We were student film-makers at the London College of Printing, where we learnt about the police trashing at the Beanfield in 1985, and subsequent trial at Winchester Crown Court in 1990/91, where 24 people sued Wiltshire police for damages. We were only meant to spend two weeks on our documentary assignment, but this turned into several months.

Everyone we would have hoped to have interviewed appeared at that trial, such as the Earl of Cardigan, or the ITN journalist Kim Sabido. Every piece of video and photographic evidence we might need, the official police report, and their radio log.

Everything would go into our final documentary ‘Operation Solstice’, broadcast by Channel 4 in November 1991, despite the police’s best efforts to get it pulled.  After we had had to condense 20 plus hours of material down to a meagre 26-minute slot. 

So, we ended up with this sizeable archive, mostly unseen, on an array of now defunct video formats.  Each potentially threatened by dust, heat and moisture. And it had lain for 33 summers and winters in a mum’s loft.  Until now.  

We had learnt that Dale Vince, the CEO of Ecotricity, social commentator, and one-time backer of Just Stop Oil, was on the Beanfield.  He had been a motorcycle outrider on the trip down to Stonehenge, passing messages up and down the line, discovering the police’s sneaky roadblock trap up ahead, getting a mention in the police radio log, ‘we have a motorcycle outrider now approaching, if he gets anywhere near our ground unit they suggest they may attempt to take him out’.

We asked him to help fund the saving of this archive, which he did, and he also agreed to do an interview.

So, we have spent the past four months going through and editing the interviews, conducted just five or six years after the Beanfield, so some very fresh recollections.  Bringing out the best of each story, really getting under the skin of what happened and why and placing it all on the Counter Culture channel on Youtube and this website for the 40th anniversary.

Also, with access to all the rushes again, re-editing ‘Operation Solstice’ so that it explains and contains a lot more, and with Dale Vince’s contribution, brings us up to date.