Could you start by telling me who you are and what you do here?

I’m Debbie; I've been here 11 years and am involved in growing, looking after the sheep, bee keeping and I work in the office; so, if you contact us, it's me that you're going to get a reply from. I also organise tours here for universities, schools, people from all over the world, more actually than from the UK. I organise the workshops and masterclasses that we run, and the catering. I also do all the electricity bills; reading everyone's meters and producing the bills; I do a plethora of different jobs! My background's actually in education; I'm an ex-head teacher.

What brought you here? What drew you to this place?

We knew the people who lived here before, and my husband, Pete, had built some of the homes. He had been involved in building what is known as the autonomous house in the centre of Southwell, a fully sustainable home which predates these. The architects who designed that house, Professor Brenda Vale and Dr Robert Vale were then asked to design these.

I wasn’t sure about it at first. We had a big allotment, and Pete was very into growing food, which was one of the main impulses for coming here; but we knew that everyone who lives here has a big commitment in terms of the number of hours we all have to put into the project. I couldn’t see how that was going to quite work out. Just after we moved in, I went back to the house we had left and which I had loved, to do the last of the cleaning and I found myself thinking that I wanted to come back here. It’s quite a magical place to live. But it can be hard work.

Road to the site

On your website it says there are three key interacting aspects to sustainability: economic, environmental and social; and that if one of these is lacking people will find it difficult to meet their needs. I was interested in what you mean by that, particularly around the social aspect.

The social aspect in this community is the most important one. When we talk about economy, for instance, it's not just economy of finance, it's economy of energy and time. Environmentally these were built as zero carbon homes, so that's our main focus; the whole biodiversity of the site and why we leave the sites wild and all of those aspects. But socially we've got five houses here, so five families are all living together. But we’re not a commune.

We manage all the growing and the business and the animals and the land together, as a community. If we don't all work together and one household is not doing their bit, then you end up with resentment and with all sorts of social issues, community issues. The way we have approached this challenge is through the hours commitment that we have. Each household is expected to give 600 hours per year to the community. We have rules that explain how those hours are to be broken down and what happens if a household defaults on them. It's very clear.

One of my jobs is to produce a report. Every household puts down all of their hours each month on a timesheet, and that is entered into a spreadsheet so we can see how many hours everybody's doing and what they're for. The 600 hours are broken down into two parts; half of it, 300 hours, are for facilities maintenance and running the business, where we all get paid, because what started off as doing little tours for curious people coming down the road has grown into something much bigger. We do consultancy work for people who want to build communities like these; there's a huge amount of challenges with planning, land management, land owners, and it's a huge area of growth; but a very, very challenging area for people who want to build eco communities. We manage wind turbines now, we do all sorts of things, Tai chi, masterclasses, the lot. And all of that is paid time. And all of these jobs are done inhouse; everything. And all are paid at the same rate, £22 an hour. If you clean the office, you get paid the same as the person who's going out doing the high-end consultancy work.

The other half are what we call the ‘organic hours’, growing our food, looking after our animals and the land, which we do without any recompense because we're growing for our own consumption. That’s a huge part of this project. It also covers the maintenance of the woodland.

It sounds like you have to be very highly skilled to live here.

We all learn, and we develop classes and workshops based on what the people living here are interested in. So, for instance, I run Christmas wreath workshops, flower workshops, because that’s my interest. We've got somebody here who’s a graphic designer, so he does all of that for us as part of his hours. We've got people with the expertise needed to keep the wind turbines running, although they don’t need a huge amount of work, and they share that knowledge with other people that come in.

But the business only needs to break even. It’s not there to make a profit; our higher end consultancy work can support some of our lower revenue activities, and also if we're wanting to start a new activity. The thing is that you're learning all the time and other people here are supporting you in that learning. When people move in, we spend quite a lot of time training them in how to run the different tours we offer. We can do a renewable energy tour, a sustainable architecture tour, specialist water tours etc, and everyone who leads these tours needs to be able to deliver them effectively.

One of the wind turbines

It sounds as though you must be working all the time!

Everyone finds a way to make it work alongside their own careers and workloads; and we have a real spread of ages. The youngest person here is 30 and the eldest is 64 and we find ways to work when we need to. You can do as much as you want to in any month depending on what we've got happening and your availability.

We’re doing a lot of grant work at the moment and people will help with that depending on their experience. We’ve got a big agrivoltaic project near our wind turbine, which is looking at growing food amongst solar panels. That’s a research project in partnership with a university. We've got a big consultation exercise we’re involved in looking at North Lincolnshire coming up. I’ve done a lot of this kind of work, community energy consultation, so I will probably link into that, but I know there is someone else who wants to join in, and she will learn from my experience and be able to do that work in the future. We've got a gardening for well-being course that runs once a week, which two people run, and which has been grant funded from the National Lottery. We do as much as we want to take on really.

How is all of this organised?

We meet three times a month. We’re looking at our land use and trading strategy at the moment, because there are two or three of us that are getting older and so maybe we’ll soon want to do less than we have been. We need to think about how we pass our skills on but to also know from the younger generation that are here where they can see thing going in the future. For our land strategy we are looking at how we could use the site more effectively in the future to meet our needs and to tackle climate change.

So, I’m trying to summarise here, this is a group of homes where people live. And it’s a community. And that community requires people to put in a certain number of hours for it to function. But it’s also an experimental research action research project that has the potential to draw in funding and develop research projects in partnership with others. Which means that the people living here, depending on their skill set and their interests, can use it to develop other projects within the wider cooperative business.

Yes. As long as everyone thinks that it’s a good idea and it doesn’t breach our farm business tenancy, because fundamentally our land is agricultural. But otherwise, the business is open to anything. And we have people here who are very inventive. One has invented something called a SunHopper with an American guy who was studying at Nottingham University. They did all the project work here and now it's gone to be manufactured in the United States. We’re trialling these in our homes and they should reduce energy consumption for hot water by between 50% to 75%. It’s a very clever system and could be very beneficial in reducing energy use in people’s homes.

So, how does life work within the Hockerton Housing Project? What are the challenges faced?

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