Gypsies, tinkers, travellers: the hidden history of one of the the city’s most fascinating and forgotten communities.
Doors: 7:00pm
Tickets £10 [£8 concession]
For almost ten years, Salon for the City has convened monthly to bring together authors, historians, artists or cultural commentators, talking on themes ranging across culture, literature, history, and beyond - but there is only ever one subject: London.
A glimpse of trailer roofs from a train or motor way is the closest most of us come to a Traveller site. But the separation of these sites from towns and cities was not always the case.
As London rapidly expanded through the nineteenth century, successive generations of Romany Gypsy and Irish Traveller families owned yards, houses and businesses across the city and engaged in a wide range of trades and professions.
Anthropologist Dr Anna Hoare, author of the Mapping the Histories of London’s Travellers project, shows how the perspectives, voices and experiences of Gypsies and Travellers form a fascinating part of the capital’s cultural history.
Researcher and guide Geoff Simmons will describe the origins and history of one of London’s most important sites for generations of Romany Gypsies - Wardley Street in Wandsworth.
Home to the traveller community from the 19th century, by the mid-twentieth century, the street had become famous as the home of London costermongers, and is an example of how Romany Gypsies were involved in trades from brick-making to market gardening. The area is still home to two permanent Travellers sites.
Dr Anna Hoare is an anthropologist specialising in architecture, who explores the role of architecture in relations between Travellers and the state in the UK and Ireland.
The Mapping the Histories of London’s Travellers project exhibition has been shown across London, using maps and linked recordings to explore themes such as the geography of movement through the capital. She is working on a book: ‘View from the Traveller site: Architecture that Begins where the House Ends.’
Geoff Simmons runs the community history project Summerstown 182 in south west London providing guided walks and talks and raising awareness of the area. Most recently the plaque 'The People of Wardley Street' acknowledged Wandsworth's rich Romany Gypsy and Traveller heritage - an initiative that be documented through an oral history project in collaboration with Anna Hoare.