The Romany museum at Romany Ri
A vardo is a horse-drawn Romani living wagon. There is a Romany museum on this site, with genuine bow top wagons and Romany artefacts on display, and a host who grew up in the tradition rather than reading about it.
Ring Clarence to ask about visiting the museum.
The short answers
A vardo is a traditional horse-drawn living wagon used by Romani people in Britain. The word is Romani. Not a cart and not a caravan in the modern sense: a home on wheels, built to be lived in all year and pulled by one horse.
The type with a canvas tilt stretched over hooped ash or hazel above a low painted wooden body. Lighter than an all-timber wagon, and the type most associated with Romany families travelling in England and Wales.
Genuine bow top wagons and Romany artefacts, on display on the site.
Clarence Ware, who is on site. He is from a travelling family and a proud historian.
The collection here
The museum is on the site at Springdale Farm, alongside the pitches. It holds genuine bow top wagons and Romany artefacts, on display.
Clarence Ware is your host and he is on site. He is from a travelling family and a proud historian, and he offers guests the chance to learn about the traditional way of the Travellers. That includes showing you how meals were cooked, out on the pitch, over the fire.
If you would like to see the museum, or you want to know whether you can visit without staying, ring and ask him. That question is not one this website can answer for him.
General heritage background
The rest of this page is general background on Romani living wagons in Britain: what they were, how they were built and why so few are left. It describes the tradition as a whole. It is not a description of what is on display here, and nothing in it should be read as a claim about the wagons on this site.
Before the wagons
Romani people were travelling in Britain for centuries before anybody slept in a wagon. The older shelter was the bender tent: hazel rods cut green, bent into hoops, pushed into the ground and covered with canvas or blankets. It went up in an hour and came down in less, and it was pitched at the atchin tan, the stopping place.
Living wagons only became common from around the middle of the nineteenth century. They were expensive, they needed a good horse and decent roads, and for a family that had one, the wagon was the single most valuable thing they owned. The classic era ran from roughly the 1850s until motor transport ended it, wagon by wagon, through the middle of the twentieth century.
Almost everything people picture when they picture a Gypsy wagon comes from that one stretch of about eighty years.
General heritage background
Wagons were named after the shape of the body, or after the town where the best-known builders worked. The differences are structural, not decorative: each shape is a different answer to the same problem of getting the most room inside for the least weight behind one horse.
The drawings below are our own line diagrams of the shapes, drawn to show how each type is put together.
A light wooden underbody with a canvas tilt stretched over hooped ash or hazel. Lighter to pull and easier on a bad road than an all-timber wagon, which is why it became the type most associated with Romany families travelling in England and Wales.
Built like a bow top, but with the front left open under the hooped canvas instead of closed by a door. You look straight out at the fire from the bed.
Named after the town its best-known builders, Dunton and Sons, worked in. The body is straight-sided at the bottom and slopes outward from the waist up, and the tall rear wheels stand outside the body. The most heavily carved and gilded of the types.
Also called the cottage wagon. The sides project outward on a ledge above the wheels, which run underneath, buying extra width inside without making the wagon wider on the road.
Straight vertical sides from floor to roof, with a raised clerestory roof called a mollycroft that lets light and air in along the top. Associated with Burton-on-Trent, where Orton and Spooner built them.
General heritage background
A living wagon was wheelwright's work before it was anything else. The underframe and the wheels came first, and the wheels are the hardest part: an elm hub, oak spokes driven into it, curved ash or elm felloes making up the rim, and an iron tyre shrunk on hot so that it grips everything together as it cools.
The body was framed in ash, which bends without snapping, and panelled thinly to keep the weight down. Weight was the whole argument. Everything a builder did was a trade between room to live in and the load one horse could pull up a hill all day.
That is where chamfering comes from. Every timber that could spare it had its edges bevelled off, which took real weight out of the wagon over hundreds of pieces, and left a run of clean angled faces for the painter to work on. The carved stops at the ends of a chamfer are one of the places you can see how much care went into a wagon that was, after all, somebody's house.
General heritage background
The painting is the part everyone remembers, and it followed rules. A deep body colour, most often a dark green or a red, carried the panels. Over it went the lining: fine parallel lines run freehand with a long-haired brush, following the edge of every panel and turning the corners in a flourish. Beside a thick line there is usually a thinner one, called the cut line, because two lines read better than one from the far side of a field.
Then the scrollwork. Carved and gilded acanthus scrolls on the porch brackets and the wheel hubs, running scroll along the waistboards, gold leaf laid over size and burnished. Roses, vines, grapes, birds and horses were painted onto the panels. Inside, cut and bevelled glass, mirrors and polished brass caught the light from the stove.
None of it was decoration for its own sake. A wagon was the most public thing a family owned, and the paint on it said who they were before they said a word.
The ornament used throughout this website is drawn in that tradition: gilded scrollwork, fine lining and painted chamfer bands, in the colours a wagon painter would have worked in.
General heritage background
Wagons wore out, and wagons were sold. But the main reason the survivors are rare is a custom rather than an accident: when the owner of a wagon died, their possessions, and often the wagon itself, were burned. It was a matter of respect and of not keeping what belonged to the dead.
So a wagon that has come through a hundred years and more is unusual twice over. It survived the road, and it survived the tradition. That is what people are looking at when they look at a restored bow top, and it is why restoring one properly is worth the trouble.
The words
