Big ups to Dijdit, DRMHCP and Bassnation, great posts.
Ever since jungle broke in '95, there's been all kinds of scenes catering to the white working class ravers that jungle left behind that can be loosely grouped under 'happy rave' I suppose. Even in London, they put on massive nights but they get no press at all.
I used to work in a warehouse with this nutter called Sean, he would go to huge things at Bagleys and out in sports centres in Essex. If you asked him what kind of music it was, he'd say stuff like 'happy uplifting hard trance house' (with a totally straight face, natch). To my ears, it was basically a cross between trance and happy hardcore.
I agree with DRMHCP & Bassnation, the whole Gatecrasher/Strawberry Sundae thing was the nearest this scene came to breaking through overground, in terms of media coverage. What it failed to do then was to develop and mutate in the way that hardcore did in 93-97 - maybe because the scene wasn't as racially and culturally mixed as hardcore was, so there wasn't the internal producer/raver tension that led to darkside and artcore.
On the free party scene, a lot of the northern trance/hard house rigs are run by people who I guess were 'crasher kids 10 years ago, and who are now in thier late 20s. These rigs are definitely 'working class raver' in spirit. The southern psytrance scene is a very different animal, very middle class gap-year/traveller vibes and a lot cliquier. They tend to rave on private land owned by someone's parents so it's very difficult for the OB to shut them down, they have top pro-sound PAs and really great drugs. There's little traffic between them and the traditional traveller/crusty free party scene. In fact from what Chris says, the southern psytrance scene is more like US-style raving than the British strain.
Dijdit, I heard the Aril Brikha record the other day, it is pretty tranc-y isn't it? And from someone who was signed to Transmat too, tsk tsk (lol). Actually it's more like 80s proto-trance - things like Chris & Cosey and those wierd euro one off records that Weatherall likes.