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OWCH IN TOUCH
Issue #1 of an occasional newsletter
Dear friend We welcome your interest, whether you want to be resident here, want to set up your own cohousing group, or simply wish us well and want to know how we are getting on. Do forward this to anyone else you think might be interested. Marion Virgo, Charlotte Balazs, Maggs Beltran (editorial team) HERE WE ARE Hedi Argent (Membership)
The “big move” began on November 30th and was completed on February 13th. After 18 years of planning, plotting, hopes, setbacks and preparation, the first couple moved in at the end of autumn and the last tenant will join us at the end of winter. Then we will be complete and soon able to look forward to life without builders. For the builders are still very much with us. There are expected snags and unexpected defects: hot water that isn’t, showers that flood, an erratic lift, a complicated heating system, unfinished this and that. But one and all, we are happy to be here! We love our individual flats, which are becoming more individual each day as we make them our own with our personal possessions.
Communal life has got off to a good start. There is the business of managing ourselves and our building: small task groups are responsible for our guest room, our finances, our garden, equality and diversity, membership, car parking (we are
The first full OWCH Business Meeting in New Ground!
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learning to share our cars), communication, legal issues, the laundry, housekeeping and the common areas, which include a common room, kitchen and office. Fortnightly management committee meetings (a group of seven members are elected annually) are followed two days later by a meeting of the whole community, where decisions are made. Meetings take up a good deal of our time, but most meetings tend to end in chat over a cup of tea or a shared meal. When we have settled more, we will have fewer meetings.
We are busy building our community. We are exploring the boundaries between valuing our privacy and enjoying all the benefits of living together as good neighbours. Living the life is not the same as waiting to live it. Probably none of us realised how exhausted we would be when we finally, after a year of delays, moved in together; how pre-‐occupied we would be with putting our homes together. Nevertheless, we have gone out to eat, to see films, to go shopping – not all together, but a few of us on the spur of the moment, or after a quick whip around by email. We have other outings planned in the spring and weekly communal meals will start this month when we are all here. Many of us are apprehensive about cooking for 26 people, but we will eat and learn. Most importantly, we are not alone and we are not lonely. The balance between communality and privacy seems about right. It is very early days but we are very positive.
We are also beginning to reach out to the wider community. We have invited all the other residents in Union Street to a coffee morning and afternoon tea. They have endured nearly two years of demolition, construction, noise, dust and parking restrictions in a narrow one way road. Now we aim to become their good neighbours. We agree with Philip Larkin that “We should be careful of each other, we should be kind, while there is still time”
More than 300 women have responded to the recent publicity about OWCH; we hope to encourage many of them to form other cohousing groups so that New Ground will not long remain the only cohousing scheme for older women in the UK.
MOVING IN Barbara Gough (Relocation)
Advance planning was essential to ensure that 26 members could relocate to High Barnet in as short a period as possible. We decided at an early stage to form a Relocation Task Group and interview three relocation companies. We chose Seamless Relocation on account of their experience of moving a group into a new-‐build. We met with Seamless to discuss all aspects of moving house and we provisionally booked three weeks to move everyone in. They recommended a few removal companies but each member made it her responsibility to interview and choose her own remover. Seamless then negotiated dates with each company and renegotiated
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twice when the completion date was postponed. They were also at hand to advise and provide additional help if needed. Most of us used the packing service offered by our removal companies. We had to be ready for February 2015 but completion was repeatedly delayed, so most buyers had to complete the sale of their homes well in advance of moving in and stayed with friends and relations, some for over a year. It was a different experience for our tenants who planned to rent from Housing for Women who bought the 8 rental flats. H4W counselled against giving notice to current landlords until their purchase was absolutely secure, and consequently our tenants had to postpone moving until the purchasers were already in occupation. New Ground is on a small one-‐way street in High Barnet, very near the centre of the town, so we planned two moves a day with the help of Seamless. Our final completion date was the end of November and several members were by then desperate to move out of their temporary accommodation. As with all house moves, there was an anxious time waiting for solicitors to complete with the seller, but finally we started to move in at the beginning of December 2016. As the builders were still here we initially used their parking suspension for the removal vans and Seamless were here to ensure that each member had the help she needed. Some had the support of friends and family as well. Because the site was not at that point secure, with entry gates still not lockable, the developer Hanover employed a 24-‐hour security company to patrol the premises and they were helpful to us in all sorts of ways we hadn’t foreseen. During the first three weeks of December all the leaseholders save one moved in. By then our three-‐week contract with Seamless had expired and from then on it was up to our own Relocation Group to ensure that removals went as smoothly as possible. This was frustrating in some cases as organizing a parking suspension with Barnet council for £170 a day proved a hit and miss affair and using visitor parking permits in an area where every parking space is immediately taken by locals was very difficult to organize. However with a lot of cooperation between members and with use of our own car park for small deliveries our tenants were able to move in, the final move being scheduled for 13th February 2017. Our builders who are still here with us in February have also looked after us during the moving-‐in period.
