Old Hall Community

Hopefully you are not getting tired of hearing about intentional communities but we promise this will be the last one! The last one for our trip blog posts at least, though not forever, as we now intend them to be a big part of our post-trip future as well. Old Hall was our fifth and final intentional community in the UK. After how much we enjoyed our two weeks WWOOFing at Redfield, we were excited to experience Old Hall in a similar way. We loved it just as much. We were welcomed into the folds of a large, active, and vibrant community. We got to participate in the activities of daily life, inhabit a character-filled historic house, and learn about another experiment in community living.

The oldest part of Old Hall was built in 1710 as a manor house. Since then, the building has become progressively more labyrinthine through a series of expansions and transformations. It passed through phases as a convent, WWII barracks, and most recently a Franciscan friary. Because of its religious history, the Old Hall building contains its own big chapel. All you have to do is turn into a nondescript side hallway, pass through a lounge room, and lo and behold you are in a church! That was the character of the place — endless new discoveries around every corner. It took us a few days to learn our way around.

After the friary closed in the 1970’s, some of the founding members of Old Hall saw the building come up for sale. They ran a newspaper ad in The Guardian for “middle class socialists” and attracted enough interested people to purchase the house and land and start the community. Starting a brand new community from scratch with a building in great need of repair was no small undertaking. But they approached it with the creativity, energy, and experimental spirit of the 1970s. So often stories of success seem to be like this, people jumping in with faith against the odds and not letting the feeling of “being in over their head” get them down. Since then, Old Hall has grown and unfolded into what it is today. Individual members and families have come and gone, but Old Hall itself remains a vital community. It is a pretty stable community as well, as many original and long term members still call it home.

Old Hall differs from Redfield in a few ways. First, while Redfield’s legal structure is “housing cooperative,” Old Hall’s is “housing association.” What does this mean exactly? While Redfield members pay a monthly rent, Old Hall members buy into the housing association at the real estate value of their unit, perhaps £100,000, more as if they were buying a house or condo. When Old Hallers move away, they sell their unit to the new member. Obviously, this high level of financial investment means that people generally stay for a long time. Imagining living in a community ourselves, we would appreciate the higher level of stability and continuity that this long term commitment creates. However, like most young people we have nowhere near the necessary capital, so we can imagine Old Hall’s structure making it harder to attract young people to a community.

The next difference is size. We had a lot more names to remember at Old Hall (50 people as opposed to 25) and a lot more land to learn our way around (80 acres as opposed to 17). In general, activities at Old Hall were done on a larger and more systematic scale which appealed to us in terms of efficiency. Specifically, with their large amount of land and greater number of people, Old Hall is able to have a strong focus on food production. Although they currently buy a portion of their food in bulk, they do produce a significant amount of their own food. Community members said that if they really dedicated themselves to it they could be almost entirely self-sufficient. We could see this in the scale of the fields: more than 100 apple trees, half a dozen cows for milking, flocks of chickens, geese, sheep, big fields of potatoes, carrots, onions, beans, an enormous kale patch, kitchen vegetable gardens, and on and on.

Lucky us, we were there right in the heart of autumn harvest. We would line up at mealtimes and pile our plates full of homegrown bounty: Old Hall’s own pork, potatoes, carrots, courgettes (the British term for zucchini), and kale. Dessert might be baked apples from their orchard, topped with yogurt from their cows. Big batches of fresh bread and rolls issued from the kitchen almost every day. These were once made from their own grain but are no longer, by community taste preference.

Just like at Redfield, we loved the way communal cooking allows one to enjoy well-rounded, diverse, elaborate homemade meals every single day. These are benefits that you would not always have the time or energy to do on your own. For most days of the month, all you have to do is show up when the bell rings! Then once or twice a month, you get to cook for the group. We tried our hand at cooking one evening when nobody else had signed up, making an enormous pot of our favorite meal, lentil curry. Another small difference between Redfield and Old Hall is while Redfield shares communal dinners, Old Hall shares both lunches and dinners. More Old Hallers are retired or otherwise “around” during the day, so this ability to share lunches as well made the community feel even more integrated.

Despite some of these small differences between Old Hall and Redfield we found the similarities to be far more noticeable. Similar to Redfield, Old Hall has no strong ideology, simply the desire to live in community with an ecological focus. The culture, energy, and direction of Old Hall reminded us a lot of Redfield. Most community members want to live closer to the land, with a smaller ecological footprint, and eat fresh nourishing food every day. In passing we heard one community member happily remarking to another “Where else could I live and be able to milk a cow every day?” Just like at Redfield, food and farming came up again and again as central factors pulling the community together. All of these similarities made extra sense when we learned that Redfield was actually modeled after Old Hall when it was created. The two communities maintain a close relationship to this day, with an annual volleyball competition and get-together. Additionally, one of our Redfield hosts’ father lives at Old Hall, so it was especially fun to connect with him.

