Caravan Site Research Articles

Coastal Observations: Rapid development and colonization of a UK sand dune system

Between the years 1200 and 1600, vast quantities of sand were brought inshore from offshore bars as a result of centuries of ferocious storms, to form a series of dune systems along the South Wales coastline. Today, as a result of many housing, leisure, and industrial developments only a few remnants exist. On one such remnant at Porthcawl, Wales, UK, became a caravan site in the 1930s, which was abandoned in 1993 for political reasons. Within 27 years a minimum of 120,000 m3 of sand was transported from the adjacent beach and formed dunes >4 m in height along a 400- m frontal edge that extended some 130 m inland, approximately a third of the site. Typical vegetation found along the frontal part of the system are Ammophila arenaria (marram), Agropyron junceiforme (sand couch grass) and Euphorbia maritimum (spurge). To the rear of the system, vegetation included Agrostis tenuis and stolonifera, (bent and creeping bent grass), Cirsium avense (creeping thistle), and Caluna vulgaris (heather). A 4-m-high and c. 3000m2 area of a vigorous stand of Hippophae rhamnoides (sea buckthorn) has also formed. The rapidity of dune formation and vegetation colonization is staggering.

Weaving Through Weather on a Danish Caravan Site

The aim of this article is to study embodied experiences and negotiations with everyday weather on a Danish caravan site. I present a contrast to representations of certain types of weather as something you travel away from to seek out the sun. This is done by introducing a sensuous and embodied focus to mundane weather that is also encountered on holiday. Drawing on conceptions of embodiment, the everyday and sensuous, I argue that experiences of weather are relational and multisensuous. This article has three aims. First, to nuance discourses on weather by researching people’s embodied and sensuous negotiations of weather. Second, to broaden understandings of holiday weather beyond that of sunny destinations. And third, proposing the concept of “weathering” to inform the relatively neglected role of everyday weather in tourism research. In this article, my aim is to discuss forms of somatic, sensuous, everyday routines, and movements cultivated and performed with weather.

Campsite Migrants: <i>British Caravanners and Homemaking in Benidorm</i>

Based on ethnographic fieldwork amongst British migrants on a Spanish Camping and caravan site, this article argues that the home is a productive entrance point for understanding the dynamics of th ...

The Potholed Path: Navigating the Contested Landscape of English Caravan Site Policy

The Travellers will find the land…Nobody wants it in their village — it's that NIMBYism kind of thing. And when you have a meeting to say: ‘Can we discuss this about this land being used for Gypsies?’ they turn up like it's a lynch mob. So that is the very difficult thing that we've got to cope with. And the council need to find land … We got space, we got money. … There's no political will to do it — I don't mind telling you! They have debated it for so long and so often and got nowhere. — Interview with Aunty.1

The evidence base for Gypsy and Traveller site planning: a story of complexity and tension

The linear technical-rational model has been heavily criticised as theoretically, politically and practically inadequate. The example of accommodation needs assessment as evidence for highly contentious decisions on Gypsy and Traveller caravan site provision suggests, however, that the technical-rational model has great value in coping with complexity and tension, although the evidence it provides is likely to be challenged. This paper also argues that the same process can accord to technical-rational, tactical or enlightenment models of the interface between social research and policy-making depending on the viewpoint of different actors; the balance may shift over time.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Tourism: The Case of a Danish Caravan Site

The tourism industry contains many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMTEs). Further- more, the tourism industry is often said to be less innovative than other industries and SMTEs' lack of motivation, knowledge and resources are often claimed to be the reasons why the industry is not very innovative. At the same time, though, rich and thick data on SMTEs and innovativeness is lacking. In order to contribute to the filling of this knowledge gap, this paper draws on a case company (a Danish caravan site) that has been innovative. The study reveals a series of reasons why this specific enterprise has been innovative and further, the paper suggests how these findings may transcend the case company.

