Notes d'une femme libre

“Most women say it,” observes Argent, a former social worker who is Jewish and fled to Britain from Vienna to escape the Nazis when she was ten years old. “Men a little less, I think. But women very much say, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to live together? We’ll buy a big house…’ ”

“ ‘… and we’ll have a kitchen in the middle and we’ll always have wine,’ ” Jude Tisdall, a 74-year-old resident, pitches in.

“But very few people are able to realise it,” Argent finishes.

All of female life is here: about nine different nationalities, workers and retirees, people who left school at 15 and people with a PhD. Some of the women are widowed after happy marriages, some are divorced after unhappy ones. There’s a lesbian couple sharing one apartment, a few who are dating or have long-term partners and others who prefer to stay single.

Men are allowed to visit — there’s a guest suite for friends and relatives — but they cannot own or rent a home here.

“It’s about taking control of our individual lives. It’s not a rejection of men,” Tisdall says.

The seeds of New Ground were planted in 1998 by Maria Brenton, now 80, who at the time taught a master’s course in women’s studies at Cardiff University. In the late 1990s she had visited North America, Denmark and Holland with a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a policy research organisation working to end poverty, to find out how different countries looked after older people.

“I was able to stay in a fantastic cohousing group of older women overlooking a canal in the middle of Amsterdam,” the academic recalls. “Holland was contemplating the ageing of its society in an inspiring, progressive way that the UK wasn’t back then and, let’s be honest, still isn’t today.”

With an ageing population and higher female life expectancy, about 2.7 million women aged 65 and over live alone in the UK, compared with 1.5 million men.

In the late 1990s, in contrast to the UK, the Dutch government was already allocating grants to help the 55-plus generation plan ahead and live communally.

One warm June day in 1998 in a pub in King’s Cross, Brenton shared the findings from her trip with a group of women from various feminist and housing networks she was involved with. She’d circulated an advert for the event around the different groups and in newspapers.

A core of women who attended that meeting became fixated on the idea of living together as they aged. One of them was north Londoner Shirley Meredeen, a former journalist, teacher, feminist activist and divorcee with two grown-up sons, who was part of a movement called Growing Old Disgracefully (GOD).

“I don’t think she would have minded me saying that she was a bit of a battering ram, which is exactly what the project needed,” Brenton says in a new book, Our Later Years, which documents what the women achieved in their own words.

Meredeen joined forces with Madeleine Levius, another feminist activist, counsellor and teacher, to form the Barnet-based Older Women’s Co-Housing group, or OWCH, because they “loved the idea of being a thorn in the side”, with the aim of developing accommodation with shared facilities, which they would control.

The women spent 12 years searching for a suitable site in London close to hospitals, public transport links and shops. Time and again they were disappointed. When the group turned down one site on a busy crossroads early on, they were labelled “difficult” by some in the housing sector.

But with the help of Hanover Housing Association, a non-profit provider of accommodation for older people, they eventually found an ideal plot: St Martha’s, a former convent school in Union Street, an easy walk from the shops and cafés of High Barnet high street.

Hanover was prepared to finance the purchase and build upfront. But then came a five-year planning battle with Barnet council. Argent recalls how, initially, planning officers said there were already “too many old people” in the borough and that they were worried this new project, which was attracting interest from women across London, would overburden their social care services.

Also, she says, the local authority “just didn’t understand” why the women wanted eight out of the 25 proposed flats to be for social housing tenants. “The women who started this didn’t want it to be seen as a place of privilege just for women who could afford to belong to this kind of community,” explains Tisdall, who had experienced living in a squat when she first moved to London from Dublin in 1971.

Including social housing in the project created a logjam that took eight years to break. But the women stuck to their guns. A London-based charity, Housing for Women, came on board. Hanover covered the £7.4 million development costs. OWCH lined up 17 women who were willing to sell their homes to buy flats for themselves. The remaining eight were sold to Housing for Women, to rent out for social housing.

Funding came close to unravelling on a number of occasions, but the project was thrown a lifeline with a grant of about £1 million from the Tudor Trust, a charitable organisation with a history of supporting equitable housing projects.

