Image Credit: Alan Lodge, courtesy of Bonington Gallery
A new exhibition opening in Nottingham this autumn will trace half a century of British counterculture through the work of a single photographer embedded in the scene he documented. Bonington Gallery will present Common Grounds: Counterculture & Confrontation Since 1976, the first major survey of photographer Alan Lodge, known as Tash, running from September 25 to December 12.
The show brings together more than 100 photographs alongside moving images, personal archives, projections and previously unseen material, including correspondence Lodge exchanged with police and officials over the years. Gallery organisers frame the exhibition around themes of collective identity, civil liberty, dissent, and the tension between public space and state authority, threads that run through Lodge’s documentation of protest movements and grassroots activism as much as his rave and free party imagery. 
Among the standout images are photographs from some of the most pivotal moments in UK free party history: the 1992 Castlemorton gathering, the 1985 Battle of the Beanfield, and the 1982 Summer Solstice Free Festival at Stonehenge. Lodge’s connection to the scene deepened after he relocated to Nottingham in 1990 and became embedded with the city’s DiY sound system collective, documenting free parties across the UK from firmly inside the movement rather than as an outside observer.
Lodge’s archive has drawn renewed attention in recent years, featuring in Aaron Trinder’s 2025 documentary Free Party: A Folk History and in a prior interview marking the 30th anniversary of Castlemorton. Common Grounds now positions his decades of work as a definitive visual record of a movement that shaped British electronic music culture from the ground up.
