New Age travellers
persons, espousing New Age and hippie beliefs, traveling between music festivals and fairs to live in a community with others who hold similar beliefs, living in vans, lorries, buses, cars, caravans, bender tents, tipis or yurts
New Age Travellers (synonymous with and otherwise known as New Travellers) are people located primarily in the United Kingdom generally espousing New Age beliefs with hippie or Bohemian culture of the 1960s. New Age Travellers used to travel between free music festivals and fairs prior to a crackdown in the 1990s. New Traveller also refers to those who are not traditionally of an ethnic nomadic group but who have chosen to pursue a nomadic lifestyle.
A New Traveller's transport and home may consist of living in a van, vardo, lorry, bus, car or caravan converted into a mobile home while also making use of an improvised bender tent, tipi or yurt. Some New Travellers and New Nomads may stay in guest bedrooms of hosts, or pay for inexpensive affordable lodgings while living in different locations around the world as part of their New Traveller lifestyle.
"New Age" travellers largely originated in 1980s and early 1990s Britain, when they were known pejoratively as crusties because of the association with "encrusted dirt, dirt as a deliberate embrace of grotesquerie, a statement of resistance against society, proof of nomadic hardship."
History
Origins
The movement originated in the free festivals of the 1960s and 1970s such as the Windsor Free Festival, the early Glastonbury Festivals, Elephant Fayres, and the huge Stonehenge Free Festivals in Great Britain. However, there were longstanding precedents for travelling cultures in Great Britain, including travelling pilgrims, itinerant journeymen and traders, as well as Irish Travellers, Romani groups and others.
Peace convoy
In the UK during the 1980s the travellers' mobile homes—generally old vans, trucks and buses (including double-deckers)—moved in convoys. One group of travellers came to be known as the Peace Convoy after visits to peace camps associated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The movement had faced significant opposition from the British government and from mainstream media, epitomised by the authorities' attempts to prevent the Stonehenge Free Festival, and the resultant Battle of the Beanfield in 1985—resulting in what was, according to The Guardian, one of the largest mass arrests of civilians since at least the Second World War, possibly one of the biggest in English legal history.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “New Age travellers” is persons, espousing New Age and hippie beliefs, traveling between music festivals and fairs to live in a community with others who hold similar beliefs, living in vans, lorries, buses, cars, caravans, bender tents, tipis or yurts. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through travellers, persons and espousing, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q949318. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “New Age travellers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.