Right now, the Government is consulting on changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). That might sound technical, but the reality is simple: Planning policy decides whether Gypsy and Traveller families can have a lawful place to live. For […]
20 February 1856.In the Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, nearly 500 years of enslavement formally ended. Between 1385 and 1856, Romani people were legally treated as property. They were owned by monasteries, noble families and the state. They were […]
I was told my whole life that I was English. English Gypsy. It wasn’t said harshly. It wasn’t said defensively. It was simply offered as fact, the way families hand down recipes or habits or certain turns of phrase. It […]
Introduction This is not a rewriting of Wuthering Heights. It is an imagining of the silence around it. In Emily Brontë’s novel, Heathcliff arrives without history, a child from Liverpool, marked as “Gypsy,” and treated as other from the moment […]
There is something deeply familiar about the current online narrative surrounding the new Wuthering Heights adaptation. Familiar, because Romani people have seen this move before The argument goes something like this: “Gypsy was a generic term.” Or “He was probably […]
Tonight I spent my time writing welfare reports. Not abstract exercises, not box-ticking paperwork, but detailed accounts of how our communities actually live. I wrote about how Gypsy and Traveller communities operate intrinsically: how we form micro-communities grounded in kinship, […]
We’re used to hearing it. “You break the rules.”“You don’t follow the system.”“Why can’t you just do things properly?” Those comments get thrown at Gypsy & Traveller families all the time, as if exclusion is a personal failing rather than […]
Content Warning: This blog contains references to racism, forced displacement, slavery, institutional abuse, forced exclusion, state violence, cultural erasure and intergenerational trauma experienced by Gypsy and Traveller people under colonial and state systems. We live within a colonial system that […]
Before We Begin You can now find our new explainer graphic —“CIC vs Charity: What’s the Difference?” — right below this post.We made it after this week’s unexpected learning curve. 📨 A Funding Lesson We Didn’t Expect This week, we […]
The Price of Being “Strong” There’s a question that has been burning inside me for a long time, and it’s one I can’t keep swallowing anymore: Where is my grace? Who gives me sympathy? As Gypsy and Traveller staff, we […]