Travelling Communities: Voices from the Margins

“Stories live on in family homes and backyards, in roads and streets, schools, churches, factories and parks. Memories live on in all the places and spaces in which migrant families worked hard to make a living”

Cities are imagined as permanent spaces, but they are also occupied by those whose lives exist in transition on the so called ‘margins’ of society:

• What histories of ‘travelling communities’ are collected in the archives?
• How have travellers been perceived and represented in the media?
• How has ‘homelessness’ been represented in Birmingham?

Chapters in this research guide include:

• Travelling Communities: Introducing the Archive
• First Records: Migration, Craft, Culture, Discrimination
• Travellers and the Industrial Landscape
• ‘On the Crossroads’: Travellers and Social Rights
• Confronting Traveller Images and Stereotypes

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People and places mentioned in this research guide include: Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Month; Boat People; Irish Travellers; Romany Travellers; New Travellers; Joseph Barber; Bromford Forge; The Black Patch; King Esau Smith; Ted Rudge; Charles Parker; Radio Ballad 'The Travelling People'; Travellers Team; and, Highways and Caravans Site Acts. Features photographs by Sir Benjamin Stone and Paul Hill.

Further links and research:

Traveller Exhibition

This is an online gallery of photographic materials taken by Birmingham City Council in the early-to-mid 20th century. The images offer a vivid and fascinating insight into the lives of Travellers in Birmingham's rapidly changing urban landscapes. This is the first time these images have been seen by the public.

Migration and Settlement in 20th Century Birmingham: Migration as a Way of Life

Connecting Histories learning package written by Sarah Dar, covering Migration as Movement, Travelling as a Way of Life, and Homelessness and Home.