Old Vicarage Windmill Hill Housing Cooperative needs people!

The Old Vicarage on Windmill Hill is an enormously spacious house built to be both a family home and partly a community space, and it’s also next door to a proposed Community Land Trust (CLT) site, the old Baptist Church. Now the Old Vicarage has come up for sale as well recently, and we’re hoping to find 2-3 other young couples to buy it jointly as a Housing Coop. The price for the Old Vicarage is very good value for money: based on four couples sharing, it would be equivalent to about 150m2 per couple (counting 1/4 of 120m2 1st floor and all of the ground floor as shared) at up to £125k each, but how much we would each have to fund and how (equity and/or borrowing) still depends on the exact legal model we go for and what kind of lending we can find. http://www.cjhole.co.uk/property-details/avon/bristol/windmill-hill

If you’re a young couple looking for a first family home, who may be able afford to buy some kind of place but probably could not afford somewhere really suitable for a family otherwise, if you have fairly compatible values of sustainability and ethics, and would love to live in a spacious family home with both some private space and some communal spaces, and with more space and more garden than any of us could possibly afford separately, please get in contact as soon as possible!

Our plan is to form a Housing Coop initially and incorporate it as a registered Industrial & Provident Society (IPS). If the plan to make the old Baptist Church next door into a Community Land Trust (CLT) also goes ahead, then it would probably be an advantage to combine with them later. One of the advantages of a CLT is it creates a legal ‘asset lock’ making the house and land a community asset in perpetuity, ensuring that any development has to be in accordance with the benefit of the wider community as well as any residents. The legal constitution would definitely include provisions for people to sell on the proportion they then own as easily as possible when they want to leave and for residents to potentially buy out other residents by mutual agreement when people have children and need more space again. We’re budgeting on trying to get together considerably more than the asking price, because competition on offers for the house sounds likely to be intense according to the estate agents, CJ Hole, and if we find we have some money left after buying it, then we can apply it to insulation and installing more efficient heating (wood stove+boiler hopefully) before next winter, and at some point we’ll probably feel we need to make a second shower room too.

First we need to find more people with money to participate, by Saturday 2nd April when our viewing is booked. If the vendor is sympathetic then and agrees to allow us enough time to get legally established and get the money together to back up our offer, we can apply for lending as a pending ltd company from Triodos ethical bank and the Cooperatives Development Agency. When enough people have expressed an interest, we’ll try to arrange a meeting with everyone plus hopefully a representative from CDA and the two existing housing coops I know of in Bristol already set up to fully discuss and decide the legal and financial details together.

Contacts: Kester Ratcliff, 07769 113533 (after 5pm weekdays) or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , or Jackson Moulding of Ecomotive and the Bristol Community Land Trust on 0117 9241263 or 07747 802201 (office hours) or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

I'm going to meet the vendor this evening at 7pm, luckily as it happens he's spent his life working in setting up Community Gardens and City Farms, and is on the Board of the European Federation of City Farms, so it seems highly likely that he'll be sympathetic to our plans as long as we sound convincing enough that we can and will get the money and people and legal structure organised effectively to buy it in a reasonable time and at the normal market price, which is very good value anyway.

Things are moving very fast on this, so please get in contact ASAP if you're at all interested, or help spread the word to friends and anyone you think might be interested and suitable.

Thanks!