Life & style

WE OLDIES CAN LOOK AFTER OURSELVES!

When Joan Bakewell was invited to sign up for a new type of retirement scheme, she had visions of ring-fenced holding camps full of huddled oldies. What she discovered was a movement dedicated to tackling the burdens of an isolated old age.

Joan Bakewell
guardian.co.uk, Saturday June 3 2006 00.03 BST

Writing my column in the Guardian about being 70, I was startled one week, having held forth about old peoples' homes, to get a shower of emails wondering why I didn't know about co-housing. One even invited me to sign up with a women-only project: within no time I imagined myself corralled into a nun-like establishment, smacked for using lipstick and forbidden contact with men. Wrong on all counts. But my original scepticism has its roots in stereotypes of which I never expected myself to be guilty.

Who wants, I speculated, to be herded together with oldies in ring-fenced holding-camps at the doors of death. No thanks. Who wants to be cut off from the laughter of children, managed by busybody managers in some British equivalent of America's condominium living or sunset cities. Again, no thanks. The truth is a number of wise and prescient older people have been getting together among themselves to discuss just how they would like to grow old and to plan to bring it about. The result is the dawning of a co-housing movement in this country. Co-housing is neither sheltered housing nor commune. It is a concept neatly balancing autonomy and support, and it is entirely welcome.

The Danish and the Dutch have been doing it for ages. Co-housing was first conceived in Denmark in the mid-1960s and by now 5% of their population live this way. In the Netherlands there are around 200 co-housing groups with an estimated membership of 5,700 aged 50 to 80. A typical community there is a group of 30 or so people based in a cluster of 24 individual apartments with common facilities. Groups can be as large as 90.

Britain has been slower to get off the mark, but there is one enterprise that is already up and running. At Cold Street Farm in Dorset, six like-minded people in their 50s and 60s bought an old farmhouse and a group of holiday cottages. They have already moved in and have now applied for planning permission for a further 11 self-contained living spaces. They eat together once or twice a week and celebrate birthdays, yet each has their own front door and privacy.

Another pilot scheme, called Vivarium, is underway in Fife, Scotland. Both promote a way of life that combines a sense of belonging within a community with individual independence and autonomy. It's a finely tuned balance that avoids regimentation and isolation to equal degrees. It takes some effort getting the balance right.

That's exactly what the OWCH is about. The Older Women's Co-Housing is based in London, so I went along to find out for myself who belongs and what plans they have. The founders came together eight years ago to formulate "a beneficial form of residential community ... that combines private accommodation with other communally-run building services". There are now around 40 members - £3.50 a month for full members, but there are also friends, associates and visitors.

Mostly they are women over 50 years old living on their own in London and taking thought for their future lives. Co-housing, they believe, will provide each of them with an independent setting - a one- or two-bedroom flat - but also put them at the heart of a community with common principles and values, the main one of which is to care for each other. The equivalent, perhaps, of the old-fashioned neighbourhood street for which there is such nostalgia. But co-housing can't just happen: it has to be planned.

I join Mena, Shirley, Christine and Jo one Sunday morning for the monthly meeting of the recruitment and communications task group. There is no chair of the meeting, simply a notetaker: "We are collaborative, not hierarchical." There is no office, no paid employees. They are all volunteers. Other task groups for matters such as membership, development, design and equal opportunity also exist to carry forward plans. There is a quarterly newsletter, a meeting every third Sunday of the month at a sheltered housing complex in Hampstead and a website.

These are persistent women, resolute that their scheme will become reality. Shirley, who has had a fall, broken her shoulder and has her wrist in a sling, insists on taking notes. As one of the founder members, she recalls that when her fellow-founder and the project's inspiration, Madeleine Levius, was dying she made Shirley promise to stand by her graveside and declare that OWCH would happen. That's how purposeful these women are.

Today's agenda involves plans for recruiting new members. This summer they will be taking stalls at three of Ken Livingstone's London festivals: at Finsbury Park, Brent and Coin Street on the South Bank. There is talk of the banner they're designing: "Please let's stick to mauve: yellow and old skin look terrible together." It becomes clear that their contacts stretch across many women's networks: Housing for Women (H4W) is a housing association that is helping them; some belong to The Older Feminist Network founded in 1982; Some to GOD - Growing Old Disgracefully - a network set up in the 90s; some of them were even at Greenham Common.

They strike me as strong-minded, feisty women who share a sense of social conscience and political outlook. They are wary of such definitions: "We don't talk politics much, but we do have a common outlook, yes." They have friendships, too: a group of six of them had been to a poetry-reading the previous night. The degree you join in is clearly up to you, but if you preferred a reclusive life then you might not qualify in the first place.

The meeting gets out the architects' plans for the site on which they expect to exchange contracts in July. It is in a leafy setting near to Wembley High Road, close to local transport, shops and a hospital. The latest version of the drawings includes a balcony for every flat, guest accommodation and several common spaces. They hope to have a completed building by late 2008. All these flats will be outside the broader property sector. They can't be traded on the open market, nor can they be inherited and taken over by family. Children will inherit the proceeds of the sale of a flat to someone next on the waiting list, at a price to be decided by a local assessor. But, I ask, don't people look to property to increase in value and reward their investment? They laugh at me for missing the point. "But we're not about money values, Joan ... we're about something else."

There will be mixed occupancy of the 24 flats. Some will be for sale: around £140,000 for a one-bedroom flat (50 square metres and over), not more than £250,000 for a two-bedroom flat (66 to 72 square metres). Some flats will be rented, some will be mixed - buying into part of the equity and renting the rest. They stress that people living on benefit can apply. They conducted an anonymous survey of members' incomes and found some living on no more than £6,000 a year. Others will be down-sizing from the properties they currently own. Joining the group puts you in line to be considered. With the lapse of time, some original members have had to make other arrangements.

OWCH is, as far as they know, the only co-housing in existence to be entirely for women. Why such an absolute rule? Christine explains: "Women of my generation have sometimes had bad experiences of men, and men of our generation usually dominate. We don't want to be taken over. Perhaps in the future, with a younger generation of more collaborative younger men, the rules may change. But not for us." Jo has recently been to see schemes in Denmark where they laughed at such exclusion. There they try to have 1/3 male occupancy. Indeed, OWCH members don't exclude men from their lives: Jo is 54, still working and has a partner, but is giving thought to her later years. Shirley, in her early 70s, is a widow with children.

They are keen to explain that co-housing will not replace the social services. There will be no warden, no medical care on tap. As they each age and grow feeble and become unable to cope, the group will meet to discuss what to do about them. There may then be a move to hospital or a care home. But I sense no one would be abandoned. They'd surely have plenty of visitors. This scheme is about friendships as much as housing. Loneliness and depression are the hidden burdens of isolated old age. Co-housing is a conceived answer to those very needs.

I've always found it offensive when the problems of ageing are referred to as about "them" (the old) needing to be solved by "us" (the young) as if we lose our marbles when we get our bus pass. This simply won't do any longer. As the proportion of the population over 50 rises steadily from the 40% it is today, it is a question of the old attending to their own lives and not waiting on, or being beholden to, other institutions, be they government, housing developers, charities or old peoples' homes. At last I discover that this has been happening for a good while already and I hadn't known about it. But I do now, and the news is encouragingly good. It may well point the way ahead for future housing plans. Central and local government should certainly be taking note.

[Photos above by Linda Nylind, freelance photographer]

You can contact OWCH at www.owch.org.uk