Community Development Journal Advance Access originally published online on March 18, 2009
Community Development Journal 2009 44(2):263-268; doi:10.1093/cdj/bsp009
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© Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. 2009 All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Nomads under the Westway, Irish Travellers, Gypsies and Other Traders in West London
email: snis@eircom.net
Christopher Griffin, University of Hertfordshire Press, Hatfield, UK, 2008, 321 pp. (+6 pp preface, 18 pp bibliography, 15 pp index), ISBN-10 1-902806-54-9, ISBN-13 978-1-902806-54-9, paperback £14.99/US$29.95.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Between 1984 and 1987, London-Irish anthropologist Christopher Griffin spent a total of 2 years as warden of a large site in north London, 85% of its residents Irish Travellers. He then emigrated to Australia where – with occasional return visits, most recently in 2004 – he has lived ever since. Twenty years on, he has written his observations of life on the site within a context of both personalised (autobiographical) and localised (the geography of the borough, its economic and social history) space and time. That he has done so in plain English, and included long introductions to basic sociological and anthropological theory, suggest that the target audience is general rather than academic.
The back cover of Nomads under the Westway promises ‘a detailed survey of cultural practice amongst Travellers and Gypsies today’. This begs two questions, the most obvious of which is how ‘data substantially gathered twenty years ago’