Ethiopian-born and native Israeli school children have different growth patterns

Objective: Nutrition status of preschool children in Azezo, North West Ethiopia, and Ethiopian-born and native Israeli children aged 7 to 11 y and 12 to 15 y was studied. The aim of the study was to determine the growth patterns of immigrant children after changes in their nutritional habits. Methods: The Ethiopian-born and native school children were recruited from a caravan-dwelling site and a boarding school and from a town adjacent to the caravan site and a boarding school, respectively. Results: Weight for age was lower than −2 standard deviations of the Z score in 40.5%, 55.6%, 31.9%, and 61% of children aged 1 to 24, 25 to 36, 37 to 48, and 49 to 60 mo, respectively. Similarly, 18.9%, 59.3%, 39.1%, and 19.5% of children aged 1 to 24, 25 to 36, 37 to 48, and 49 to 60 mo had a height for age lower than −2 standard deviations of the Z score. The Ethiopian-born boys aged 7 to 11 y had lower body weight ( P < 0.03), mean arm muscle circumference, plasma transthyretin and magnesium ( P < 0.0001), and higher triceps skinfold thickness ( P < 0.01) compared with the controls. Similarly, the Ethiopian-born girls had lower body weight ( P < 0.006), weight-to-height ratio ( P < 0.02), mean arm muscle circumference and plasma transthyretin, calcium, and magnesium ( P < 0.0001), and higher triceps skinfold thickness ( P < 0.0001) than their Israeli counterparts. Weight, weight-to-height ratio, mean arm muscle circumference, plasma calcium and magnesium ( P < 0.0001), and transthyretin ( P < 0.01) were lower and triceps skinfold thickness ( P < 0.0001) was higher in the Ethiopian-born boarding school children than in the native Israelis of the same age range. Conclusions: The Azezo study confirmed that malnutrition-induced developmental impairment in preschool children is a major problem in Ethiopia. It is a manifestation of a rural economic and educational poverty and cannot be eradicated by palliative short-term nutritional programs. Although ethnicity and prenatal and postnatal malnutrition may have contributed, an insufficiency or imbalance of vital nutrients appeared to be the determinant factor for the lower relative growth of the Ethiopian-born children. The children from Ethiopia may have a propensity to avoid certain foods because of digestive intolerance or early childhood dietary habituation. Parental financial constraint may have been a factor in the younger group. These findings have implications for nutrition and welfare policies for children emigrating from developing countries.

The Religion and Social Organisation of Irish Travellers (Part II): Cleanliness and Dirt, Bodies and Borders

Introduction The social organisation of semi-nomadic Irish Travellers is characterised on the one hand by internal autonomy and tension between domestic groups, and on the other by a barely muted sense of conflict between themselves and non-Travellers. Correspondingly, there are two modes of religious-cum-ritual expression: one personal, private and interior, that draws on diffuse and condensed symbols (to use Mary Douglas's terms 1978, 1984); the other collective, public and exterior, that draws on condensed symbols (Griffin 2002). This paper takes these ideas further (1). To begin with, just as some Gypsy or Roma groups articulate aspects of their social organisation and identity in beliefs and symbolic practices concerning the body (Miller 1975; Okely 1983; Stewart 1997; Sutherland 1975), so too, it will be seen, do Irish Travellers. Moreover, when the historian de Paor (1986: 39) said of the Celts, 'this concept, this clear and sharp division between inside and outside was for the Irish as powerful as the concept of Hellas for the Greeks, and was to have long continuing importance', he could as well have been referring to today's Travellers. Secondly, when Travellers describe individuals of groups as 'clean' of 'dirty', and act accordingly, all they are really doing is differentiating the 'inside' from the 'outside', separating 'us' from 'them', marking a border. Thirdly, while the Traveller categories 'clean' and 'dirty' say something important about insider/outsider identities, they are more often than not exaggerated oppositions of what are really more ambivalent relations. Fourthly, attitudes and beliefs about social boundaries also find expression in behaviours concerning their own bodies which, for convenience, I shall describe as body ritual. Fifthly, while aware of the danger of reading too much symbolism into the body ritual of Travellers, thereby overlooking more 'rational', common sense explanations (Acton et al. 1997), I am confident the interpretation below remains valid. Finally, although my selection and interpretation of data owe much to previous writers, the data themselves were collected relatively uninfluenced by earlier texts, in the course of my work as the warden of a Travellers' caravan site in London--a warden who happened to be an anthropologist. Indeed, after reading Rehfisch's (1975) comment on writers repeating too uncritically claims to 'facts' made by writers preceding them, I decided to suspend my reading on Gypsies and Travellers until such time as I had built up some knowledge of my own. Consequently, it was at least nine months before I returned to the literature. The Site The site was a walled strip, situated on two-thirds of an acre of land, in the middle of an inner-city motorway. Over its west wall, a ramp carried an endless stream of traffic bound for central or outer London onto a flyover, which passed over several caravans parked at the bottom of the site. Over the east wall, another ramp ushered the flow in another direction. The site's entrance lay at the bottom near the flyover, where a rutted lane led in from the surrounding predominantly working-class neighbourhood to a narrow road that ran down the middle of the site. To add to the overwhelming sense of ghetto, the place was further bounded on its west by a railway line, a triangle of waste ground and several acres of industrial land, and to the east by towers of 1960s-style council flats. When I was appointed warden for six months in 1983, my employers in the Housing Department of the local authority explained that the site had become run down following the previous warden's departure a year earlier. It was only a successful legal action brought against the authorities by site residents and their supporters that had forced the council to act, and to reappoint a warden. I also discovered that what the authorities really wanted to do was to apply to central government to close the site under a special provision of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act. …

The Religion and Social Organisation of Irish Travellers on a London Caravan Site (Part I)

