“I thought, ‘this is going to be huge. There’s not a person on the planet who doesn’t know Stonehenge’,” says Rajan Naidu, recounting the time when he and fellow Just Stop Oil protestor Niamh Lynch sprayed the iconic prehistoric structure with orange powder (a non-toxic blend of cornflour and food colouring). It was a stunt that went viral.
Naidu was 73, Lynch 21 – at opposite ends of their lives but united in their commitment to a cause they cared about. Afterwards, they sat silently, crosslegged by the stones in the warm June air. Time seemed to slow right down. And then they were arrested. The action didn’t stop there. It continued in every piece of press coverage, every social media post, every conversation, in their eventual acquittal.
I’m sitting with Naidu (main picture) in the community cafe of The Old Print Works in Birmingham as he recounts all this. It’s mid-November, a fortnight since he, Lynch and Luke Watson, another activist who filmed the Stonehenge protest, were cleared of causing a public nuisance. Rain taps on the large old windows, while reggae wafts through the space. We tuck into steaming piles of chickpea curry. With his warm smile, white beard and colourful cardie, he’s not how the media might have you picture a protestor: young, shouty, looking for trouble. But he’s part of a recent wave of older protesters shifting those stereotypes.
