehenge ‘belonged’ to Edmund Antrobus, because he owned the land it sat on. He had objected several times to the mass initiation ceremonies conducted there by the Ancient Order of the Druids (which was in fact not very ancient, and set up only a century or so before). When he began charging the druids for entry to his land, they objected, and brought a case in which they claimed they could not be charged for admission into their own temple. They won. They didn’t own Stonehenge, but it was theirs to use. When Sir Edmund and his heirs died in the First World War, the land was put up for auction and bought by Cecil Chubb, who then gifted it to the nation (in exchange for a knighthood). In the deeds of the gift was Sir Cecil’s express directive that there must be ‘free access for all’.
In the 1920s, 20,000 visitors came to experience the stones. In the fifties it was 124,000 and, by the 1980s, 800,000 tourists were visiting the stones each year. The fence went up in spring 1978. By the time Ecstasy hit the shores of England, a large society of travelling hippies, called the Peace Convoy, were settling at Stonehenge for solstice celebrations, free festivals of mysticism, drugs and rave. But this was the wrong use of the countryside, by the wrong type of people.
The National Trust and English Heritage, who by this point co-owned the site, obtained an injunction for eighty-three named people, banning them by law of trespass. But on 1 June 1985, a group of 600 hippies and New Age travellers were driving along the A303 to set up another festival at the stones. They were met seven miles away from the site by 1,300 police officers and a roadblock made out of three trucks’ worth of dumped gravel. The police, in full riot gear, shields and batons, went up and down the stalled convoy, smashing windows, arresting the drivers. Their primary objective was to find the ringleaders of the festival, whose names were displayed on the Peace Convoy’s posters and marketing material: ‘Boris and Doris proudly present …’ But in spite of checking each and every person in the convoy, they couldn’t find them, because Boris and Doris were geese.
Trapped in their line of convoy, under attack from the state, the hippies tore down the fences on one side of the road and escaped into an arable field, followed by lines of police vans, who could now do them for criminal damage and breach of the peace. So began the Battle of the Beanfield.
Eight policemen and sixteen travellers were hospitalised. There is footage, filmed by an ITV camera crew, but not shown at the time, that is dizzying to watch. Brightly coloured buses and lorries doughnut around the field, as armies of helmeted officers run in squadrons, bashing their sticks through the windscreens, showering the families inside with glass, before hauling the drivers out through the jagged windows. Shields are used to flatten prostrate hippies; truncheons are jabbed into their stomachs. The whole melee was an act of state-sanctioned hooliganism, the wanton destruction not just of motor vehicles, but of homes, which to the Peace Convoy were one and the same thing. Eventually 537 travellers were arrested, one of the largest mass arrests in English legal history, and Operation Solstice was deemed a success: Stonehenge remained empty. The Daily Mail ran with the headline ‘A New Generation of Vagabonds’, that same, tired projection, as old as the Thurston Oak in Suffolk.
The sociologist Howard S. Becker wrote about moral deviance in such a way that the word can easily be swapped for trespass: ‘social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an offender.’ The hippies and their alternative, unsanctioned use of the land, had been turned into moral vagrants. By pouring three trucks’ worth of gravel onto the A303, the police had turned a temple into an exclusion zone, drawn an ideological line in real space that excluded an alternative way of life. They weren’t responding to a crime, they were creating one.
Twice a year the hippies are now allowed to gather at Stonehenge, to watch the sun rise on the solstice. But Cecil Chubb’s demand for free access remains unacknowledged. Today, £20 will buy you a seat on a bus that will shuttle you to a fence set ten yards from the stones. However, if, like the festival-goers at Wilderness, you can afford a little more, you can book months in advance and pay £140 for an exclusive Special Access Tour, which will take you inside the fence. It has never been clear why ‘Rooster’ Byron’s giant built Stonehenge, but the new designation of place, for tourism and not worship, is indicative of how space is now sanctified across the land: it is a commodity. By restricting access to land, and then charging for entry, whether it be Stonehenge or Cornbury Park, sectors of society unable to afford the cost have become marginalised and cut off from experience. Experience must be sold to grant it a licence. This is the leisure industry, because leisure shares its roots with the word licence, from the Latin licere: to be allowed.
We have cut through the woods and arrived at the highest point of the estate, the peak of a hill of long swaying grass, on the perimeter of the Wychwood. The festival is laid out in a bowl beneath us and we can hear the hubbub of the crowds and the heavy thump of the music. We find a large flattening in the grass, the long stems bent to the ground to form a living straw mat, like the scrape of earth that a hare sleeps in, its ‘form’. The stars come out quickly, the satellites glide through space and the planes soar silently, scoring lines of vapour across a violet canvas. Then someone turns the lasers on.
The verb ‘to rave’ is from the French rêver: ‘to dream, to wander, to behave madly’, an etymology that, just like trespass, implies some sort of given line. In the eighteenth century, raving led you to incarceration in the workhouse; these days it leads to expulsion from the land. Illegal raves are still held throughout the country, in deserted quarries, old industrial sites, the holy Brecon Beacons, because no law of trespass will ever quench the human need to dream, or behave madly. But the power of the police to close down raves has little to do with morality, noise pollution or community disruption; it is decided by property alone.
A few years ago, the 3rd Baron Margadale, the current owner of William Beckford’s Fonthill estate, threw a twenty-first-birthday bash for his daughter. The sound system went on until 8.30 in the morning and could be heard for miles around. After local residents complained about the noise, the Warminster police turned up on site and then wrote on Twitter: ‘Complaint of loud music in Tisbury … area checked, private party on private land. No criminal offences.’
Property decides what is proper. It decides what land is for and who land is for. If you can’t afford to pay for access to city clubs or country festivals, or if you don’t own property spacious enough to create your own community gathering, if no landlord will give you their permission, there is simply nowhere for you to commune. As long as what happens on the land is governed by a select few there will never be a society that reflects the values of its constituents, there will never be an England that reflects the values of anything but a tiny minority of its citizens. If we are truly to discover what we have in common, we must be allowed to gather on common ground.
Both my friends are gently snoring. Octavia Hill’s outdoor living room has become our open-aired bedroom. Fizzing with Ecstasy, warm and snug in our form, I don’t want to shut my eyes, or lose consciousness. The sky before me is a paradox of time laid out in space. To my left, the crescent moon shines in pitch darkness, to my right, the rising sun shines in a blaze of blue; small clusters of birds fly from night into morning. The lasers are still slicing the sky, but the festival ground is empty. There is a low thrum of noise, which I take to be the sound of some giant generator still feeding the place with electricity. But it isn’t. It’s the sound of heavy, thumping techno sunk in a tight gorge of the valley, where the last dancers are still raving to the beat of a drum.
We need space for the mind to rave, to wander and to dream. Access to land is access to experience and access to nature is access to our own wild, spiritual mind. And while the current logic of property forbids our experience of land unless it is sold, we are expected to buy weekend tickets to access our own wild creativity. Twenty miles due south of us, 130 years behind us, William Morris is still sitting beneath that elm tree in Uffington. His words apply as much to our minds as to our land: ‘The beauty of the landscape will be exploited and artificialised for the sake of the villa-dwellers’ purses where it is striking enough to touch their jaded appetites; but in quiet places like this it will vanish year by year (as indeed it is now doing) under the attacks of the most grovelling commercialism.’