Introduction Given Ireland's age-old reputation for religiosity, scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to the religion of Irish Travelling People. One fairly recent book on Traveller society (McCann et al. 1994), for instance, included only two index entries on religion in a list of over 400, and even these were minor. Other work, including some fine ethnography, remains unclear about whether the ritual data apply equally to Irish Travellers as they do to Romanies (Okely 1983), and some is of somewhat narrow scope-(Mends 1997). This essay is the first in a series of two (1) and is based on the experience of two years I spent with Travellers as site warden of an official Traveller caravan site in London, during the 1980s. It focuses entirely on Irish Travellers, even though a minority of families were British Romanies. This first paper is organised in two parts. The first section, Part one, distinguishes individual from collective religious behaviour and looks at the existing literature on Traveller religion to argue that in England religion is important as a marker of identity in ways that it is not in Ireland. Section 2 unravels the nexus between social organisation and communication and classification, and, in doing so, draws heavily on Douglas (1978) and Simmel (1964). Because section 2 of this essay acts as an arch-stone for the rest, we should begin by anticipating its central thrust; namely, that a tension in Traveller social organisation occurs at two levels. One is between individual families--and the individual members of separate families--operating as strangers (Simmel 1964); that is to say, individuals and individual families physically `near', but socially `remote' from one another: `potential wanderers' and essentially `traders'. The second occurs between Travellers as a self-`imagined community' and the non-Travellers whom they perceive as the Other, and vice versa. Section 2 also examines how Traveller social organisation supports a world-view and set of categories and symbols which serve to fashion identity. It argues that when Travellers speak about the body and its `inside' they are talking metaphorically of the wider social body. I have already mentioned Douglas's work (1984) on purity and danger, but the present paper also draws on her book on natural symbols (1978) which some commentators consider to be `eccentric' and `untidy' (Farndon 1999). For this reason alone I would therefore emphasise that I have applied this aspect of Douglas's work only years after the data were collected, and that the evidence of bodily concerns which I found was not something I deliberately set out looking for. Indeed, during my first nine months as warden, I consciously avoided reading anything about Travellers and Gypsies so as not to cloud my mind with other people's ideas, including Okely's (1983). Moreover, it was long after my busy years as warden that I reread Douglas and found it relevant. Ironically, in this essay about outsiders, it is not only the academic `outsider' Douglas (Fry 2000) I rely on. I also draw on Simmel, another sociological `outsider', to show that the emic categories `inside'/`outside' and their numerous parallels, in addition to the behaviours that accompany them, echo Simmel's concept of the Stranger as one who is physically near but socially remote. Thus such perceptible patterns of language and action can just as easily be examined etically and `objectively', a la Simmel, as they can be emically and `subjectively', in terms of the native categories inside/outside. Put otherwise, individuals and individual families within the site will be seen `objectively' to act like Strangers in `near-remote' terms (the hyphen here serving diacritically to signal the important coexistence of properties). At the same time, between themselves on the site, Travellers express a marked inside/outside normative differentiation; in other words, a clear sense of social boundary or non-coexistence (indicated here by my use of the uncompromising oblique mark:/). …

Defining the traveller: From legal theory to practical action

Abstract In this article we draw attention to the very different ways in which the definition of a ‘Gypsy’ has been constructed in legal discourse. The development of a ‘racially flavoured’ ethnic definition with reference to race relations legislation is compared with the adoption of a non-ethnic nomadic definition in the context of caravan site legislation. Disjunctions are then identified between these definitions and both the social reality of travelling and the practical action taken by local authorities to regulate it. For source material we have drawn upon the reports of the relevant case law, previous studies conducted by Gypsy scholars and our own empirical data relating to local authority action.

Some environmental consequences of groundsheets on campsite vegetation

Opaque groundsheets create conditions on camp and caravan site awards similar to those generated by agricultural polyethylene mulches. On monoculture field plots, translucent polyethylene sheeting killed much less vegetation than groundsheets. After three weeks under groundsheets at least twice as much live biomass of Poa trivialis survived compared with three other grasses and Trifolium repens. The former would therefore be beneficial to include in camp and caravan site seed mixes. Agrostis stolonifera might also be useful, though its ground cover is limited by low production. Translucent groundsheets would also limit vegetational damage, especially to Lolium perenne, Dactylis glomerata and Trifolium repens

Holiday caravaning in Wales—construction of a national site inventory

Until 1980 a national inventory of caravan site opportunity for Wales had not been produced, although the Wales Tourist Board had twice attempted one during the 1970s. This paper attempts to outline how such an inventory was produced using primarily public health and planning authority data. The rationale for constructing such an inventory lay in assessing the significance of caravan tourism in Wales. This is discussed in terms of site location.

The planning, layout and administration of a large caravan site.

The planning, layout and administration of a large caravan site.