Postlip Community

Is Postlip your kind of life?

sandymcmillan — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:07:48 +0100

Would you like to...
... own part of a Jacobean manor? ... bring up your children in fifteen acres of freedom and opportunity? ... eat home-grown organic vegetables and fresh eggs? ... be entertained by musical & dramatic events in the Great Hall & Tithe Barn? ... join with us to get great pleasure from an amazing and beautiful place?

And would you enjoy...
... gardening organically in a walled garden? ... caring for chickens, sheep and Gloucester Old Spot pigs? ... maintaining and preserving a Grade 1 listed historic building? ... rebuilding drystone walls, mowing lawns and weeding flower borders? ... running the Cotswold Beer Festival and other public events? ... taking your share of community activities and meetings?

Postlip Community

Postlip's 40th Anniversary - and a big family unit for sale

sandymcmillan — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:57:20 +0100

The Postlip Community celebrated its 40th birthday on July 3rd 2010, underlining our claim to be the oldest UK cohousing group. Postlippers old and new converged in brilliant sunshine on the tennis court glade and people who hadn’t seen one another for twenty years or more hugged and drank champagne. People who grew up here brought their children to play in the woods where they had played and the air was loud with “And do you remember when…? We drank to the absent friends around the world who couldn’t make it back, and to the next forty years.

Postlip Community

Postlip Community: cohousing established in 1968 - new to the Cohousing Network

admin — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:22:35 +0000

The Cohousing Network welcomes the Postlip Community: click here for their network homepage.

In 1968, two families who had been running a bulk-buying cooperative started to think about other ways of sharing. We wanted space, facilities and support to pursue the bees in our individual bonnets. We believed in being together but felt that everyone needs private space, so we dreamt of creating separate family homes within a cooperative setting. We'd accidentally invented cohousing!

So we searched for other families with compatible dreams, and for a large country house where we could grow food and flowers, paint and sculpt, write novels, work on inventions, give our children opportunities and freedom, make wine and drink it, have parties and fun together, and create somewhere special to live. We spent 1969 in growing the group, refining our ideas and eventually discovering Postlip Hall, a mainly-Jacobean Manor House with fifteen acres.

Almost 40 years later, Postlip is eight family 'units', each a separate home. We work the organic two-acre kitchen garden and grounds communally (with the help of WWOOFers) and use the Great Hall for shared meals, public events, parties and whatever. People move between privacy and communality. We eat together regularly but not constantly, meet often enough to share ideas and make decisions about practicalities, and are casually into one another's homes much of the time.

We're a Housing Association, keep minutes and accounts, and manage to stay solvent. People hold their units on long leases, so you can only join if somebody leaves and makes a unit free to be sold at an agreed valuation.

There's more about us at our website.

Postlip Community