In `Stopping Places` Simon Evans explains, in words and pictures, how the transition between a nomadic lifestyle in bender tents and wooden vardos to the enforced settlements of today's housing estates and council sites has very often been traumatic and hazardous.
`The Garden of England` as Kent is affectionately known, has a strong Gypsy population due in part to its agricultural history. A large but short-term workforce was needed to pick and to harvest in the days when Kent fed the city's markets. While many Londoners came down for the Hopping, it was the Travelling families who were able to move around the crops as they came into season. Simon describes how these `old ways` were overtaken by the mechanization of farming at the same time as the old stopping places were disappearing.
Travelling People have historically been perceived as a threat to a settled society and Simon traces the legislation and laws which very often led to Gypsies appearing in local court records and newspaper reports. He uses these, along with Parish records to give us some idea of how families would have lived and moved as wars and governments came and went.
 A large number of the stories in `Stopping Places` have been gathered as aural records and so contain eyewitness accounts of a changing lifestyle. These are enhanced by old photos from family collections, which Simon has supplemented with his own from more modern days.
Many of the problems and prejudice Travellers face in their day-to-day lives alongside non-Gypsies are the result of misunderstanding and misinformation. This book aims to tell the local history of a group of people who Simon believes could be the largest single ethnic minority in Kent.
Stopping Palaces is published by The University of Hertfordshire Press price £14.99 in paperback. ISBN 1-902806-30-1
More book reviews»
| 
