Maria's blog
It is nearly 5 years since New Ground opened with a full complement of 26 members, and in that time, since late 2016, we haven’t seen any turnover. The past 18 months have been a testing time for the group - but who has not had a testing time?
The community was actually well placed to withstand the challenges thrown up by the pandemic - everyone at New Ground knows her neighbours and knows she can call on them for all kinds of support and assistance. We have a wide age range of women over the age of 50 - most of whom lived alone before we moved here - and we set up our cohousing community specifically to have alternative choices as we go forward into the future. An additional motive was to stay independent and in charge of our own lives through working together and drawing upon the collective strengths of the group. We took a lot of care to spend time developing a sense of communal solidarity prior to moving in and worked together to agree a set of shared values and some community policies.
The structures we have set up have stood us in good stead - we have an elected management committee and a series of small teams who take responsibility for various aspects of life at New Ground: maintenance of the building; upkeep of our all-important garden; fire alarm safety, finance and procurement, etc. as well as external communications and maintenance of our website. We also set up a small team to keep us as safe as possible and familiarised with the requirements of the successive lockdowns. Our weekly communal meals remain suspended; during the lockdowns our common house was put mostly out of use and all door handles and rails around the building were sanitised regularly. The summer months were fine for socially distanced parties on the lawn and keep fit sessions in the car-park. The group found the winter months hard, but we soon adapted to monthly community meetings via zoom, and small groups also took to zoom for play reading, memoir writing, film and book discussions and ‘coffee mornings’.
We are a resilient group - what comes to mind is the question ‘What would life have been like for us during the lockdowns if we were still living in our previous homes scattered around London?’ One of our number answered this question with ‘It would have been awful. I would have been stuck in my 2nd floor flat, with no garden, not knowing my neighbours, and I would have been totally isolated.’ Sharing responsibility for our lives together means we have a range of skills and talents to draw upon.
Our website (owch.org.uk) gives a lot of background information on New Ground, as well as some helpful short films. Just to summarise, we have 25 flats plus common facilities like a large garden, laundry, common house, guest room etc. The group comprises 17 leaseholders and 8 social rental tenants, with a small housing association as landlord for the latter. There is no discernible difference between the tenures either in terms of the occupants or their flats - all have an equal voice in the community. New Ground itself has won a number of architectural awards, but the award we as a group would give it is a prize for including us in shaping its design. Besides the physical features, New Ground stands out for its exceptional social architecture - the group itself manages and controls everything and mutual support underpins relationships in the whole scheme. Our original goal was to create neighbourliness - and this we have sustained.