Lots of new and exciting initiatives sprout up in North London, it seems. One that seems to have inspired a number of people is a proposed development on the old St Luke’s Hospital site in Muswell Hill. "Cohousing Woodside" has taken its name from the road running immediately south of the site, where the hospital is currently being demolished. We are a group of potentially thirty households who will live on the leafy north-west corner of a scheme being built mostly for over 55s. We’ll be near the shops and a frequent bus route, too.
3D visualisation by Pollard Thomas Edwards architectsA cohousing community is a way of ensuring you know your neighbours - but it’s more than that. We are a group of men and women who mostly have not known each other until now, but who are all looking for similar things. Whether the aim is to downsize from a house and garden too large for present needs or capacities, or to avoid a future alone, or just to enjoy a more active and companionable life, members of Cohousing Woodside are "signed up to be neighbourly". We hope to move in to our flats and houses in mid-2017, having by then sorted out our shared ideas as to how we want to live as a group. We will need to work out what balance we want between personal privacy and conviviality, how we are going to use and enjoy our "Common House", how we are going to make the most of our shared garden, etc.
The group meets each month in Muswell Hill. This get-together is usually a combination of reporting back on negotiations with the developers, pushing on with our own group agreements which have been worked on by small sub-groups, and sharing a potluck sup-per. There are details on our website (www.cohousingwoodside.co.uk) such as our Development Plan and regular blogs. Enquirers and visitors can also, via the website, come along to find out about the project, which is one of the very few cohousing developments for our age-group in the UK. We still have units to reserve for sale - and we benefit from an "early-bird" discount too.
We are hoping to encourage a sense of community on the whole six-acre site as it gets built, but the difference that cohousing makes is that we have set out to be a community right from the start, looking out for each other, sharing tools and other resources and - crucially - sharing cars. Some of us are still working. Some are retired or "otherwise busy". Some still have kids at home. We are part of a very slowly growing national movement - the OWCH (Older Women’s Cohousing) group is ahead of us in Barnet. There are up to a dozen senior cohousing groups to be found around the country. All are looking to compensate for the anonymity of many modern neighbourhoods and to plan for a future when kids may have flown the nest, jobs come to an end and people are asking "what’s next that is comforting or exciting or challenging?. Or all three?"
