The Wandering Tribes: recovering the lost lives and landscapes of the railway navvies

This project focuses on the navvies - the neglected men and women who built the railways. At the height of railway construction, between 1830 and the 1860s, these itinerant workers moved from site to site living in temporary camps, often removed from established settlements and far from home, but near to the new railway. The legacy of their labours is all around us and still in use today - the banks, bridges, tunnels, cuttings, and approaches of the modern railway landscape. Yet the legacy of their distinctive lifestyles, and what that can tell us about transient communities in contemporary Britain, has not been explored. This project draws upon the textual and material sources available at the NRM and combines them with new approaches and datasets - digital newspapers, archeological surveys, and community engagements - to create an important new history of this lost community. It will give voice and colour to a group who were fundamental to railway history and who deserve their place of honour in the upcoming redesign of the Great Hall, yet are overdue a dedicated interdisciplinary study to understand them as a distinctive community and their place alongside historical and contemporary migratory worker cultures