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," says Saunders. "People were being attacked and murdered. Out of that came a youth campaign that harnessed the energy of new sounds like punk and reggae. It was part of an enormous change in society that is still going on - multiculturalism from the roots up."

RAR staged hundreds of concerts around the country, before announcing plans for its most audacious event to date - a carnival in the heart of the National Front's east London stronghold.

The organisers had optimistically hoped to attract 20,000 people; anti-racist sentiments may be common currency for musicians and fans today, but nobody then was quite sure what sort of reception the event would receive. In the event, four times that number snaked into Victoria Park to see The Clash perform excoriating renditions of White Riot and London's Burning and the Tom Robinson Band play their bittersweet Glad To Be Gay.

Not only did the carnival pave the way for the Free Nelson Mandela and Live Aid concerts, it crucially ruptured any nascent link between Britain's youth movements and the extreme Right.

In the park that day were several young rebels, including the future Fire Brigade Union leader Andy Gilchrist, Labour politician Peter Hain and singer Billy Bragg. "We felt we were part of a movement," Bragg recalls. "In the early days, punk could have gone either way - the Sex Pistols wore swastikas and there was flirting with the Right - but The Clash and RAR pointed the way forward."

Tom Robinson and other RAR veterans will be appear alongside new acts at an anniversary carnival in Victoria Park on April 27, and at Brixton Academy on April 30 ·