A New Lease Of Life

Retirement can be isolating, but a pioneering group of women have created their own groundbreaking community to tackle the problem.

- Sally Williams

In 1998, Shirley Meredeen was in her late sixties, and had recently retired from her job as a student counsellor. But she had no plans for a quiet life. This, after all, was a woman who got a degree from The Open University at the age of 56; who had worked full-time and raised two sons after her divorce; and who, together with friend Madeleine Levius, had founded Growing Old Disgracefully, a network that challenges preconceptions of older women as passive and past it. Shirley was keen to change the world, or at least the way the world saw older women.

How it began

That summer, she and Madeleine attended a workshop on co-housing run by academic Maria Brenton. Back in 1990, Maria was researching old age. ‘I saw it was very much a women’s problem,’ she explains. ‘Women live longer than men, and many have fewer resources because they’ve been out of the workforce bringing up children.’

Maria, now 70, travelled the world in search of projects in which women were ‘helping each other out’. ‘What I found was the co-housing model in Holland,’ she says.

There are now 230 senior co-housing communities in the Netherlands and they’ve been encouraged by successive governments because when older people are happier and healthier, they make fewer demands on health- and social-care services.

‘At some point, people may need full-time residential care,’ Maria says, ‘but much later than if they’d been living alone.’ She began spreading the idea and Shirley and Madeleine were inspired by her workshop to build a British version.