Travellers' Times - Community Channel

From the Community Channel

This June, Community Channel will be celebrating the long and complex history of the Gypsy Roma Traveller (GRT) community with a series of programming from GRT filmmakers. More information and schedule here.

More recently, Travellers’ Times has been successful enriching the lives of the modern GRT community. Here they explain how they are so vital to their readers:

Travellers’ Times is the only regular national media by and for Gypsies and Travellers and those who work with them. It publishes articles, film and radio features, blog and an events calendar, stories about Traveller achievement, about health, religion, heritage and culture, photographic features on family history, as well as news items about issues around planning and the problems of homelessness and finding sites.
Travellers’ Times website gets an average of 15,000 visits per month and the quarterly magazine is mailed out to a readership of approximately 30,000. You can subscribe to the Travellers’ Times magazine for as little as £14 per year or you can make a donation. Ring 01432 344039 for more information or go online

As Maggie Smith-Bendell (Romani Gypsy Advisory Group, SW division) says: “The Travellers’ Times does many things, not only keeps Gypsies and Travellers up to date with news on planning, evictions, weddings and bereavements, it encourages young Gypsy and Traveller people to be proud of their heritage, seek employment, enter competitions, how to communicate with the settled community.”

Travellers’ Times provides a realistic and positive view of Traveller life and culture in the UK today, a platform for the genuine hopes, fears and achievements of ordinary Traveller families, from their point of view.
School teachers, health workers, housing and planning officers, diversity trainers, legal and citizens advice centres, prison libraries and universities, all subscribe to Travellers’ Times, which helps them to understand and to work more closely with Travellers.

Kate D’Arcy of Cambridgeshire Race Equality & Diversity Service is one of the many public sector workers who uses Travellers’ Times – “Travellers’ Times has provided positive role models of Traveller children who are succeeding against the odds in education and many other young Travellers have been encouraged and inspired by this.”

Watch our film for young people about the website and how to use it:

Every two years our Big Readership Survey helps us to understand who is using the magazine and website, and how it is helping to combat prejudice and misunderstanding, as well as providing vital information about Traveller’s increasing use of the internet and social media.

Our Editor is Romany Traveller and 50% of our staff comes from the Traveller communities. We also run media skills and advocacy training for Gypsies and Travellers – teaching interview and recording techniques, and producing a short radio piece over the 2-day course. Travellers have chosen to cover subjects ranging from religion, medicinal herbs, advantages of living in a house or a trailer, Irish Traveller women’s attitudes to work outside the home.

“I originate from Romani culture and have found the Travellers’ Times to have been a great help to me practically and with inspiration for me as a person who had very little schooling. ……It’s let us become real people. People with talent and focus. People just as able as any to produce interesting material that others value….It has brought us together.” Rosy Mitchell, Cambridgeshire, Traveller

Travellers’ Times exists to support the communities to fight back against the centuries old discrimination against them and refusal to take their voices seriously. The need for this has been clearly demonstrated again recently with the factual entertainment show, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, giving a widely publicised but completely distorted view of Britain’s Traveller communities. This and the prominent Dale Farm eviction last year and the on-going political battles over new sites for homeless Travellers, has pushed Travellers way up the media’s agenda.

Travellers’ Times is non-profit making, and currently funded by Big Lottery and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation. It is published by The Rural Media Company

The Rural Media Company also produced Travellers Remember, a collection of 25 digital stories recalling the personal memories of Gypsy and Traveller families in the West Midlands of their traditional way of life. View online at: http://www.ruralmedia.co.uk/remember/