It was instructive to learn some of the subtle differences between the two places. As we think about how we would like to do things in a community we might join or create, things as mundane as washing up are interesting to observe. At Redfield, everyone washed up together after dinner, so that after a short and intense flurry of activity the place is spick and span in no time. In contrast, Old Hall has a community job rota that people sign up for (or sometimes don’t), and doing the dishes is one of those tasks. Occasionally the skyscrapers of dishes would sit around giving plaintive looks to all passers-by… “wash me!” They always ended up washed in the end but sometimes they had to wait awhile for some brave soul to come forward.

There were more people consistently around at Old Hall, a sociability that we enjoyed. Although evenings were very quiet, when everyone retired to their private quarters, in the day it was generally quite lively. People sat at the outdoor picnic tables chatting over tea, kids ran around the yard, cooks chopped vegetables in the kitchen, gardeners came and went with wheelbarrows, people read the newspaper and talked about the world. Although Redfield had a similar vibrant energy, with twice as many people Old Hall naturally had more activity. This is one of our favorite parts of community living, always having someone to greet, have a conversation with, help out, or simply share a space with.

And now for the unavoidable challenges. Decision making is always a top one, with conflicting perspectives, difficult personalities, and institutional slowness. 40 different adults have 40 different perspectives on any particular issue. It’s easy to glamorize community living, but it is also hard work. There are long-running arguments and issues that never really get solved or examined. When people do agree on things (such as it being a good idea to install a dishwasher), then you still need someone to come forward and actually spearhead that initiative, or else nothing ever happens. We got to sit in and observe one of Old Hall’s community meetings, getting a taste for what it might be like if we lived in a community. Like Redfield, the Old Hall community makes decisions by consensus, ideally based on deep listening, respect, and the overall good of the community. The structure is slightly different, though. First, since Old Hall is larger it has some sub-committees which address particular topics. Second, while Redfield’s general meetings are all but required, Old Hall’s are not quite as well attended which makes it harder to conclude decisions.

At Old Hall we heard more complaints than at Redfield about people not pulling their fair share of the weight, or at least perceived not to be. With no enforceable way to make sure people contribute equally, several members referenced an imbalance in how much different members contribute to the community. While the Old Hall community recommends 12-15 hours contribution per week, we heard that some members do 3 while others do 30. Of course, everyone is in a different life situation but it did seem like such an imbalance could create resentment!

Similar to Redfield, we enjoyed helping with a diversity of tasks and getting to know many community members. Working in the gardens alongside our hosts gave us lots of time to get to know them as friends as well as pick their brains about community living. We won’t put you to sleep with an endless list of all that we did, but here are some of the highlights: picking apples, clearing brush from tree work, picking bean pods off the plants, cleaning and sorting onions, weeding and planting, burning brush from the apple orchard, arranging the bee boxes for winter, and feeding the dragon. Wait what?!!? The Dragon is Old Hall’s enormous biomass boiler which provides hot water and heating for the building. Its favorite meal is waste wood chips, which need to get loaded by wheelbarrow onto a feeder ramp every other day. Along with their large solar array, the Dragon is part of Old Hall’s goal of energy sustainability. We also helped with random tasks like wheeling a donated deep freeze across the “village”(what we would call a town), moving sofas between units, and setting up the stage for a concert in the church across the street. Julia returned for the concert, and the string quartet was sublime! Another day our host took us to the Wednesday morning tea social at the church. All of our activities were punctuated with lovely tea breaks. Everyone we talked to was minorly shocked that tea breaks are not a thing in the United States.

Besides helping out community members we had some of our own chores to attend to. Now that we purchased plane tickets for India we began getting serious about all the other details. We applied for the e-Tourist visa on their mind bogglingly convoluted website. For example, conflicting instructions would be given at three different places on their official website. Aaarrgh! Why did we even decide to go to this crazy country? The applications also gave us a chance to look deeply at our self identity. We filled in the lines with our best guess. Occupation: Traveler. Employer: Self. Designation: Explorer. We hoped the bureaucrats would be cool with this. But fortunately everything worked out! Next task was going into a pharmacy to get our necessary shots. Colby got two in a row and didn’t even faint from his needle phobia!

Besides all the work, the Old Hall community also knows how to have fun. Two of the members were getting married, so of course we were invited to the wedding. A pirate themed wedding. (“All in favor, say Aaarrgghh.” … “AAARRGGHH!!!”). The chapel was transformed into a pirate ship, and the attendees left no piratey detail forgotten in their elaborate costumes. We thought the friars must be turning over in their graves at this heathen celebration. The dance party went on till 4 am, but we checked out early after only a few delightful hours.

Spending time at Old Hall cemented that we would really like to live in some sort of intentional community ourselves. As humans it’s in our blood to live in community, and we believe it would enrich life in many ways. Once we get home, we want to take the next steps towards finding or building one. During our stay, we enjoyed talking with a number of potential members coming to visit. People who, similar to us, have not lived in an intentional community before but are drawn to it. Despite the trade off of losing some personal control over certain elements of daily life, we have consistently resonated with life at the intentional communities we have visited. We could definitely envision ourselves living at a place like Redfield or Old Hall. It will of course take a longer term and more involved trial period to discern if a particular community is the right fit, but community living is definitely something we would both like to pursue. Old Hall was so lovely, we were sorry to leave but the travel bug is still hungry!