Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an ethnographic account of the temporal experience of a family of Irish Travellers in London. It demonstrates that while Travellers’ temporal experience is fluid and multifaceted, it is their dreaded expectations of what the future portends that shapes their sense of time.

Paper long abstract:

Irish Travellers are one of the most marginalized groups in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Influential work focusing on the time-making activities of marginalized groups, suggests that they purposefully orient their temporal horizons to the present. This paper sets out to destabilize this approach through examining how the threat and implementation of eviction by a borough council shaped the sense of time of an extended family of Irish Travellers living in an extra-legal camp in London. To do this the paper presents an ethnographic account demonstrating that, though Travellers’ temporal experience is fluid and multifaceted, it is their dreaded expectations of what the future portends that shapes their sense of time. Therefore, Travellers’, temporal horizons are not present-oriented but are shaped by the state’s ability to impose spatial and temporal regimes on them, through implementing eviction proceedings.

The paper ends by examining how this eviction is part of the council’s attempts to implement their new masterplan to redevelop the area that encompasses the Travellers’ encampment. In this scheme, Travellers are excluded from the council’s futurist vision of fabricating, what the advertising hoardings that litter the area term, ‘a new part of the city’. Therefore, while the council shaped the Travellers’ sense of time through threatening their future in the camp; the future envisioned by the council, redevelopers, and the broader field of actors involved in regenerating the late-liberal city, had no place, and more crucially, no time, for these Travellers.