This feature relates to the Dispatches programme Gypsy Eviction: The Fight for Dale Farm.
Over the summer we've criss-crossed Britain from the coasts of Dorset to Yorkshire, from rural Powys to suburban Essex, talking to local residents and their neighbours - English gypsies and Irish travellers living on permanent sites and temporary stopping places.
We haven't found many examples of happy co-existence.
We've also been following the twists and turns at Dale Farm, in Essex, where 400 people are facing eviction. Protestors, high-profile campaigners like Vanessa Redgrave, MEPs - even UN advisers - have all backed the Dale Farm residents, but the courts haven't.
After a six-year legal battle, the bailiffs are due to start clearing the site on Monday morning, 19 September. Our cameras will be there.
Dale Farm has become a huge national story and one that attracts very polarised views. Does it symbolise the struggle of a minority group to continue their traditional lifestyle? Is it an example of a flawed planning system that allows one group to flout rules that apply to everyone else?
The original site at Dale Farm dates back to the 1970s when Basildon Council granted planning permission, but in the last 10 years the site has doubled in size. So one half is legal and one half isn't - and it's the illegal half which faces forcible clearance.
But away from Dale Farm there are smaller scale skirmishes happening all the time, especially over the summer. The travelling community in Britain - that's gypsies and travellers - numbers about 300,000. At least half live in what they refer to as 'bricks and mortar' - houses. Of the other half who live in caravans, most have permanent pitches. But both groups like to hit the road in summer, stopping wherever they can.
This leads to the situations of the kind we found in Sussex and Dorset: one group camped on the cliffs next to the Coastguard helicopter, another on a nature reserve, another on a playing field behind bungalows.
In each case the local council went to court to get an eviction order and the travellers moved on just before it came into effect. In many cases it was almost a game of cat and mouse. The travellers moved a few miles down the road, the council went back to court and local taxpayers complained that they had to foot the bill for the mess left behind.
Then there are the 25,000 members of the travelling community who don't have a permanent site, like the families we met in Leeds. Nationally there's a shortage of about 6000 pitches and in Leeds that means there's no room for them on the one council site or the handful of privately run ones. So they stop on the roadside and are constantly moved on by bailiffs.
Dispatches explores the dilemma this creates for councils - spending money on traveller sites is not a vote winner, but taxpayers might be equally furious to realise that councils spend about £18m a year evicting and clearing up after travellers who stop on illegal sites claiming they've nowhere else to go.
We also look at retrospective planning applications where travellers move onto a site first - usually in the green belt where housing development is strictly limited - and apply for permission afterwards. Thats what's happened in Meriden, near Coventry, and the village is still waiting on the results of the planning enquiry, due later this year, while the gypsy family remains on the site they've occupied for over 16 months.
Dale Farm will grab the headlines this week, but if the illegal half of the site is cleared and 400 travellers have to find somewhere else to live, this issue certainly won't be going away - and that's the bigger picture that we investigate in Dispatches.
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