The New Age Travellers

The New Age Travellers are a group of people who often espouse New Age and/or hippie beliefs, and who travel between music festivals and fairs in the United Kingdom in order to live in a community with others who hold similar beliefs.


Their transport and homes consist of vans, lorries, buses and caravans converted into mobile homes. They also make use of improvised bender tents, tipis and yurts. New age travellers were largely a product of 1980s and early 1990s Britain, but a small number continue to travel in the country today, and cultural groupings with similar composition have also manifested themselves in other countries, such as New Zealand.


The movement originated in the free festivals of the 1970s such as the Windsor Free Festival, the early Glastonbury Festivals, Elephant Fayres, and the huge Stonehenge Free Festivals in Great Britain. Later events included the Castlemorton Common Festival, a huge free and illegal event which attracted widespread media coverage and prompted government action. Some legal festivals, such as WOMAD, continue to be held in a variety of countries, including the UK.


In the UK during the 1980s, the Travellers' mobile homes - generally old vans, trucks and buses (including double deckers) - were driven in convoys. The movement had faced significant opposition by the British government and mainstream media, epitomised by the authorities' attempts to prevent camps at Stonehenge, and the resultant Battle of the Beanfield, in 1985 - the largest mass civil arrest in English history.