LIVING HERE Janet Wood (Social) I have been living at New Ground for over a week now and I cannot believe the change it has made to my life. I have a brand new flat, new furniture and live in a community where I know and like all 25 of my neighbours. I love the feel of our building as we are all arriving at the place we want to be and we have the huge benefit of being able to choose to have company or keep to the privacy of our own flats.
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I feel hugely optimistic and happy and so incredibly lucky to have been given the opportunity to live here, I have booked another 30 years at least! I have never had any outside space before so now not only do I have a balcony but will be able to help and learn in the garden and on the allotment. Wonderful to think we will be able to cook fruit and vegetables we have grown when having communal meals. I came to this group not knowing anything about co housing and now we are nearly all together I really appreciate the ethics and values needed to make sure we all benefit and enjoy living together. I do hope this ground breaking story will encourage others to go down the route of co housing. ‘NEW GROUND’ GOES PUBLIC Maria Brenton (Consultant) The long awaited move by OWCH members to their new homes has attracted a deluge of interest from hundreds of women in the UK who would like the same, and from admirers and enquirers as far flung as the USA, Australia, France and Spain. One woman’s comment: ‘I hope people learn from this for the future for generations to come; it’s one of the best things I have heard about in a long time. Just brilliant...’ was typical of many. Most of these enquiries were stimulated by OWCH members appearing on national BBC TV News programmes – edited extracts of which appeared on Facebook and have been viewed, we are told, more than a million times. Senior Cohousing as a collaborative way of living where older people stay in charge of their own lives has now made and is continuing to make the headlines. This was part of our plan. In accepting the generous funding of the Tudor Trust, which made possible the inclusion of eight flats for social renters, we undertook to blaze a trail for others to follow, and to make available to older people elsewhere the lessons we have learned. So, while the cynic might label us as inveterate self-‐publicists, there is method in our madness. We have a message to put out! The message is ‘You too can do this – learn from us and from what we view as the mistakes to avoid’. The message to local authorities, planners and housing providers, is that ‘Senior Cohousing is a valuable investment in the wellbeing of older people – please make it easier to achieve’. Broadcast media – such as Woman’s Hour, aired shortly – have been followed by discussion in the online and paper press. When you are featured by the Daily Mail’s Inspire magazine, by the Financial Times and by Red Pepper all in one week, you
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know you are hitting a wide audience. Time Out follows, with a different focus for Valentine’s Day. We are running three information sessions in March and April for the first 90 or so women on our mailing list who respond to our invitation. We will, however, soon divert all similar enquiries to the UK Cohousing Network, as we are not equipped to respond to such a high volume of interest, and we will have built sufficient reserve numbers shortly. We will also continue our crusade for more senior cohousing and I will be working with the UK Network to make information and advice on creating senior cohousing accessible to a wide audience. This, the first of our occasional newsletters, will try to bring you news from time to time. Now we have got the ball rolling, it is time to give the OWCH community, the last of whom moved in on February 13, a chance to settle in, rest and consolidate their ‘virtual’ community into the actual reality of ‘New Ground’ described in this newsletter.