As Covid lockdown kicked in I started to conceive of using the enforced downtime to see if I could complete some sort of record of my time at People In Common. The result was a year long series of blogs which is now published as A Life in Common Continue reading A Life in Common
(This is the personal story of how I got into communal living – and what happened when I did. ) I Continue reading Get a big house and share it
At the short-life licensed squat on Camden Park Road we somehow seemed to collect people… We clearly needed a bigger house. Continue reading Not dirty hippie squatters at all
I spent the summer after leaving the Hampstead Lane squat in London earning enough money working in a bakery to buy a motorbike Continue reading I had meant to do a tour of communes
I’ve been trying to recall my first visit to People In Common which, from what scant records I have of that time, must have been sometime during the winter of 1977/78. Continue reading Like owning your own squat
In 1974 it was not possible for more that three individuals to own a property together without setting up some sort of corporate organisation; a limited company, Trust or a Housing Association. Continue reading We fought the law and the law changed
A year or so before I joined People in Common had bought a derelict cornmill with a three and half acre field on the banks of the River Calder some five miles from the houses in Burnley. Continue reading Mill owners out on a stroll
So we set up Altham Workers Co-op and set off on something of an adventure in running our own business. There was definitely an element of making it up as we went along. Continue reading “No toilet and what if I got pregnant ?”
At PIC when I arrived the only music that was going on was that Barbara was learning to play Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer on an old upright piano she had jammed into her to tiny downstairs front room bedroom Continue reading Singing for our lives
If you had asked me in the past what our decision making process was at People in Common I would have said we used consensus, or more correctly I would now say we used the unanimity form of consensus process that was prevelant at the time. Continue reading So how did we decide that
