There’s little as romantic or historic in British landscape than a stone circle. Standing since Neolithic times, both a physical and gestural conversation between society, land, and proto-architecture, they act as a poetic shorthand for a mysterious past that at once seems distant yet also very present.

Physically, they are remarkably simple and immediately legible as forms – a circular arrangement of standing stones, situated both in landscape and in relation to celestial movement, with many circles aligned to the sun on solstice mornings. The most celebrated and recognisable – such as Avebury or Stonehenge (see 00017) are now iconic shorthand for British history, but there are thought to be around 1300 other stone circles in Britain and Ireland, not all as famous and ancient – the newest appearing only in the last few weeks!



Leagrave is a suburb of Luton, Bedfordshire, once a small village sited on the river Lea until it got subsumed into the wider, growing town in the 1920s, though the first settlement in the area goes back to around 3000BC. Along the side of the river is Waulud’s Bank, a D-shaped embankment enclosing the source of the river covering 7 hectares, a structure that might have been used as an enclosure for cattle herding, may have had a spiritual or mystical importance, acted as a space for market exchange, or perhaps was simply one of the earliest known examples of largescale land art.

Today, there’s not a lot to see, having been flattened by centuries of agricultural use and excavated for gravel. It is, however, culturally fascinating, and was the impulse behind artist Matthew Rosier to choose the site for the country’s newest stone circle. Luton Henge is a permanent artwork, designed for and with the local community, that sits in its site as if it’s been present as long as the 1300 others scattered across the islands. It emerged from an open call for Nature Calling, a national arts project organised between the National Landscape Association and Activate Performing Arts, who commissioned six art projects and six writers to work across the UK’s National Landscapes – the 46 areas of the country formally designated as Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Other installations – involving creatives including digital artist David Blandy, musician Gwyneth Herbert, and artist and writer Rob St. John – are temporary or ephemeral, covering pop-up installations, events, and podcasts. Matthew Rosier’s henge is not just the only permanent project on the list, he hopes it will become very permanent – “it’s basically to confuse future archaeologists”, the artist jokes.



Rosier’s circle appears modest, but is meaningful. Formed of eight chunks of clunch, a chalky limestone rock historically used as a building material, the pieces were selected by the artist from nearby Totternhoe quarry, now largely closed but offering great conditions for a Wildlife Trust nature reserve, then carved down to the forms that encircle a mound today.

The site selected by Rosier for the rocks is also important, not only for its proximity to Waulud’s Bank. The rubble-filled topology of the site had been used by BMX bikers for a couple of decades, though the area had become overgrown and a little forgotten about by much of the local community. Rosier chose the site because it wasn’t one of the National Landscapes’ most glamourous or photogenic locations, but was a real plece with history and community, and was where the artists saw art could make an impact – not as a shiny bauble on a pedestal, but as a device to focus energies, engage local residents, and create a moment of curiosity in the public realm: “The idea was to treat it like a ready-made earthwork, as a response to the rubble piles already here and Waulud’s Bank – just to put our stone circle in a carved-out section in the middle as a gathering space – but to keep the BMX track functioning.”




This sense of gathering is important. The site is adjacent to Marsh House, a community space managed by Marsh Farm Outreach, initiated by former members of the legendary rave organisers Exodus Collective – named after the song by Bob Marley, a mural of whom covers one wall of the community centre. Over the 1990s, Exodus Collective were not only involved in organising some of the largest free raves, including a 1992 New Years Day event with over 10,000 attendees, they were also deeply interested in social organising, co-operative housing, environmental issues, and activism against authoritarianism.

Those formative energies are present in the organising and events that take place in and around Marsh House, and Rosier was keen that his work emerged from working with them rather as a public art project helicoptered in from outside. It was through workshops and conversations with this engaged community – Rosier realised his initially grand ambitions could be scaled down.

“I’d been over-designing it,” Rosier – who studied architecture at Oxford Brookes and UCL Bartlett before migrating into artmaking – said. “There was an interesting part of the public consultation, at an event people debated ‘what does a Luton henge look like?’ And what I got from it was that there wasn’t actually that much interest in what it looks like, its aesthetic, but people were more interested in ‘what is it for? How is it accessed? How is it used?’ Which I found very liberating in the end.”

It meant that Rosier, supported by producer Lucy Wood, could scale back grander ambitions and allow the simplicity of the stone circle as a gathering space and locality to be richer. “What was really important was the cultures and mixing that happens here – there is anecdotally not necessarily much mixing between certain communities – so I think the bigger aim here is how to create a space that feels truly accessible to different people. It doesn't feel overly one thing, religion, or culture.”




The community were also involved in the making of the site. Not only in discussions around the design and future, but helping with the huge amounts of labour involved to clear the site and then rake and hammer 10 tonnes of Totternhoe gravel to create the paths and central gathering space – “I’ve never done so much raking!” said Rosier, who created the work with the support of over 1,500 volunteer hours. Several wooden benches surround the stone circle, created with donated local timber then built over a week by community participants and Common Practice, a small Dorset-based architecture studio who focus on collaborative and low-carbon design.

A stone circle is a perfect device for such nuanced interpretation. There is so much about them still unknown, from the rituals or functions that they enabled to their methods of construction, and as such are perfect canvases for us to inject with our own meaning, concerns, and modes of congregation. The areas of Luton it sits at the centre of has large South Asian and Afro Caribbean communities as well we White British, and a stone circle is universal, abstract, and historic enough to be able to carry different meanings and interpretations. “One of the producers at Revoluton Arts, a cultural organisation based here, was saying an elderly Pakistani man visited and said that they reminded him of home, because in Pakistan there are white mountains in the Kashmiri regions.”




Revoluton Arts have now taken over the site to manage the growth of wildflowers across the mounds as well as organise ongoing public projects and events. The site symbolically passed over from the artist to the community organisations with a diverse day-long festival including a clay workshop, drumming, poetry, soul music, and even a bird rave.

All that is left to happen now is for the stone circle to age into its site, both naturally and culturally. The rubble mound and added stones offer perfect conditions for wildflowers and a management plan will be overseen by the local community. Grass will regrow over where the works have taken place, the central circle will begin to become occupied by organised and informal events, gatherings, and parties, while BMXers will continue to circumnavigate the whole thing along their paths.

“We have no idea what happened in spaces like this, so that means people can do anything, and I think that's what's exciting.” Rosier wants to revisit the circle over coming months and years, but it’s now not his work, it belongs to the people of Leagrave, and says that “for me the artwork is seeing what happens here now it’s essentially a public space.” Humans have always had the impulse to gather, whether for solstices or raves, in venues or on public land, and Luton Henge is now a space where it can happen, for perhaps thousands of years to come.