The gig that rocked Britain’s consciousness

Today it is home to joggers, mothers with prams and bored teenagers. Thirty years ago next month, this scruffy corner of an east London park hosted the Woodstock of the punk generation.

On April 30, 1978, more than 80,000 people marched from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park for what was later described by the veteran anti-fascist campaigner Gerry Gable as "one of the most important cultural events of the postwar period".

It started with an angry letter to a newspaper after Eric Clapton, in a drunken diatribe on stage at a 1976 Birmingham concert, publicly backed Enoch Powell's stance on immigration.

The photographer Red Saunders and graphic designer Roger Huddle penned a searing reply denouncing the rock star. "Half your music is black. Where would you be without

the blues and R'n'B?" they wrote in the New Musical Express. "We want to organise a rank-and-file movement against the racist poison in music. We urge support for Rock Against Racism."

Their call chimed perfectly with the crisis atmosphere of the time. The extreme-right National Front had driven the Liberals into fourth place in the Greater London Council elections. In east London, Asians were being repeatedly subjected to vicious assaults. On the streets, the newly formed Anti-Nazi League had begun confronting the NF, culminating in the so-called Battle of Lewisham in August 1977.

In clubs, colleges and concert venues, Rock Against Racism (RAR) started to tap into the anti-authoritarianism of punk to woo disenchanted white youths away from the far right.

"It was an emergency,"