New Age travellers

New Age travellers or New Travellers, often referred to as crusties, are people in the United Kingdom generally espousing New Age beliefs along with the hippie culture of the 1960s (overlapping with Bohemianism), and who used to travel between free music festivals and fairs prior to crackdown in the 1990s, who now congregate in community with others who hold similar beliefs on various authorised and unauthorised sites.

This article is about the UK subculture. For the musical genre sometimes termed crusty, see crust punk. For the similar New Zealand subculture, see housetrucker.
New Age travellers
Vehicles used by New Age travellers
Regions with significant populations
United Kingdom
Religions
New Age

A New Traveller's transport and home may consist of living in a van, "gypsy" Vardo wagon, lorry, bus, car, or caravan converted into a mobile home while also making use of an improvised bender tent, tipi, or yurt. "New Age" travellers largely originated in 1980s and early 1990s Britain,[1] when they were described as crusties because of the association with "encrusted dirt, dirt as a deliberate embrace of grotesquerie, a statement of resistance against society, proof of nomadic hardship."[2]

History

Origins

The movement originated in the free festivals of the 1960s and 1970s[3] such as the Windsor Free Festival, the early Glastonbury Festivals, Elephant Fayres, and the huge Stonehenge Free Festivals in Great Britain. However, there were longstanding precedents for travelling cultures in Great Britain, including travelling pilgrims, itinerant journeymen and traders, as well as Romani groups and others.[4] Later events included the Castlemorton Common Festival, a huge free and unlicensed event which attracted widespread media coverage and prompted government action. Some legal festivals, such as WOMAD, continue to take place in a variety of countries, including the UK.

Peace convoy
See also: Battle of the Beanfield

In the UK during the 1980s the travellers' mobile homes—generally old vans, trucks and buses (including double-deckers)—moved in convoys. One group of travellers came to be known as the Peace Convoy after visits to Peace camps associated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).[3] The movement had faced significant opposition from the British government and from mainstream media, epitomised by the authorities' attempts to prevent the Stonehenge Free Festival, and the resultant Battle of the Beanfield in 1985—resulting in what was, according to the Guardian, one of the largest mass arrests of civilians since at least the Second World War,[5] possibly one of the biggest in English legal history.[6]

In 1986 and subsequent years police again blocked travellers from "taking the Stones" on the Summer Solstice (June 21). This led Travelers to spend summers squatting by the hundreds on several sites adjacent to the A303 in Wiltshire.

New Zealand housetruckers
Further information: Housetrucker
Housetrucks at the Nambassa 5-day festival, 1981

In New Zealand, individuals, families or groups who convert old trucks and school buses into mobile homes and live in them, preferring an unattached and transient lifestyle to using more conventional housing are termed "housetruckers". These mobile home vehicles began appearing during the mid-1970s and even though there are fewer as of 2012 they continue to exist. An early manifestation of this culture came with the Blerta (1970–1973) travelling circus of music, light theatre and art. This involved a well-known New Zealand actor, Bruno Lawrence, and 30 or 40 hangers-on who traveled around the country in an old Bedford bus, sang, wrote and did hippie art. Most of the riders were radicals, hippies, groovers and free thinkers. They attracted a following and had a hit single with "Dance around the world" which was nominated for the Loxene Golden Disc in 1971, a local musical award at the time. After 1973 the Blerta project ran out of steam, and Lawrence turned his hand back to acting in such movies as Smash Palace in 1981.[7]

See also

References
  1. http://subcultureslist.com/new-age-travellers/
  2. Fox, Dan (3 April 2018). "24-Hour Party People: How Britain's New Age Traveler movement defined a zeitgeist". World Policy Journal. 35 (1): 3–9. doi:10.1215/07402775-6894684. ISSN 1936-0924. S2CID 158322983.
  3. "New Travellers, Old Story" (PDF). The Children's Society. Retrieved 1 November 2014.
  4. Ivakhiv, Adrian (2001). Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona. Indiana University Press. p. 89. ISBN 0-253-33899-9.
  5. https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2004/feb/22/features.magazine27 whilst other commentators see it as possibly one of the biggest in English legal history.
  6. Stuart Maconie (2014). The People's Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records. Ebury Press. pp. 356–. ISBN 978-0-09-193380-7.
  7. Colin Broadley and Judith Jones, eds., Nambassa: A New Direction, A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1979.ISBN 0-589-01216-9.

Films
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