Concrete Circles
The M25 And The Emergence Of A New Folkloric Landscape.
Jamie Brett | January 2022
For many, the thought of driving along an endless motorway isn’t an emotive one, yet when we delve further into folkloric interpretations of this major monolith we hear evocative stories of illicit parties, secret underpasses, roadside weddings, sacred wells, and even demonic associations.
The M25 is a vast orbital construction snaking through the mostly suburban edgelands and rural fields of the home counties of Kent, Bucks, Hertfordshire, Essex, and Surrey, making it the largest ring road in Europe. It was built to relieve gridlocked high-density traffic both in the capital and the towns, villages and arterial roads that fed it. Due to lower production costs of the common car and a rising middle-class, for the first time the car became a viable option for many during the 1970s and 1980s. The British public weren’t quite ready for the mass urbanisation of their road networks and therefore motorways remained alien, if not feared by many. Not unlike other motorways before it, and despite costing over £1 billion in 1986, the system was plagued with a lingering PR disaster after its launch. Suffering from a lack of public understanding both on what it was for, and how to use it properly, the M25 was essentially deserted for many months after its construction, and as a result became a playground for those in search of mischief, reverie or simply the curious.
The M25 almost appears as a two-dimensional portal through the countryside, at odds with the luscious surroundings it cuts through. Naturalist Helen Macdonald comments ‘At first sight a motorway is a soulless corridor devoid of all-natural life, a conduit built for us to hurtle along with all obstacles eliminated” (The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway, 2021).
By 1988, the M25 was fully ingrained within the British psyche, yet the number of road users remained relatively low by today’s standards. Cutting journey times and opening access from all across the UK into inner-London and back out again, this liminal boundary space took traffic away from polluted suburban streets into vast rural expanses, with underground footpaths and wildlife bridges scattered along its circular route to appease the movement of people and animals in its wake. Despite the road’s rather banal, yet functionally successful impact on the standard of urban life in Britain, never has a civic structure been so rich in soul and allegory.
By the end of the 1980s, the Conservative government had incited a major crackdown on so called ‘Acid Parties’ particularly in response to a major front page newspaper headline in The Sun newspaper inciting moral panic across the nation. The words ‘SPACED OUT! 11,000 youngsters go drug crazy at Britain’s biggest-ever Acid party’ hit the headlines on 24 June 1989, igniting a government backed crackdown on unlicensed parties taking place across Britain in empty warehouses, underneath motorway bridges and in abandoned pub basements. This party pictured, now known to be the Midsummer Nights Dream Rave, was famously accessed by M25 Junction 14 by thousands of southbound revellers.
Often dubbed ‘The Second Summer of Love’, during 1988 and 1989 a heady cocktail of radical electronic dance music combined with a newly re-synthesised, highly available, and intensely empathogenic party drug (Ecstasy aka Methylenedioxymethamphetamine), sweeping a humdrum post-industrial Britain. House music was first developed in the early to mid 1980s within the underground black, gay warehouse (hence ‘house’ music) parties of post-industrial USA under parallel circumstances. Marginalised from mainstream society, these young men would escape to Detroit’s liminal spaces, replacing the industrial clanging of the old steel city with the pounding kick-drum of house music. Later the sound was imported to the UK via a party called ‘Hot!’ in Ibiza, where Manchester DJ’s Jon DaSilva and Mike Pickering heard this new sound for the first time, bringing it to the famous Hacienda nightclub on a low-rent Tuesday night, in turn sparking a worldwide phenomenon and subculture via folkloric transmission of sounds and esoteric ideas about music and alternative lifestyles.
By the time ‘acid parties’ or ‘raves’ had reached parliament and in turn, the police, young people were on the hunt for empty warehouses and post-industrial liminal spaces to experience transcendental joy worlds away from a bleak existence of poll tax riots and miners strikes. Often partying in the factories their forefathers worked in, young people purposefully immersed themselves within self-generated walls of sound made by speaker stacks instead of machines. Travel became a major part of getting from one rave to the next, and the M25 was a key facilitator in the arterial network that connected these secret, underground parties to one another.
Squelching acid-house, thumping techno, and crashing breakbeats filled the pastoral fields of the home counties, and the car became the essential mode of transport. Hill (2003) describes this new nomadic way of living, which fused with the new-age traveller community as a major anxiety for Thatcher in complete antithesis to the home-ownership, family-centric policies at the time; describing ‘mobility as destruction’ and perpetual, orbital travel as a rejection of the idea of settlement, capitalism, paying taxes and perhaps humdrum suburban living. ‘The parties threatened the sanctity of this space as a symbolic home for values that were fundamental to Thatcherism, and many were taking place in the ‘heartland’ constituencies of Conservative members of Parliament.’ (Hill, 2003). Renowned rave writer Sam Williams comments on the unlocking effect of the M25 in a BBC documentary found orphaned in an obscure corner of YouTube ‘This one road allowed us to party on a grand scale like we had never known before. Just a couple of years after the road opened a rave scene had developed in London, which was quickly made illegal. To avoid the long arm of the law, party animals descended on the M25’ (Thomas, 2011).
Within my own work at the Museum of Youth Culture, I’ve heard many rich stories about the M25 and its highly coveted, mythical role in rave culture and the transport of people, culture, music and style. One key figure in the Museum’s archives is Tony Davis, a Nottingham based rave and dance music scene photographer who, whilst remaining a participant during the height of rave culture, was commissioned by i-D magazine to document the motorway service stations for a feature on their unwitting involvement as party hotspots discusses the impact of these newly build British motorways. Tony remarks ‘It’s strange really how you get a sense of the club or the rave through a group of people in a service station. In a way it was a lucky periphery of the time.’ (Davis, 2021). Periphery is key here, as it appears partygoers weren’t intentionally going out to party in a service station, yet sometimes it would remain the destination as they drive around, looping the motorway in search of lights, lasers, or loud music to follow. The M25 acted as a secret party portal, with ravers travelling junction to junction, looping miles of concrete and asphalt waiting for any sign of reverie, whether it be in Surrey, Kent, Essex or Hertfordshire – the rave train failed to discriminate. Tony concludes ‘Every time I post the car picture people always comment on it saying, “that sums up raving in one picture”. It doesn't really, it’s just some people in a car, but it does in another way. There's no DJ’s there, no lasers, there's no field, there's no club, none of that. It’s just three guys in a car, the driver completely off his head.’ (Davis, 2021).
This is an abridged version of a full essay written by Jamie Brett for MA Folklore Studies at University of Hertfordshire & Museum of Youth Culture.
