Marsh House Luton - from punk to Henge

Luton Henge Festival last month (29 July 2025) marked the opening of  Luton Henge, a landscaped space featuring a circle of eight chalk stones that will serve as an outdoor venue for social and cultural events. The festival included music and dance, with Laura Misch playing her saxophone in the sunset. While I was there Bird Rave were doing their thing, dancing in feathered headdresses to classic rave tunes like  'Voodoo Ray' in bird inspired moves that they call 'dancefloor ornithology'. Anyway it was great fun.

Capoeira display

The location by Marsh House at the Leagrave end of town is significant, located as it is near to the source of the River Lea and the ancient earthwork of Waulud's Bank. It is also a place linked to Luton's subcultural history. The green barn just about still stands where Crass, Poison Girls and Luton punk band UK Decay played in 1979, and where people also put on jazz funk dances in that period (as recalled by Fahim  Qureshi, see below).

I missed Crass, but it was here around the same time that I saw my first punk gig. From 1977 to at least 1984 there was an annual late summer one day Marsh House Festival. 16 year old me cycled over in 1979 and saw UK Decay and Pneu Mania, as well as 'Stevie's band', a scratch band made up of members of both bands who did a version of YMCA. Also on the bill were local rock band Toad the Wet Sprocket, Arcadaz (jazz/funk band), and acoustic singers Clive Pig and Heinrich Steiner.

'About 1500 people were entertained at the peak of the six hour concert which featured six local bands, solo singers and the White Dwarf Disco' all 'on a stage provided by Vauxhall Motors' (Luton News, 30 August 1979)

'yes, finally in the whole of desolate/boring Luton, people have finally done something positive'. 

A review of the 1979 Marsh House UK Decay/Pneu Mania gig from Stevenage based fanzine 'Cobalt Hate' no.1)

I know I was there in 1983 with The Pits, Click Click (post punk electronica) and Passchendale, kind of Houghton Regis Killing Joke. In the following year my friends Luton anarcho-punk band Karma Sutra played along with their St Albans counterpart Black Mass, Harlow punk leftists the Newtown Neurotics, Snatch and Nick the Poet.  It poured with rain towards the end and loads of us got up on the stage for shelter and joined in singing with Attila the Stockbroker.

1984 Marsh House Festival flyer

Marsh House was originally a farm house for Marsh Farm - the land on which the Marsh Farm council estate was built in the 1960s. In the 1990s, Luton free party collective Exodus started off on this estate and Glenn Jenkins and other people who had been involved in Exodus helped save Marsh House after it was boarded up and threatened with demolition in the 2000s. It now acts as a hub for various community projects, including a music studio.

For me, Marsh House was primarily a place where I went to summer holiday open access playschemes as a kid, charging around the ramshackle adventure playground (getting temporarily banned for stone throwing), bouncing on inflatables and playing softball by the river.  I now know that some of the people who ran those playschemes were part of the local radical/alternative art scene some of whom had previously been involved with Luton Arts Lab and Reflex collective and went on to found the 33 arts centre which gave me a later education in experimental film and theatre-  but that's another story.

Marsh House today

Revoluton Arts  who put on the Henge festival and are based at Marsh House are a descendent of these multi-faceted efforts to make things happen in my home town. They have done some interviews with people involved in some of these past projects, interesting to hear Fahim Qureshi (who I remember from the anti-racist movement of that time), Glenn Jenkins and Linda ‘Muddie’ Farrell (who worked on playschemes and helped set up 33) talk about the River Lea and its wildlife. Guess I followed that river down to London but never stop Luton.

Bird Rave

As for the stone circle, I used to be cynical about contemporary efforts to recreate ancient looking monuments but I have seen the Brockley stone circle on Hilly Fields near where I live now become a focus in the south london park where it dates back only to 2000. At the end of the day the combination of stone, sky and people is as real today as it ever was. Build it they will come. 

