ABSTRACT
Caravans are designed and built merely as leisure dwellings, but as the stories from Lake Camping and Camping Mares show, these prefabricated homes on wheels are appropriated, altered and changed in a range of different manners. In a dedicated manner, caravan enthusiasts and potential buyers perform thorough testing and evaluations of mobile dwellings and what they see as material ‘quality’. Inhabiting caravans that are legally categorized as mobile leisure vehicles thus also involves a convenient avoidance of property taxes, shedding yet more light on the ‘freedom’ and flexibility caravanners associate with the mobile dwelling. In both the UK and Sweden, the caravan has come to be attached with ridiculing portrayals of working-class leisure, and in media coverage the caravan is ‘uncool’ in the broadest sense. The stigma of the caravan is thus very much alive, also among its residents that see it as a path to the ‘good life’.
