This is one of a series of short, staple bound books published by Café Royal Books. Café Royal Books is the publishing project of artist and scholar Craig Atkinsion, dedicated to the creation of a “focussed and complete archive of British documentary photography.” Café Royal books are generally printed in black and white in relatively small editions, and focus on works by photographers of any nationality made in the British Isles, as well as works by British photographers made abroad.
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.”