More Luton stuff:

How it all began (for me): a School Kid against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80

Luton Nuclear Disarmament Campaign go to Greenham Common 1980

The Luton Riots of 1981 - 'Brixton comes to Bedfordshire'

The Hunger Strike, the Irish War and an English Town

Partisan Books: a Luton 1970s radical bookshop

Crass, Poison Girls, UK Decay in Luton, 1979

Karma Sutra, Luton anarcho-punk and hunt sabbing

Clubbing in Luton 1984-6

Dole Days in Luton: unemployed protests, 1985

Luton Punk Squat Party 1985 - with Karma Sutra

We are Luton - opposing the English Defence League in 2012

'Angry White People' book review (in Datacide magazine)

Out to the Dancers - Emma Warren and Femi Koleoso

I really enjoyed 'Out to the Dancers', a conversation between  Emma Warren and Ezra Collective’s Femi Koleoso at the South Bank Centre's Purcell Room, centred around what dancing means to them in different ways (8 August 2025).

A key theme was around inclusivity - who gets to dance, how and where? In answer to the opening question, 'What makes a great time on the dance floor?', Femi expanded on Emma's ingredients of space and sound by adding inclusivity - 'I think dancing is like almost a human expression of feeling welcomed. And it's very difficult to dance, if you don't feel welcome somewhere....  I think if you can make people feel included, they dance'.

As a young black man growing up in London Femi has of course had a particular experience of what welcome means. As he recalled, planning for a night out was always accompanied by the nagging worry of whether he and all his friends would actually get in.  There was an interesting discussion about doors, Emma talking of the excitement of the bass rattling of the door as you approach it, 'the door as a kind of holder of the sound' promising how you will soon be feeling the music inside. Femi said that he hated that very moment, carrying with it the threat of rejection at the final hurdle after all the queuing. No wonder he said he preferred dancing outside with one less door to negotiate.

Interesting to see how this perspective plays out in Ezra Collective's approach to performance - 'the party starts on stage and everyone's invited' with a conscious effort to make people in the audience feel included, something I really felt when I saw them.

The talk was part of the South Bank's summer programme 'Dance your way home', inspired by Emma's book of the same name and featuring a month of dance-themed events. In fact while the talk was going on hundreds of people were dancing on the riverside terrace outside to Deptford Northern Soul Club.

'Out to the Southbank dancers' - Emma Warren's mini-zine for the events

Looking forward to reading Emma's new book on youth clubs, out soon.

(thank to Jools for photo of Emma and Femi)

Jordan photos at Colony Room Green

 

Jordan Uncovered is a small exhibition of personal photos of first wave punk icon Jordan (Pamela Rooke, 1955-2022), put together by Andrew James and Darren Coffield. Working at Sex in the Kings Road, starring in Derek Jarman's Jubilee, and managing Adam and the Ants, Jordan was one of the people who in effect created the punk look, at least in its 1970s London incarnation. Sometimes its not the people in the bands who are the most influential in defining a subcultural aesthetic, it's also the faces in the scene and that was certainly the case with Jordan.  Later in life she returned to her love of animals and became a veterinary nurse on the south coast.

Jordan and Jarman

The exhibition is at Colony Room Green in Heddon Street, Mayfair, a basement bar reviving the original Colony Room Club which closed in 2008.  There's lots of memorabilia from the famous Soho Bohemian drinking den, with some drinks still on sale at 2008 prices. A friendly place for a drink in this part of town.

