Gypsies and Travellers in housing: maintaining and redefining identity

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Gypsies and Travellers in housing maintaining
and redefining identity

Jamie Keddie PhD Candidate Cities
Programme London School of Economics Housing
Studies Association Annual Conference April 2008
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Structure

• Background to Gypsies and Travellers in the UK
• Restrictions on nomadism and the move to housing
• London accommodation assessment background and
  methods
• Responses to living in housing
• Maintaining and redefining identity

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Background

• UK presence since C10th
• Estimated population of 300,000
• Traditional caravan based, nomadic existence
• Increasing numbers in housing but often hidden
• Gypsies and Irish Travellers as ethnic groups
• CRE most excluded ethnic group in UK
• Multiple indices of disadvantage health,
  education, employment, access to services

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Restrictions on nomadism

• Nomadism as threat to social order
• Modernity is the belief in linear progress,
  absolute truths and rational planning of an ideal
  social order
• David Harvey (1989 35)
• Legislation
• The Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act
  1960
• Caravan Sites Act 1968 (Part II)
• Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994
• Socio-economic changes
• Competition for rural employment

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The London accommodation assessment

• Housing Act 2004 requirement to assess Gypsies
  and Travellers accommodation needs
• 850 interviews, over half in housing
• Method
• Consultation with community and stakeholders
• Community interviewers
• Introductions and snowballing

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Housing conditions

• Temporary accommodation
• I have 2 adult sons with learning problems
  and we were all homeless 4 years ago living in
  squats after Housing Services said we'd made
  ourselves intentionally homeless after I left my
  house in London for 5 weeks to go to a funeral in
  Ireland. I did not know this would make me
  intentionally homeless.
• Tenancy breakdown
• Overcrowded conditions

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Reasons for moving to housing

• Lack of sites
• The travelling life is not allowed anymore and
  you get fed up with the agro on the roads.
  Theres no room on caravan sites and waiting
  lists go on forever.
• Access to servicesit was too difficult to
  travel and keep kids in school, they can get a
  better life here
• Positive choice
• I had an offer on my land and sold it ... I
  was getting older and my wife didnt want to live
  in a trailer anymore... Since living here I have
  grown to like the privacy you can get in a house
  that you don't get on site. Houses are warmer in
  winter and you've got better access to water in
  housing.

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Adjusting to integration

• Adverse psychological effects
• We are Travellers I hate living in a house.
  I dont have my community around. I really want
  to live on site with my family again. The kids
  cant go out and play. I get very lonely and
  depressed living in a house I feel like I am in
  prison
• Threat to cultural identity
• We are losing our community, we don't have
  communal space anymore. We used to share
  childcare so our kids are no longer communally
  raised. We are losing our cultural identity

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Responses

• Location choices
• There are at least ten Traveller families on
  this estate Ive come to know... Im not sure if
  the council just wants to stick us all here
  together, out of the way, but it makes you feel
  much happier knowing you got your people around
• Vernacular architecture
• More travelling than on sites
• Im settled in housing but I still travel with
  my family to fairs all over the country. Think
  this is a very important part of their culture
  and identity and I need my children to
  experience this I want them to fit in but retain
  their Traveller identity.
• Identity adapted and modified

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Identity redefined

• I moved into a house in the late 1980s or early
  1990s because I was fed up with always being
  moved on. Now I would not go back to living
  permanently on a site because I prefer the
  comfort of a house, especially in the winter.
  However I love to travel in the summer and do
  travel a lot with my family in the summer. We are
  very much a Traveller family, perhaps we are a
  new type of Traveller family who now want to live
  or be based in houses in the winter and will
  travel in the summer, being happy now in houses
  and on sites, so long as we can do both. When
  living in houses we still live the Traveller
  life, mixing with our own and marrying into our
  own We are also still seen as Travellers by the
  settled people and our kids as seen as Travellers
  in schools and find it has hard as we did to
  settle in schools. I think my kids will still be
  travelling after they get married but I do not
  think they will be living permanently on sites.
  Theyll still be Travellers though.

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Conclusions

• Lack of culturally suitable alternatives
• Housing management and design to ensure
  successful transition
• Identity adapting, but multiple and factional
• An adaptive, inclusive identity to ensure survival