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)