24-Hour Party People: How Britain's New Age Traveler movement defined a zeitgeist

Members of a family play the violin and flute outside their tent at the Glastonbury music festival in 1989.

"Crusties," we called them. You don't see them around today as much as you did in the 1990s and early 2000s. Back then they were a familiar sight on the streets of Britain's cities. The term evokes white, matted dreadlocks; drab combat fatigues; and a mangy-looking dog on a string traipsing behind. "Crusty" as in encrusted dirt, dirt as a deliberate embrace of grotesquerie, a statement of resistance against society, proof of nomadic hardship. You'd often see them begging in the centers of small cities, drinking, perhaps the more enterprising of them trying to earn a few quid doing street performances, selling woven bracelets, or giving henna tattoos to teenage German tourists. Substance abuse, homelessness, poverty, and trouble with the law were rife among members of the community. In the minds of mainstream society, they were simply a bunch of dropouts in need of a shower. But if you knew how to read the aesthetics of postwar British pop culture, their bashed-up army boots, their piercings, and the unnameable green-brown-grey hue of their clothes signaled that they were among the remaining members of what was once a vibrant subculture.

Dial back the clock to the 1980s and 90s and "crusty" was just a pejorative term for those known as New Age Travelers, members of the "peace convoy," eco-warriors. Going even further back to the 1970s, they were hip-pies, freaks, and long-hairs. New Age Travelers weren't out begging on the streets, but roaming the British countryside in caravans of old double-decker buses, camper vans, and converted army ambulances. Their culture orbited around a jumble of leftist, anarchist, anti-war, and environmentalist causes. They would camp at the edges of small villages and at music festivals, or engage in direct-action protests against motorways tearing through greenbelt land. I remember one bright summer afternoon in 1986, when, as a 10-year-old on a family vacation in rural Dorset, we drove past what seemed to be an infinitely long convoy of travelers along the edge of the road. Vans and trucks were painted in colors that may once have been vivid but had been dulled by exhaust fumes and mud. Men and women who looked like refugees from a future apocalypse stood by their vehicles, uneasily watching the large numbers of police patrolling the road. The travelers belonged to a subculture that was routinely pushed around by heavy-handed law enforcement, and whose fate was directly shaped by the effects of public order and housing legislation.

There is no clear originating moment in New Age Traveler history. They emerged slowly from the British underground of the 1970s, a period characterized by collective disappointment after the revolutions promised by the 1960s failed to materialize. As the 1973 recession pushed the country into economic trouble, leftist politics became more militant while support grew for the far right. Idealistic 1960s experiments in sex, drugs, and communal living—attempts to deprogram from mainstream society—were falling apart in some quarters and retrenching in others. It was the decade in which the Irish Republican Army bombing campaign reached the British mainland, a period of intense social unrest, industrial action, power shortages, and paranoia in the highest establishment circles about leftist threats to the country. The 70s also set a high watermark in British pop history; these were the years when David Bowie and glam rock initiated young minds into new androgynous identities, punk turned disaffection into a DIY revolution, and reggae cemented itself as a major influence on U.K. music. Young people were able to seek an identity in one of youth culture's many tribes, and, in the process, discover new ideas about art, life, and how to live it.

If you were to draw a thumbnail sketch of traveler DNA, one line could be traced back to the music festival circuit of the 1970s. In 1972...