Nomads Westway extract

Taken from the Preface

I first became involved with Irish Travellers and Gypsies over twenty years ago, when I began work as warden of the Westway Travellers Site, in Notting Dale, west London, close to Shepherds Bush. At the time there was nothing like the volume of literature, conferences or activism surrounding Gypsies and Travellers that exists now, which is by no means to suggest that there was none. Nevertheless, the dearth of reliable writing on Irish Travellers, particularly in Britain, was one reason why I took the job and put in two years’ work there.

A full explanation of why I chose to work on the Westway, both as warden and anthropologist, is provided in Chapter 1. Suffice it to say, here, that the reasons were as much personal (in the sense of psychological) as they were professional (in the sense of career-orientated). That is to say, they were as much tied to questions of my identity as one of the second-generation, post-war ‘Irish’, and linked with the ‘kind of chronic rootlessness’ that Lévi-Strauss (1976, 67) once commonly associated with anthropologists, as they were to any academic, professional, pragmatic or ideological issue. The reader is warned, therefore, that this book is more autobiographical than most other ethnographic studies. It eschews the notion of clinical detachment, but at the same time does not recoil from the idea of objectivity. Instead, it adopts the kind of framework that Professor David Pocock (1977) called ‘personal anthropology’, a modus operandi akin to what has since been dubbed ‘auto-ethnography’.

Chapters 1 draws shamelessly on what it meant to me on a personal level to grow up ‘hybrid’, as one of the ‘English–Irish’ or second-generation ‘London-Irish’, for whom stigma was part of ethnic identity. At the same time I step outside that subjectivity to see west London, and two districts of it in particular, with as much anthropological detachment or objectivity as possible. One, North Kensington and north Hammersmith, is where the Westway Traveller Site is located, and is the subject of Chapters 3 and 4. The other district, Barnes and Mortlake (here abbreviated to ‘Mortlake’, in accordance with ancient tradition) is where I lived while working at the site and where I grew up before I had even heard of ‘anthropology’ (see Chapter 5). Chapters 8, 9, and 10 deal as objectively as possible, and in detail, with the site itself.

Because ethnography is essentially a detailed description of a socio-cultural situation or setting, the analysis contained is usually firmly embedded within it. Furthermore, because I seek as wide an audience as possible, and not just an academic one, what theory I have used to select, shape, and interpret all that I have seen and heard is unobtrusive; at least, as unobtrusive, I hope, as a tourist’s travel guide. In other words, having borrowed other people’s ideas about what and how to see when ‘travelling’ sociologically, or how to interpret things afterwards, and found them useful, I pass them on to you without undue insistence.

One reason for going into the details of two districts, one north of the Thames, the other south, where Travellers, Gypsies and other people interact, is to deepen our understanding of the social fabric of suburbs; those residential areas situated betwixt countryside and city-centre whose wealth and statuses vary greatly with location and with time. With a view to seeing Irish Travellers and Gypsies in historical and geo-spatial contexts I have therefore incorporated the work of historians, including little-known local historians, and leant on novelists and biographers whose neo-realism has opened my eyes to the wonder of the western suburbs, which I was only half-aware of (and felt more than a little dejected about) when as a young man I decided to escape by getting into social anthropology, only to return there eventually.