BROCKHALL VILLAGE LTD.
REVITALIZING THE RURAL COMMUNITY

It is easy to forget what rural communities used to feel like. Their basic building block was the farm; an owner-managed business, where the owner lived, worked and employed a handful of local people. Farmers clustered together and, as well as competing with each other, they co-operated to their mutual benefit. They built strong communities because they needed strong communities.

It was this working community that gave the countryside its distinctive "feel". So attractive was that "feel" that successful urban businesspeople often sought to buy into it. Though their businesses remained in town and they did their earning and spending there, they started to commute by car to homes in the countryside. We now realise that this process was unsustainable. Agriculture was in long term decline, in any event, and, gradually, the countryside started to lose its "feel" and turn into a dormitory. In the process, the rural community weakened and it is weakening still.

Gerald Hitman and his team believe that there are three contemporary trends which, if harnessed together, can begin to reverse that process and militate towards the common good. Indeed, so sure are they that it can be done that they have completely refocussed their company, Brockhall Village Ltd., on the project.

The model they have adopted is the working farm; an owner managed business, where the owner lives, works and employs a handful of local people. It is designed particularly to suit brownfield employment sites in open countryside which have failed to attract conventional redevelopment. It aims to bring modern, high quality, employment opportunities to these countryside sites in a way that is sustainable and rebuilds the community.

The proposal is to build clusters of high quality homes, each with an office or studio building, at the bottom of the garden, suitable for four or five people to work in. Each cluster is to be served by a central facility to serve common needs for meetings, exhibitions, video-conferencing and simple networking. This central facility is to be run by a Cluster Co-ordinator, perhaps best seen as the successor of the branch secretary of the NFU. As well as promoting the interests of the businesses in the cluster, the co-ordinator would have a vital role in doing research on the success of the scheme in promoting high quality rural employment, reducing the number and length of motorised journeys and the regeneration of rural community facilities. Because of the importance of this research function, Brockhall Village Ltd. would fund each co-ordinator post for a minimum of three years and collaborate with The Live Work Network, Economic Development Officers and other partners in managing the post.

The proposal offers a robust and common-sense solution to the apparent conflict between the need to reduce the number and length of motorised journeys by concentrating development in the main centres of population and the equally valid need to sustain the rural economy and promote real communities.

The model is rooted in research carried out by Tim Dwelly of the Live Work Network with the support of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, The Housing Corporation, The Peabody Trust and others.

Developments in information and communications technology, a growing desire to achieve an improved work-life balance and an increasing committment to environmental responsibility have led to a mushrooming of the trend towards working from home, particularly in the countryside. In the early stages of business development, this has not required new property types. Homeworkers have simply bought a home in the countryside and settled down to work in the study, the kitchen or around the dining room table.

To be sure, there have been drawbacks to this lifestyle. Principal amongst them have been:-

• Personal isolation brought about by a lack of clustering
• A blurring of boundaries between work time and family time
• Restraint on growth brought about by the need to preserve some privacy in the home
• Real difficulties for children distinguishing between home space and their parents' workspace.

Critically, home run businesses tend to hit an insurmountable obstacle at the point at which they need to take on their first non-family employee. To have a stranger in the home for thirty five hours a week, every week, is simply too much to bear.

The Brockhall Village model addresses each of these drawbacks directly:-

• Each development, has the critical mass to constitute a business cluster and support a co-ordinator
• The boundary between work time and family time and work space and family space is concretized by the walk down the garden
• Staff and customers do not enter the home and are not even visible from it.

The model will liberate home-based businesses to employ staff and, as such businesses are concentrated in the high paid sectors of ICT, design, professional and financial services, to re-invigorate the rural economy.

As well as enabling home-based rural businesses to grow, the Brockhall Village model will also draw successful urban businesses into the countryside, in a sustainable way. England is replete with small businesses, in the sectors enumerated above, in which the owner and the three or four employees already live in the countryside and each spend ten to fifteen hours a week driving into business premises in the towns. Not only do such people resent the waste of their time but many feel their lifestyle is socially irresponsible. Top end estate agents report high levels of enquiries for homes with outbuildings suitable for conversion to offices or studios. Regrettably, they also report overwhelming drop-out levels as prospective buyers realize the problems they will face with planning procedures, services, conversion costs etc. The Brockhall Village model will provide a ready made solution to their needs - with the added benefits of clustering and co-ordination.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR OF THIS PAGE

"In my parish of Dinckley, in the Ribble Valley of Lancashire, there were fourteen working dairy farms just twenty years ago. Now there are two. A few hundred yards from where I sit, as I draft this document, is a redundant church and, a little further on, is a redundant pub. Every morning, there is a traffic jam where the road from the village joins the A59. It is made up of people driving to their jobs in towns between seven and forty miles away. More than half of the economically active population of the borough does the same.

When the decline in agriculture started, the Council did its best to promote alternatives. It allocated forty acres, right on the A59, for offices and factories. They called it the Ribble Valley Enterprise Park and arranged for a stretch of the road to be dualled and a new roundabout to be built to improve the access. Fifteen or more years after the allocation was made, just over 1.000 square metres of offices are now occupied there. More or less everyone who works there arrives by car.

In my village, there are about three hundred homes. 17% of the economically active population works wholly from home and my house is designed for live work. Seven people are employed in the business here. Four of us live in the village and arrive at work on foot. One lives in a neighbouring village and has a very short drive to work. One has a twenty minute drive to work. Interestingly, she is currently planning to move to the village. One person lives eleven miles away and does not intend to move.

The initiative of the people who live and work in the village has led to the establishment, in the last three years, of a small hotel, a restaurant, a commercially run day nursery, a youth club and an effective and very active residents association. People here are still not interested in the redundant church but just about the whole village turns out for carol singing under the village Christmas tree. There has not been a burglary in the village for ten years.

It is a wonderful place to live and work and I want to make it even better. There are eight acres in the village that remain to be developed. Two acres are allocated for up to 39 dwellings and will be snapped up as soon as they hit the market. Six acres are allocated for employment and there is no interest in them at all. My prayer is that the whole eight acres will be used for 39 live work units with space in each for five people to work; the modern equivalent of 39 quite large dairy farms. The economic benefits to the district are obvious, the community building effects will be more dramatic still and the effect on the number and length of motorized journeys will also be large.

I want to do it here and to spread the idea through the country."

Gerald Hitman