Exhibition closes 22 August 2025

Palestine solidarity pots and pan protests

Lewisham protest, 1 August 2025

In the past few weeks many 'Stop Starving Gaza' pots and pans protests called by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign have been held around the UK:

'Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are starving to death due to Israel’s blockade – a blockade designed specifically to use starvation as a weapon of war and of genocide. We’ve all seen the haunting images of Palestinian adults and children reduced to skeletons, the exhausted people holding empty pots and pans waiting for any small amount of food aid available, and cruelly, often meeting their deaths this way. Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been shot to death by Israeli soldiers whilst queuing for food' (PSC)

I took part in one in Lewisham, South London where a 200+ people turned out and banged pans in solidarity with Gaza. On the same day (1 August 2025), Georgina Cook took part in a similar event in Hastings, and at her substack she has reflected on this kind of public gathering:

'It sounds the alarm. Turn’s pots and pans, the very tools that should prepare nourishment, into instruments of protest against weaponised hunger. It alerts our neighbours and community that plenty of people oppose this weaponisation of hunger, as they do the wider genocide that it's part of, despite the involvement and/or complicity of our governments and media [...]

'The simple act of showing up with a saucepan might not stop a genocide, but it reminds us that we're not as alone or as powerless as so many of us feel. It creates a moment where the silence around atrocity gets punctured by the clatter of kitchen utensils'

As Georgina mentions, historian Matthew Kerry has written of the radical history of this practice which in its modern form he traces back to 1970s Chile:

'Pots and pans are some of the least offensive objects in the kitchen, yet their very mundanity and the ease with which they can be employed by anyone to contribute to a deafening wall of noise make them a media-friendly, uncomfortable reminder of the collective conscience and a challenge to the voice of the state. Pot-banging is malleable to different political contexts, from dictatorships to democracies, as well as spatial performances, including refuge or confinement in the home [...]  Despite attempts to quash noisy protests, the history of pot-banging and its radical mundanity suggests the clanging discordant beat of pots and pans will echo on. (Radical Objects: the Pot and Pan, History Workshop, 2024)

Banging pots has also been a feature of protests in Myanmar against the military government that took power in a coup in 2021 where punks formed a collective named Cacerolazo after the Spanish name for this kind of protest (the name derived from Spanish word for “casserole”).  As a form of protest it is particularly associated with women in  Latin America and women. A 2002 manifesto of the Housewives Union in Argentina (Sindicato de Amas de Casa de Santa Fe) argued at a time of economic crisis and austerity:

'Although women have always been involved in the popular struggle, from the Indigenous and slave rebellions at the time of the Conquest, to the movement of the mothers during the dictatorship, to today's "cacerolazo," we have not been listened to and our demands have been postponed in the name of "more urgent"  needs. Other women in Latin America and in the world are banging their pots not only in support of the Argentinian people but on their own behalf, because beyond national realities, we women have needs and demands which bring us together as sisters'. 

Commenting on this manifesto, Krista Lynes remarks 'The cacerolazo is thus a special drumbeat—a beat that announces through the mundane materiality of kitchen tools the publicity of the private in the face of the privatization of the public sphere' (quoted in Feminist Manifestos: a Global Documentary Reader, edited by Penny A. Weiss, 2018).  In the case of Palestine today today though we have to raise noise against something more - the extinction of both the private and the public sphere through starvation, slaughter and destruction.

(photos from Stop Starving Gaza protest at Lewisham Clock Tower, 1 August 2025)

'Youths fight police kill-joys' (1977) - cops at Bob Marley and Delroy Wilson gigs

'25 police were militarily positioned outside the Rainbow theatre in Finsbury Park, North London, last week. Squads of police were also placed nearby – at the tube station, near bus stops and down side roads. The 60 to 100 youths standing outside the Rainbow were not an unusual sight for the night of a performance. What was different was their colour. For these were black youths – waiting for their friends or thinking of ways to get in to see the evening's performer, Bob Marley. And they were targets of the increasingly common police harassment and intimidation at black social gatherings.

In response to such racist intrusion and killjoy tactics of the police, black youths have taken up the challenge. In Handsworth, Birmingham, several people were injured following a sell out appearance of sugar Delroy Wilson at the Rebecca club. 900 fans were turned away, but many remained at the club in the hope they might be allowed in. The police were called and a battle began. At least 14 police officers were reported injured following the battle' (Socialist Challenge - International Marxist Group, 9 June 1977)