“Where can we put our homes?” Gypsies and Travelers in the English Green Belt

Abstract

For the past few centuries, anti-nomadic legislation has attempted to settle nomads who traveled throughout England and elsewhere in Europe, as their mobilities challenged the sedentarist goals of modern nation states. As recently as 1994, the nomadic way of life was effectively criminalized in England and Wales, revealing the unbalanced power relations between Gypsies and Travelers and the state. This article will examine and highlight the agency and spatialities of resistance of nomadic Gypsy and Traveler groups in England who are struggling for the recognition of their right to legally inhabit caravan sites in areas such as Green Belt land. The selection of places in the Green Belt for their homes offers another contested landscape that runs counter to the typical understanding of Gypsies and Travelers residing in marginalized places due to discrimination or wanting to remain unnoticed. By drawing from Gypsies and Travelers' own narratives, this article documents how they navigate through policies designed to constrain them.

Keywords:

• Gypsies and Travelers
• England
• Green Belt
• agency
• nomadism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jeremy Jimenez and Rebekah Verona for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Alyson Greiner and two anonymous reviewers for their comments. The usual disclaimer applies. Portions of this article derive from my dissertation completed at UCLA in 2007.

Funding

Support for this article was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.

Notes

1. This broad category includes a variety of diverse groups, including: British Gypsies, who are related to other Roma groups; Irish Travelers, Ireland's indigenous nomadic ethnic group; and New Travelers, a group composed of various British people who chose a nomadic way of life, beginning primarily in the 1960s; as well as Welsh Gypsies and Scottish Travelers. For the purposes of this article, while not eliding their differences or the fact that they are competing for scarce resources, it is useful to consider them together as they are contending with similar forms of policy constraints and discriminatory attitudes. For more discussion on the various traveling communities in the UK, see Clark and Greenfields (2006); Kabachnik and Ryder (2013). While the term Gypsy is seen as pejorative for many Roma, British Gypsies prefer to self-ascribe that way.

2. To be sure, enforcement of legislation throughout the centuries was never uniform and would have varied from every local authority and at different periods. Regardless of whether the law was enforced, what Gypsies and Travelers signify and the goal of the state is made clear.

3. For a thorough deconstruction of sedentarism, the advent of the “new mobilities paradigm” (see Sheller and Urry 2006; Hannam et al. 2006; Cresswell 2006; Urry 2007) has illustrated the need to move past traditional binary oppositions (place/mobility, sedentary/nomad) and focuses on both conceptual and embodied connections between places and mobilities and moorings and routes (Kabachnik 2012). For more on sedentarism with specific reference to Gypsies and Travelers, see McVeigh (1997).

4. I do not mean to suggest that they were never occupying contested places in the past, as Sibley (1981) makes evident in his discussion of Gypsies and Travelers in urban areas being seen as out of place due to not corresponding to the “rural Gypsy” stereotype.

5. This has slowly begun to change with the emergence of the Cambridge Model, designed by Margaret Greenfields and Robert Home (2006), which not only considers the advice of Gypsies and Travelers but puts the data collection in their hands as well. This collaborative model for needs assessment has been adopted by several local councils to use as best practice.

6. The council did offer “bricks and mortar” housing which the residents turned down (BBC 2004b). In several cases planning permission has been granted to Gypsies and Travelers based on their “cultural aversion” to “bricks and mortar” housing (Johnson 2009; Greenfields and Smith 2010).

7. The next two sections derive from my fieldwork. I have changed the names of the people and places to preserve anonymity. I chose to focus on this particular family's experiences primarily due to their lengthy history with eviction battles, the fact that they were evicted and face eviction once again, and that they selected Green Belt land. I also spoke with multiple family members which gave me a more complete picture of their situation.

8. Tourers are homes that can be hitched to vehicles. A chalet can be seen in Figure 1.

9. “Pikey” is a derogatory term for Gypsies and Travelers.

10. It should be noted that I am using a nuanced conception of place that encompasses a variety of social relations, not simply location (Kabachnik 2012). Furthermore, fulfilling the right to place is not the only step needed, though it is a necessary one. As Shubin (2011a) and Kabachnik and Ryder (2013) argue, the problems Gypsies and Travelers face are not reducible to site provision and a place to stop but are connected to a myriad of other issues.

11. This is despite certain policy statements that would seem to provide support for caravan sites. As recently as 2006, government Circular 1/06 was published. It stated that the government's goal was to “ensure that everyone has the opportunity of living in a decent home,” giving many Gypsies and Travelers hope that new practices will be enacted to address the shortage of caravan sites (ODPM 2006, p. 4).

Additional information

Funding

Funding: Support for this article was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.