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No Place to Call Home: Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers
The shocking poignant story of eviction, expulsion, and the hard-scrabble fight for a home
They are reviled. For centuries the Roma have wandered Europe; during the Holocaust half a million were killed. After World War II and during the Troubles, a wave of Irish Travellers moved to England to make a better, safer life. They found places to settle down – but then, as Occupy was taking over Wall Street and London, the vocal Dale Farm community in Essex was evicted from their land. Many did not leave quietly; they put up a legal and at times physical fight.
Award-winning journalist Katharine Quarmby takes us into the heat of the battle, following the Sheridan, McCarthy, Burton and Townsley families before and after the eviction, from Dale Farm to Meriden and other trouble spots. Based on exclusive access over the course of seven years and rich historical research, No Place to Call Home is a stunning narrative of long-sought justice.
They are reviled. For centuries the Roma have wandered Europe; during the Holocaust half a million were killed. After World War II and during the Troubles, a wave of Irish Travellers moved to England to make a better, safer life. They found places to settle down – but then, as Occupy was taking over Wall Street and London, the vocal Dale Farm community in Essex was evicted from their land. Many did not leave quietly; they put up a legal and at times physical fight.
Award-winning journalist Katharine Quarmby takes us into the heat of the battle, following the Sheridan, McCarthy, Burton and Townsley families before and after the eviction, from Dale Farm to Meriden and other trouble spots. Based on exclusive access over the course of seven years and rich historical research, No Place to Call Home is a stunning narrative of long-sought justice.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
352 pages, Paperback
First published August 22, 2013
10 people are currently reading
415 people want to read
About the author
Katharine Quarmby
18 books27 followersAward-winning writer, editor and journalist with extensive knowledge of writing and editing across print, TV, radio and online.
Katharine’s latest books include her debut, prize listed novel, The Low Road, which was published in hardback in June 2023 and in paperback by Eye Lightning in November 2025. Set in rural Norfolk, London and Australia in the early nineteenth century, it is based on a true story that Katharine uncovered in her Norfolk hometown, of a Norfolk woman, Mary Tyrell, who was staked through the heart after death in 1813. She had been questioned repeatedly about a suspected infanticide.
An older daughter, known only by the initials A.T., had survived. Katharine traced her to the Refuge for the Destitute in Hackney. She had met another destitute, Anne Simpkins, there and they forged a friendship that deepened into love. In December 1821 they stole laundry from the Refuge, but were caught, stood trial at the Old Bailey, and were sentenced to transportation.
The Low Road novel is about uncovering lost histories: the stories of poor women from rural areas, the stories of the imprisoned, the stories of convicts sent to penal colonies, the stories of people who often left no records as a result of illiteracy and hardship. It also contains an important strand of narrative that explores experiences left out of the history books: a same-sex romance that evolves into a marriage of sorts two centuries before this was legally possible.
Aside from The Low Road, Katharine mainly writes now on environmental journalism and is also an editor.
Katharine’s latest books include her debut, prize listed novel, The Low Road, which was published in hardback in June 2023 and in paperback by Eye Lightning in November 2025. Set in rural Norfolk, London and Australia in the early nineteenth century, it is based on a true story that Katharine uncovered in her Norfolk hometown, of a Norfolk woman, Mary Tyrell, who was staked through the heart after death in 1813. She had been questioned repeatedly about a suspected infanticide.
An older daughter, known only by the initials A.T., had survived. Katharine traced her to the Refuge for the Destitute in Hackney. She had met another destitute, Anne Simpkins, there and they forged a friendship that deepened into love. In December 1821 they stole laundry from the Refuge, but were caught, stood trial at the Old Bailey, and were sentenced to transportation.
The Low Road novel is about uncovering lost histories: the stories of poor women from rural areas, the stories of the imprisoned, the stories of convicts sent to penal colonies, the stories of people who often left no records as a result of illiteracy and hardship. It also contains an important strand of narrative that explores experiences left out of the history books: a same-sex romance that evolves into a marriage of sorts two centuries before this was legally possible.