Hanover allowed the women to choose the architects. They went with the London-based Pollard Thomas Edwards (PTE), who armed them with disposable cameras to explore the local conservation area, noting roof angles, tile colours and brick types to inform the design. The women remember that PTE thought gathering 26 opinions might be like “herding cats” — but the group had already spent the best part of a decade honing their ideas and had chosen two of their number to liaise with PTE.

They settled on a design of 25 apartments with their own kitchens and “wet room” bathrooms, connected via corridors and walkways to a shared common house with a kitchen, a large table for communal meals, a screen for movie nights and plenty of bookshelves. When I visit, a work-in-progress puzzle is out on a table overlooking the walled garden — a riot of wildflowers around a sun-drenched pergola.

The whole place was future-proofed with extra-wide doorways and automatic doors to accommodate wheelchairs should they be required as the women aged.

The women moved in over two days in December 2016. Madeleine Levius was not among them: she died aged 78 in 2005 and never saw her project finished. Maria Brenton chose not to live in the development she inspired, preferring to move on to other projects. Shirley Meredeen was able to enjoy six years living in the home she fought to create before she died in 2022. There is a prominent plaque by the front door in her memory.

“Right up until her dying day she said to me, ‘You’ve got to keep this going. You’ve got to encourage the next generation of women,’ ” Tisdall says. “We want them to use our experience and to take this over one day.”

This wish is a big part of the reason why the women of New Ground wrote Our Later Years — a manifesto but also a collection of incredible personal stories.

One resident, Lida Mansourian, 65, was a political activist in Tehran who survived the notorious Evin Prison. She later escaped Iran on a camel to reach the Afghan border before seeking asylum in the UK.

Ann Beatty, the youngest resident at 60, was raised in West Hampstead, north London, by an illiterate father and a mother with bipolar disorder. She left school at 15, had a daughter at 18, moved to Sierra Leone to set up a safe house for 65 young girls and now serves as the chief executive officer of an international educational charity.

The corridors that link the apartments are decorated with personalised art, including a huge mosaic of the Thames made from pottery found by 86-year-old Rachel Douglas, a keen mudlark. Another is artwork by 74-year-old Hilary Vernon-Smith, who spent 28 years in charge of set painting at the National Theatre. The postboxes in the mail area are painted in the suffragette colours of green, purple and white.

But with 26 people living together, surely it can’t have been harmony and laughter all the time? “It’s not utopia,” Tisdall says. “It’s not always easy to live with 25 other women. We deal with ageing, illness and disagreements. We’re not Stepford Wives, we have to work at it and negotiate.”

Disagreements can occur over issues as small as whether a wall should be painted pink or green, or sensitive topics such as the selection of new members.

To help them with decision-making, the women underwent formal conflict resolution training. All decisions are made by consensus and if that cannot be reached, there is a vote requiring an 80 per cent majority to pass. If a decision is blocked, the opposing group has one month to present a workable alternative.

The women share responsibility by volunteering for task groups based on their skills, and they handle everything including finance, building maintenance, gardening, housekeeping and communications. There’s an annually elected committee of seven members who report to a monthly meeting attended by all New Grounders.

They employ a managing agent on a flat annual fee, solely to handle health and safety and building regulations, and to collect the service charge, which is set by the residents.

Women wait years for a flat to become available, so the group runs a non-resident member system where those interested can spend time at New Ground.

Over ten years, only five of the flats have changed hands. Two women died; one moved to the coast to be closer to her sister; another resident became too ill and moved to a care home nearby (but still joins the women for days out); and one simply “decided it wasn’t for her”.

“I have friends who hate the sound of this, but they can see why it works for me,” says Anna Watkins, 72.

Some of the women have regular carers, but there’s no hard-and-fast rule that determines when someone is too ill to live there independently. It’s an ongoing discussion, usually with family and friends.

However, there is a “health buddy” system: small groups of three or four who agree to do the shopping or pick up a prescription if their “buddy” is feeling unwell. When Sue Tubb, 79, fell and broke her hip, her neighbours waited with her for five hours until an ambulance arrived.

Another resident had heart surgery and needed no professional aftercare because her neighbours helped her. The group estimates this saved the NHS about £5,000. This is ironic considering the local authority’s initial scepticism about building new senior housing. “I’m quite certain that we have asked less from the local council than an equivalent number of women living alone,” Argent says.

There are only 31 established cohousing communities in the UK and just a handful designed with older people in mind, according to the UK Cohousing Network.