I have been thinking lately about what inspired me to choose this way of life, why I didn’t want to succumb like everyone else to just be normal.
My first memory of there being any other kind of alternative was growing up in London in the 1950s/ 60s. Where we lived in a tiny flat on a police married-quarters estate and my parents blatant disregard for living within their means meant we were always freezing and hungry. The only good times in all those long eighteen years were when I was shipped off to my Nan and Granddad, then later to Aberllefenni, North Wales (where my school had an annex).
My grandparents lived in Wellingborough (Northamptonshire), in a real house with a real garden. They bought it before they got married, then bit by bit as they had the money made it into a lovely home. A frugal life, never borrowing but making what they needed or buying second hand from the local auctions. I loved being there, it was such a warm and cosy place and they were so kind and loving. In his spare time Granddad grew cut flowers in his back garden, which he sold, and kept hens. At the top of the road, where the town ended and the countryside began, he maintained a large allotment too. Over the years I began to realise that my grandparents were not only very content and happy together, but they also had everything they could ever want. Even at that early age I knew this was what I yearned for.
In 1973, while I was in the Sixth Form, the Centre for Alternative Technology opened in Machynlleth (North Wales), just down the road from Aberllefenni where I was now spending as many school holidays as possible, the remoteness and wild countryside having become the one thing that made me really happy. Finding CAT there too was a bonus. A whole community of people dedicated to living simply in harmony with Nature.
The following year in Camden Town (North London), I came across Compendium Books. Never before had I been in anywhere like it, probably the most radical bookshop ever and where there was literally a whole other world waiting to be discovered. One section in particular caught me eye, hundreds of titles on alternative living, and that’s where I came across SHELTER (edited by Lloyd Kahn). You’d have to be blind to miss it, so big was it. The examples contained within have kept me inspired ever since.
Lawrence D Hills was another huge influence. Born in 1911, he spent long periods in bed as a child suffering with undiagnosed coeliac disease, so rather than attend school he read voraciously. The subject he most enjoyed was horticulture, and without the usual distractions he soon became very knowledgable, enough to publish his own book aged only 16. From there he devoted the rest of his life to promoting his ideas. Most successfully through an organisation he created, the Henry Doubleday Research Association (better known as HDRA). In 1985 acquiring a 22 acre demonstration site near Coventry (Ryton Gardens), where the public could come and see (in many cases for the first time) practical examples of organic gardening/ forest gardening/ rewilding/ and reforesting. As soon as we heard about this we became members and visited regularly, enjoying the opportunity to learn first-hand about growing our own food.
Four years after that Ken Fern, a bus driver in London, along with his wife Addy, decided to change their lives by moving to Cornwall and become self-sufficient. Their research into which permanent plants can be used for food (foraging), as well as every other practical need, is still the most comprehensive database available.
After which we finally decided to follow these examples. In 1991 I gave up working (aged 35) and began experimenting on our one acre garden while we waited for our house to sell.
Around this time we got to hear about Botton Village (part of the international Camphill movement), a unique community of volunteers caring for adults with learning disabilities living on 600 acres of the North Yorkshire Moors. Since 1955 the community of over 300 permanent residents had been utilising the fruits of this land using a system of agriculture called biodynamics. Devised by the visionary Rudolf Steiner, this is a way of farming sustainably. Which very simply means living as lightly as possible. Never taking anything from the land without putting the same back, not bringing anything in to enhance it (and thereby robbing Nature elsewhere), or allowing any part to be removed for the purpose of profit. This then became our mantra too.
The rest as they say, is history. In 2000 we finally sold our home and set off in a converted van to search for a place where we could live as simply as possible surrounded by Nature.
Nineteen years later, on returning to the UK for the first time, I found things had changed dramatically in the interim, all for the worse.
Wellingborough was unrecognisable. When my grandparents bought their house in 1923 there were 20,000 people living there. By 1956 (the year I was born) that had risen a bit, to 29,000. But today there are now more than 80,000 and this is anticipated to rise even further. The empty streets where I played as a child are choked by traffic, the surrounding countryside long gone, replaced by concrete and tarmac, and all the species that had once thrived there have been totally wiped out.
