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<\/p>\n‘They’re taking our beliefs, they’re taking our culture away from us’.<\/p>\n
16:00, 08 May 2026<\/p>\n
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A Traveller site in St Anthony’s Park, Avonmouth, has been shut since June 2025(Image: Bristol Live)<\/p>\n
A member of the Traveller community says the closure of a site in Avonmouth<\/a> has left her and many others ‘scattered’ throughout Bristol. Sarah* was living in St Anthony\u2019s Park, a council-run site, before Bristol City Council shut it down and evicted people living there in the June 2025.<\/p>\n Since then, the community, which consisted of at least 13 families, has been spread in disparate locations across Bristol. Sarah said they had been paying the council to live on the site without any issues, before they were evicted due to a large fly tip that had accumulated from people from outside the site dumping rubbish there.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’re all scattered around the place with young children, all while the site is still down there, and they’ve now taken the rubbish out of the site,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe got told to move out of the site for three months and the site would be cleaned up. And that’s not the case, because the site has been cleaned up and they won’t open it, and the caretaker told us that anybody that got eviction orders from the site is not welcome back into the site.\u201d<\/p>\n Travellers were evicted from the site in June 2025(Image: Bristol Live)<\/p>\n Sarah\u2019s father, who suffers from a number of health problems and was recently hospitalised due to a heart attack, has been left to live in a vehicle in an alley by an industrial estate, with no access to facilities or electricity.<\/p>\n The ongoing closure of the site has had two effects: -the pre-existing community made to disperse around Bristol, and any new or returning groups of Travellers are unable to set up on the site, which is on the outer fringes of Bristol.<\/p>\n St Anthony’s Park is meant as a \u2018transit site\u2019, meaning people should only live there for up to thirteen weeks. Some, like Sarah, had been there over a year.<\/p>\n However, that was not the reason the council gave for evicting them, and the site remains closed due to unspecified health and safety issues.<\/p>\n Bristol City Council<\/a> refused to comment on when the site would be open, or the provide more details concerning its ongoing closure.<\/p>\n There is only one other council-approved Traveller site in Bristol, in Ashton Vale, which has no vacancies. With Ashton Vale full and St Anthony\u2019s Park closed, there is an increased chance groups of Travellers will base themselves in more prominent, unauthorised locations.<\/p>\n While many ad-hoc encampments pass through areas without issues, they raise the possibility of conflict between Travellers and the wider public. A group who set up on Highridge Common in South Bristol were recently threatened with legal action<\/a> by the local authority due to an \u2018unusually\u2019 high number of complaints from locals\u2014that group eventually left without the need for bailiffs.<\/p>\n “Our priority is to support ethnic Gypsy and Traveller communities onto full time permanent sites,” a council spokesperson said regarding the Highridge Common group.<\/p>\n![\"Travellers](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0_AMR_080526_AvonmouthTravellers.jpg\")
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