Woooooo, more nerdly government document fun: BOPCRIS: Official British Government publications from 1688-1995!
From 1909:

Apart from a small number of persons who use moveable dwellings as a pastime, van-dwellers are of two classes, showmen and the gypsy class. For showmen no legislation was required. Mr Horne, the chaplain of their guild, stated that there were 4,000 vans and 12,000 souls. The trade was perfectly honest and respectable and its members were well-to-do and in some cases even thriving. There was no complaint against them, but the showmen sometimes complained that localities used existing restrictions to prevent shows.

The gypsy class should be distinguished from tramps- the large nomad population coming from the cities to do hop-picking, pea-picking, etc., who sleep under hedges, in barns and casual wards, and not in vans, and who are a ‘ terror to the neighbourhood’. Gypsies were cleaner than the East End hop-pickers, but had primitive views as to the rights of property, especially in respect of what grows and moves on the earth in a more or less wild state, and were given to petty pilfering. Where they congregated in numbers, e.g. the commons in Surrey, problems of sanitation might arise. The case for further legislation had been made out.