Aside from The Low Road, Katharine mainly writes now on environmental journalism and is also an editor.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 3, 2015
Quarmby discusses the history of GRT* persecution drawing heavily on the work of Romani academic Ian Hancock and other historians. British legal history includes waves of hostility towards 'vagrants' and 'itinerants' and Gypsies were repeatedly expelled, criminalised or executed for being nomadic or on racial grounds. Enclosure affected Traveller groups profoundly as it did settled workers on the land. The romaticisation of nomadic lifestyles and Romany people as exotic ethnic others with a fading old world culture parallels views of Plains Indians and other First Nation peoples elsewhere. Confronted with actual flesh-and-blood gypsies settlers tend to regard them as degraded remnants or imposters assuming the identity of the sentimentalised ideal compared to which they fall short by being insufficiently 'noble savage': this is a genocidal strategy working in tandem with the stealing of Travellers' children and draconian residence policies aimed at enforcing assimilation. It is significant that the Nuremburg report barely mentioned the killing of the Roma, despite the fact that historians believe a quarter of their European population was wiped out in the camps, considering that anti-Semites deny or underplay the atrocities committed against the Jews during and before the Nazi Holocaust. The ongoing virulent racism against GRT people is made comfortable by settled people's failure to acknowledge or forgetting of the Porrajmos
Hostility from settled locals is a running theme, but the history Quarmby traces reveals that the state led the violence and shaping of attitudes towards nomadic/'vagrant' people. It could be said that this is still the case: the state in the form of local councils everywhere continues to persecute. However, I suspect it does so on behalf of the landowners who hold such wide ranging influence over HM gov here (see George Monbiot's excellent blog for multiple demonstrations of this fact, with receipts). Of course, GRTs are discriminated against even as landowners as the case of Dale Farm shows, but this only reveals the underlying class structure silently regulating property rights.
Zygmunt Baumann suggests reasons for the hostile, perennially genocidal attitude on the part of sedentary, homogenous and increaingly materialistic populations towards traditionally nomadic people that has persisted so long in Europe and especially the UK. Nomadic lifeways represent oppositional knowledges and ways of being to the coloniser capitalist state and its supporting mythologies of white supremacy and occupation-as-work. They have the potential to retain ecological integration that settled communities forgot in the 'Enlightenment' and horizontal colonial periods when 'nature' (in all its forms, outside and inside us) was to be conquered and subdued. New Traveller Tony Thomson has pointed out that nomadism has been the human habit for over 500,000 years: settling is a tiny blip. He also mentions that it directs us to a closer and more thoughtful relationship to the land and resources, which threatens an economic model based on the unsustainable exploitation of scarce materials. Quarmby quotes various politicians and who repeat genocidal opinions, tellingly
Yet the fear of and hostility towards GRT people extends from the settler/nomad binary and beyond actual (as opposed to assumed) lifestyle differences since the majority of people with these origins no longer travel, because many of the traditional services they once provided as they roved, such as seasonal agricultural work, heritage skills like mending pots and pans and dealing in scrap metal have been regulated or industrialised out of existence. Yet as well as significant structural disadvantages people identified as gypsies or travellers are subjected to overt racist abuse such as having their homes bombed, vandalised and terrorised, racial slurs, violent personal assault, being excluded from pubs, shops and wedding venues sometimes by 'no gypsies' signs and by inflammatory media reporting, exclusion from employment, exclusion from school and bullying, low teacher expectations and ignorance** and microagressions. English Gypsy Noah Burton reflects lucidly on his lifelong experience of 'passing', denying his origins in order to protect his livelihood and avoid being abused and excluded. Reflecting on the civil rights struggles of black and Asian people he says 'They couldn't pass. Maybe if we had been in that situation we would fight harder against racism against us'.
Quarmby's book is ambitiously broad in scope, but goes into the Dale Farm furore in depth, as well as the rather different stand-off at Meriden. In the former case, I was most interested in and perturbed by the complicated and certainly not entirely positive role of non-Traveller activists, self-proclaimed allies, who set up camp at the site in force, organised by long-time GRT supporter Grattan Puxon. At Meriden, I was most intrigued by the machinations of the organisation that opposed the establishment of a site for the Gypsy group, whose protagonists became 'consultants', charging handsome fees for their services to other local groups seeking to oppose coucil plans to create legal sites for Gypsies and Travellers. Councils under legal pressure to find sites are hampered not only by internal reluctance but by nimbyist activism, now part funded by the taxpayer courtesy of the coalition government's 'Localism' bill.