The Centre for Alternative Technology is no longer the same either. The original community, who welcomed visitors to learn from their unique social experiment had already begun to fall apart before we left. One by one deciding to move off-site into their own homes, for which they needed an income to afford. Leaving the community no choice but to find ways to earn the money to pay them. The result of this was the unique magic of the place lost its purpose and began to wither and die. No-one lives there any more, which is immediately apparent when you arrive, it feels like an out-of-season down-at-heel theme park. A situation which will remain as long as their focus is on having to earn money. Especially when it is doing it by peddling green initiatives for government and the renewable energy lobbies, which is all they have on offer at the moment, false hopes and greenwashing. Which is very sad when they could be promoting instead the use of less money and choosing childfree. I seriously wonder if there’s a single person working there now who is even aware that continuing down this path will only help to speed up global extinction.
HDRA suffered a similar fate too, when Lawrence Hills stood down and his replacement decided it should be run more like a business. The first thing they did was replace all the volunteers who had up ‘til then had been doing everything brilliantly, with paid staff. Then in order to pay them, sold off the irreplaceable seed bank and heritage tree collection. After that another small fortune was spent on constructing pointless new buildings. Then when outgoings began to dramatically exceed income they tried rebranding, including changing the name. This proved to be the last straw and without that link to the past what little public support they had disappeared. Debts continued to soar until eventually the only option (to saving their jobs) was to sell the site. What remains today is nothing more than an obscure website.
The question that needs to be asked of both of these organisations, is how can well-paid professionals get it so wrong when volunteers had done so well? Especially in the case of Lawrence Hills, who not only had no formal education but never claimed a salary. The answer, obviously, is they had passion and experience while employees have neither.
Ken Fern also made the mistake of thinking that by becoming a charity it would help spread the message and ensure its future. Then one day the trustees turned against him and the organisation disappeared into obscurity just like HDRA.
Botton Village today, after more than 40 years of nurturing the hidden talents of a section of the community the state still prefers to ignore through institutionalising them (even if it is in smaller care homes), suddenly found themselves forced by new legislation to replace their volunteers with suitably qualified staff on salaries and contracts. The effect was to end a unique period in history, when adults with learning disabilities were treated as individuals and fully functioning. Botton remains open, but now a shadow of its previous self.
All is not lost though. A fresh new generation of passionate souls has emerged to fill their place, and this time there are far more of them. They are the disenfranchised. Those who have lost everything, thanks to our current selfish and barbaric culture, and driven by desperation and anger at what is happening to the planet, are finding new ways of living outside the system. They are the true rewilders, who instead of using money to provoke positive change, have only the tools that cannot be taken from them. Common-sense and a genetic programming for survival.
Daniel Suelo, Mark Boyle and Dietz are three wonderful examples. All childfree and frugal by choice (as were Lawrence Hills & Rudolf Steiner). Who together with millions of others are changing the attitudes of others simply by their example. More than all the so-called professionals ever could or will.
There is hope, we just have to want to become part of it.
(photograph of Alice & Harry Rooksby on their wedding day in 1923)
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How to live off-grid 
Hi Phil Your grandparents sound very much like my own – they only lived in their own house because it was left to my granny after an uncle of hers, whom she looked after in his old age, died. The garden was beautiful, with flowers from spring through to the end of autumn and they had an allotment from which they ate food every day. My mother and father were similarly careless to your own with the very little money we had, smoking and ‘treating’ us to pub visits… which of course were for their own benefit. My parents went through a spell of ‘self-sufficiency’ having watched The Good Life, but still worked, smoked, etc. Whilst we ate well from the project, my mother did very little other than have us kids do the work of animal ‘care’ and vegetable tending. I put ‘care’ in here like this as our animals were not well treated and most met a sticky end. Eg We had an ‘aggressive’ cockerel and she decided one day that it was it or her – she kicked it against the coop wall until it stopped coming back for more…. I shudder to think of some of the things we witnessed as kids. She was I will add, equally ‘caring’ for her three daughters, hence the many trips to A&E for broken, sprained and bruised limbs. My time spent with my grandparents also showed me that there was an alternative to the violent, inconsistent way of life that I had at home. I saw my grandparents most days as an adult until they died and my own daughter was cared for by them whilst I worked. This influence in her young life has carried through to adulthood – she grows her own vegetables, she is childless by choice and a proud vegan. So, I won’t get to nurture any grandchildren, show them how to grow, sew, re-purpose etc. but that wasn’t my decision to make. I will research the links you have inserted in your blog post. Keep on posting – its a dose of common sense in a broken culture within a completely bonkers world! Best wishes Sarah
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