This blog was kindly contributed by Colleen Roper, co-founder of Future4Fairgrounds.
My name is Colleen Roper, and I am part of an organisation called Future4Fairgrounds. We are a group of six Showmen, all women, who came together in September 2020 to provide a platform for the concerns of our community. Our aims are to celebrate our past, raise awareness for our present and protect the future of the Showmen community.
Showmen are a distinct and unique travelling community, intrinsically linked to the fairground industry. We are not an ethnic group, but our tangible cultural heritage is recognised, and this was recently acknowledged in the 2021 census where for the first time we were able to identify using our background and say who we are as a group of people and not just what we do as businesspeople.