The book is full of GRT voices from the spectrum of communities, and Quarmby tries to reflect all sides of multifaceted conflicts and tensions. Other voices also offer food for thought, notably Luton-based CofE chaplain Martin Burrell who says
*GRT is an abbreviation standing for Gypsy/Roma/Traveller, an adjectival phrase which even in its compoundness fails to capture the full spectrum of people it attempts to describe, who include (without being limited to) Irish and Scottish Travellers, English, Scotch and Welsh Kale Romanies, Eastern European Roma and Sinti, Showpeople, Boaters and New Age Travellers
**I speak of teacher ignorance advisedly. When I took my PGCE we had to complete a diversity portfolio, one part of which was a very well organised task in which groups of three researched a topic and produced a workshop for the rest of the cohort, as well as producing an individual academic write-up. (That was in 2010-11, so 'austerity' cuts have widely phased this quality of diversity training out of initial teacher training altogether) My extensive research and discussions had a profound effect on me, but our group was still stunned when we gave our workshop by the entrenched anti-GRT attitudes of many of our peers. I hail, by the way, from a town so white that my primary school of 300 local children had only two recognisably non-'Caucasian' pupils in the whole time I was there, but which has a local authority traveller site on the edge of town, by the rubbish tip***. It is not particularly uncommon even to meet a woman or teenage girl in the market square selling sprigs of heather and telling fortunes in a lilting accent, dressed unexotically in jeans and tank top. (I have had my fortune told many times, and I am moderately confident that I will have a happy life, with some challenges.) We sedents of the rural provinces owe it to our nomad and other GRT neighbours to educate ourselves
***Quarmby reports on the ubiquitous practice on the part of local authorities of placing GRT sites, when they finally do create them, on contaminated, unsuitable or unsafe land.
The very best thing in the book for me is this from the brief section on GRT art and culture, by part-Romani poet-ecologist David Morley, an imagined conversation between C19th poet John Clare and his friend Wisdom Smith, a local Gypsy
Hostility from settled locals is a running theme, but the history Quarmby traces reveals that the state led the violence and shaping of attitudes towards nomadic/'vagrant' people. It could be said that this is still the case: the state in the form of local councils everywhere continues to persecute. However, I suspect it does so on behalf of the landowners who hold such wide ranging influence over HM gov here (see George Monbiot's excellent blog for multiple demonstrations of this fact, with receipts). Of course, GRTs are discriminated against even as landowners as the case of Dale Farm shows, but this only reveals the underlying class structure silently regulating property rights.
Zygmunt Baumann suggests reasons for the hostile, perennially genocidal attitude on the part of sedentary, homogenous and increaingly materialistic populations towards traditionally nomadic people that has persisted so long in Europe and especially the UK. Nomadic lifeways represent oppositional knowledges and ways of being to the coloniser capitalist state and its supporting mythologies of white supremacy and occupation-as-work. They have the potential to retain ecological integration that settled communities forgot in the 'Enlightenment' and horizontal colonial periods when 'nature' (in all its forms, outside and inside us) was to be conquered and subdued. New Traveller Tony Thomson has pointed out that nomadism has been the human habit for over 500,000 years: settling is a tiny blip. He also mentions that it directs us to a closer and more thoughtful relationship to the land and resources, which threatens an economic model based on the unsustainable exploitation of scarce materials. Quarmby quotes various politicians and who repeat genocidal opinions, tellingly
I think you are endeavouring to defend something that is historically outdated: the tinker and the wanderer. There may be places for them in other parts of the world, but there isn't in an industrialised urban communitySince I and the political class issuing such statements live inside a sedentarist industrialised colonial mindset it can be difficult for us to notice that there is very little left of community in the context we have built. One of the most wonderful things in the book, although it is compromised by Quarmby's rather conservative, objective tone (she strives to be even-handed) is the description of a large community of Eastern European Roma that moved into Govanhill in Strathclyde. They spent their evenings 'shooting the breeze' singing, making music and dancing in the street. (A local Chief Inspector opines 'if you are a middle aged white female and you have lived all your life in Govanhill, then... all you see is foreign faces, your natural reaction is. "I don't like this"'. I'm enraged by this standard use of the white woman as frail creature to be defended (in which white feminism has all too often been complicit and worse) in order to justify racist attitudes and associated excessive policing and surveillance). Of course, it would annoy me, I need to sleep, I need to go to work in the morning, but doesn't that reveal unambiguously how deeply my very emotions and physical needs are structurally and forcibly invested in an economic model that deprives me of communal leisure and ways of knowing and being in mutuality?
