ABSTRACT
From the early 1980s until the mid-1990s, the British New Age Traveller community created a vibrant scene that made its mark on the landscape and wider culture. Drawing from the post-war squatting movement, homegrown jazz festivals of the 1950s and the American hippies, Travellers were always an eclectic mix, unified by their existence on the margins. This chapter explores the development of the movement and in particular addresses the popularity of the 1970s free festival scene and then the punk explosion that led to the blurred subset of the ‘crusty’. It argues that ‘crusties’ were artifacts of a complex and often contradictory mobile subculture, one that attracted the optimistic, the disaffected and the anarchic. It explores how the increasing visibility of the ‘crusties’ in the 1980s, and uneasy embracing of 1990s’ rave, ultimately led to extreme political interference that guaranteed their demise. Deliberately unfashionable even in their heyday, and unusually a subculture that was not rooted in a particular genre of music, ‘crusties’ deserve recognition for their considerable contribution to twenty-first-century mainstream British culture.
