Can alternative, nomadic forms of living survive criminalisation and what do they teach us about freedom and belonging?
Maddie Wakeling explains what she learnt about the meaning of home while undertaking research for her new play Roadside.
When I set out to interview roadside dwellers across the southwest, I thought we’d be chatting a lot about evictions. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act had passed, with increased powers to evict and criminalise traveller communities. Mendip Council had also just proposed a ban on roadside dwellers in the area surrounding Glastonbury, the town I grew up in, and a place home to a lot of people living in vans, caravans, benders and wagons.
My first interview took me down the A303 to visit an old friend. I pulled up on a grassy verge where my mate had set up camp. He travels in a bright green wooden wagon, with two horses and a dog.
Sitting around the fire we started to chat. I brought up the current moves toward criminalisation and how this might affect our community. My friend shook his head and said ‘It's all just sort of a continuous history. And as you're doing your drama thing I think it's really important you look into the history of it all.’
And he was right. It is all a continuous history. These moves towards criminalisation are just the latest in a long history of attacks on travelling communities.
However, despite this, the New Traveller Community continues to grow. The community was originally born out of festivals and free parties in the 70s and 80s. For many New Travellers I spoke to, their first interaction with the community came through these parties and festivals decades later.
The motivations for this way of life are cyclical too. The housing crisis of the 90s pushed many onto the road and a similar crisis today continues to do the same. There are also brighter motivations echoed by the people I interviewed - a desire to connect more with the natural world, to live simply, to be part of a community, to own and build your own home and to have more freedom.
The conversations I had when I first started to make Roadside were not, as I'd anticipated, about evictions, but were rather a celebration of a way of life. No matter how many boulders or yellow lines were put on stopping places, people continue to live in vans, caravans and wagons. It is continuous. People will always be driving in convoy down to the sea in the summer. Someone will always be sitting outside their caravan playing music. Someone else will be sending smoke into the air as they light the burner.
Roadside is not a story about evictions. It's about what home can mean. It's a show inspired by my own roadside experiences and by conversations with roadside dwellers across the southwest. Inspired by this reminder that ‘It's all just part of a continuous history’, my play is a celebration of the community that will continue to thrive against the odds.
Mon 15 April 2024 at 7.15pm
Tickets £8 (work-in-progress)