Yet the fear of and hostility towards GRT people extends from the settler/nomad binary and beyond actual (as opposed to assumed) lifestyle differences since the majority of people with these origins no longer travel, because many of the traditional services they once provided as they roved, such as seasonal agricultural work, heritage skills like mending pots and pans and dealing in scrap metal have been regulated or industrialised out of existence. Yet as well as significant structural disadvantages people identified as gypsies or travellers are subjected to overt racist abuse such as having their homes bombed, vandalised and terrorised, racial slurs, violent personal assault, being excluded from pubs, shops and wedding venues sometimes by 'no gypsies' signs and by inflammatory media reporting, exclusion from employment, exclusion from school and bullying, low teacher expectations and ignorance** and microagressions. English Gypsy Noah Burton reflects lucidly on his lifelong experience of 'passing', denying his origins in order to protect his livelihood and avoid being abused and excluded. Reflecting on the civil rights struggles of black and Asian people he says 'They couldn't pass. Maybe if we had been in that situation we would fight harder against racism against us'.
Quarmby's book is ambitiously broad in scope, but goes into the Dale Farm furore in depth, as well as the rather different stand-off at Meriden. In the former case, I was most interested in and perturbed by the complicated and certainly not entirely positive role of non-Traveller activists, self-proclaimed allies, who set up camp at the site in force, organised by long-time GRT supporter Grattan Puxon. At Meriden, I was most intrigued by the machinations of the organisation that opposed the establishment of a site for the Gypsy group, whose protagonists became 'consultants', charging handsome fees for their services to other local groups seeking to oppose coucil plans to create legal sites for Gypsies and Travellers. Councils under legal pressure to find sites are hampered not only by internal reluctance but by nimbyist activism, now part funded by the taxpayer courtesy of the coalition government's 'Localism' bill.
The book is full of GRT voices from the spectrum of communities, and Quarmby tries to reflect all sides of multifaceted conflicts and tensions. Other voices also offer food for thought, notably Luton-based CofE chaplain Martin Burrell who says
The Roma are an ethnic group of some twelve million people who say that they don't want a patch each, just somewhere to liveAnd that may just be the height of radicalism in the days of late capitalism and the nation state as economic unit.
*GRT is an abbreviation standing for Gypsy/Roma/Traveller, an adjectival phrase which even in its compoundness fails to capture the full spectrum of people it attempts to describe, who include (without being limited to) Irish and Scottish Travellers, English, Scotch and Welsh Kale Romanies, Eastern European Roma and Sinti, Showpeople, Boaters and New Age Travellers
**I speak of teacher ignorance advisedly. When I took my PGCE we had to complete a diversity portfolio, one part of which was a very well organised task in which groups of three researched a topic and produced a workshop for the rest of the cohort, as well as producing an individual academic write-up. (That was in 2010-11, so 'austerity' cuts have widely phased this quality of diversity training out of initial teacher training altogether) My extensive research and discussions had a profound effect on me, but our group was still stunned when we gave our workshop by the entrenched anti-GRT attitudes of many of our peers. I hail, by the way, from a town so white that my primary school of 300 local children had only two recognisably non-'Caucasian' pupils in the whole time I was there, but which has a local authority traveller site on the edge of town, by the rubbish tip***. It is not particularly uncommon even to meet a woman or teenage girl in the market square selling sprigs of heather and telling fortunes in a lilting accent, dressed unexotically in jeans and tank top. (I have had my fortune told many times, and I am moderately confident that I will have a happy life, with some challenges.) We sedents of the rural provinces owe it to our nomad and other GRT neighbours to educate ourselves
***Quarmby reports on the ubiquitous practice on the part of local authorities of placing GRT sites, when they finally do create them, on contaminated, unsuitable or unsafe land.
The very best thing in the book for me is this from the brief section on GRT art and culture, by part-Romani poet-ecologist David Morley, an imagined conversation between C19th poet John Clare and his friend Wisdom Smith, a local Gypsy
The Act
A chorredo has burreder peeas than a Romany chal
(a tramp has more fun than a Gypsy)
Wisdom swings to his feet as if pulled by an invisible hand.
'I shall show how this world wags without making one sound.'
And the Gypsy transforms himself first into a lawyer. He bends
a burning eye on invisible jurors. He simpers. He stands on his head
as the Judge and thunders silent sentence. Then Wisdom levitates
to tip-toe in pity and pride as a Reverend bent over his Bible
while an invisible scaffold gasps and bounces from a rope's recoil.
The Gypsy hangs kicking until hacked down by invisible blades.
The world grinds to a stop on invisible springs, bearings and axis.
'Do you ever tell lies Wisdom?' 'All the long day through, brother,'
laughs the Gypsy. He lights his long pipe beneath his hat's brim.
'But the brassiest of lies' - the Gypsy plucks - 'are like this heather:
a charm against visible harm and' - he crushes it - 'invisible harm.'
And the friends look at each other across the invisible stage of grass.
January 22, 2014
I received a free copy of this book from a Goodreads Giveaway. Thank you!
Extremely informative book! Gave me a lot of perspective on the struggles of those groups to find their place in the modern world. A little dry, but overall a great non-fiction book.
Extremely informative book! Gave me a lot of perspective on the struggles of those groups to find their place in the modern world. A little dry, but overall a great non-fiction book.
September 10, 2013
This was an Informative book; I gained a better perspective of the life of gypsies and those who traveler.
The book is well referenced with suggestions for additional reading.
The book is well referenced with suggestions for additional reading.
Read
July 2, 2015I won this book through First Reads and I look forward to spending time reading it in the future. In grad school, I spent a lot of time reading about the Roma experience in Eastern Europe, but I know of very few books as well researched as this one depicting their experience in the West. It's an incredibly valuable addition.
September 17, 2023
This book was definitely very interesting for the most part, but also quite heavy reading in terms of how much social policy/sociology style discussion there was.
Don’t get me wrong, I find sociology very interesting and studied it at university but when I’m reading a book for enjoyment I don’t massively enjoy feeling like I’m back in my studies. I ended up skim reading fairly big sections of this due to the policy talk which felt slightly high-level when what I was more interested in was the real lived experiences of the people the author met during her research.
Despite my complaints above, I am glad I read this book - the Gypsy/Traveller community is not one I know a lot about so it was interesting to read about them and the prejudices they have faced.
I would recommend to someone with an academic interest in the subject but maybe give it a miss if your interest is a bit more generalised.
Don’t get me wrong, I find sociology very interesting and studied it at university but when I’m reading a book for enjoyment I don’t massively enjoy feeling like I’m back in my studies. I ended up skim reading fairly big sections of this due to the policy talk which felt slightly high-level when what I was more interested in was the real lived experiences of the people the author met during her research.
Despite my complaints above, I am glad I read this book - the Gypsy/Traveller community is not one I know a lot about so it was interesting to read about them and the prejudices they have faced.
I would recommend to someone with an academic interest in the subject but maybe give it a miss if your interest is a bit more generalised.
January 4, 2024
This book centers around the forced eviction of a Gypsy community in England. The settled neighbors, the local government, and the police were all united to uproot this meager settlement of poor people. Gypsies in England live such a precarious existence. Many of them would like to settle in a permanent home so their lives can be improved. They would like to educate their children to give them a shot at a better life. It's a book that opened my eyes to an injustice. Racial and cultural hatred toward fellow human beings never seems to diminish, whatever the country.
October 9, 2023
DNF
The book intially started off okay but I did not really like the tone of the book nor did I think it right to only focus the story on Dale farm and then half way through the book to suddenly turn to a story about the Connors (Irish Traveller family) which is completely unnecessary and has no relevance to the topic of the book.
The book intially started off okay but I did not really like the tone of the book nor did I think it right to only focus the story on Dale farm and then half way through the book to suddenly turn to a story about the Connors (Irish Traveller family) which is completely unnecessary and has no relevance to the topic of the book.
August 12, 2024
An interesting and informative book about the gypsy and traveler communities, especially those evicted from Dale Farm in the early 2000s. I learned a lot about my prejudices and how inbreed they can be as well as learning about this ethnic group I'd even seen as a separate group before
October 12, 2025
This was a good book. It was a little politically heavy although I realise this is where the struggles begin for the community. I would have liked to have read more about the families and their lives to understand more of their day to day struggles. Good book anyway and recommended.
June 21, 2024
Gave up after 70 pages. Too tedious and dry, akin to an academic dissertation.
September 2, 2016
An in depth look at England's Traveller community. The book does a good job of outlining the day to day, current and historical struggles of Irish, English and Roma travellers. I was alarmed at the systemic and often hidden policies and political motions bent on furthur marginalising an already diadvantaged group. I could not help but see many parallels with the treatment of Canadian Aboriginal groups. Well researched and written with a compassionate tone I feel this is an important read for all people.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews