The housing estates being built in the Diocese of Oxford have never had post offices. Known as new communities (euphemistically perhaps), they don’t even have post boxes at first. Most don’t have pubs, shops, community centres, doctors’ surgeries or schools either.
Research has shown that when people have spaces in which to meet, friendships and social networks are sustained. People living in Manhattan, New York, for example, experience it as an urban village even though half of them live in lone households. This is because there are cafés and alternative places to hang out.[3] When people have nowhere to go, they experience a void rather than a heart. There’s a sense of isolation that generates a particular kind of feeling alone.
And these places in which people are vulnerable to loneliness, are being built right across the wider Thames Valley. In the Oxford Diocese, there are 38 new communities being created in ten Oxford deaneries affecting 48 parishes. Bicester will double in size, so will Aylesbury. Milton Keynes will get considerably larger.[4]
Within these estates, the church has a significant role to play. “Developers build houses, but churches seek to engage communities,” says Peter Morgan, New Communities Development Officer, Diocese of Oxford. By moving in, baking cakes as welcome gifts, writing newsletters, holding street parties and setting up mother and toddler groups, the church can help create places where people can flourish.
It can also act as a bridge between the developers and those who live on the estate. Developers have to provide schools and community centres but not before people have moved in and not necessarily in the way they need. There is a role for the church in forming relationships with planners and builders to help ensure the appropriate community facilities are written into plans and delivered on time. “There is no other resource on the estate,” said Captain John Bentley, New Community Minister, Kingsmere, Bicester. “We have created a means by which people can find out what’s happening, where to go and be a community.”
[1] The Network Change Programme was announced by the UK Government in May 2007 in response to declining use of post offices which was leading to unplanned closure of branches.
[2] Post Office Closures: Impact of the Network Change Programme, Consumer Focus Wales (2010)
[3] Weiss, R. Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation Cambridge. MA: The MIT Press (1975)
[4] New Communities Group, Summary of Large-Scale Housing Development, Diocese of Oxford (2015)
Pros
Cons
[1] Barker K, Review of Housing Supply Final Report – Recommendations Delivering Stability: Securing our Future Housing Needs: HM Treasury (2004)
[2] House Building: December Quarter 2014, England: Department for Communities and Local Government (2015)
[3] Housing Supply: Opportunities for Economic Growth: Barton Willmore p3 (2013)
[4] Population and Household Estimates for England and Wales: Office for National Statistics (2012)
[5] Subnational Population Projections, 2012-based projection: Office for National Statistics (2014)
This is the fifth of a series of posts on loneliness. It is based on Loneliness Accident or Injustice by Jo Ind, a joint publication from the Diocese of Oxford (Board of Mission) and the Archway Foundation.
]]>My pride at my four-year-old son, Arch, felt so overwhelming I felt it should not be seen in public. I wondered how other parents handled (or concealed) this obscenely primitive emotion.
As a result I have had three very helpful conversations, two on Facebook and one in the flesh, about the dilemma. (Is it a coincidence that the three people who helped me did not have children themselves?)
One discussion was about our ambivalence about pride of any kind. Is it good or is it bad?
We expect people to take a pride in their work, for example, but if they are too proud we wag our fingers at them: “Pride comes before a fall.”
I look in the dictionary and see it means both “excessive self-esteem” and “self-respect, personal dignity.” Those are two very different things – opposites even – and yet the same word covers both. No wonder it’s confusing.
And then there’s that interesting point about whether we can be proud of something that has got nothing to do with us. I would not think so – and yet I am.
I’m proud to be a citizen of a country with a national health service. Did I have anything to do with the creation of the NHS? No, but I’m proud of it nonetheless.
My pride in Arch feels like that kind of thing.
One Facebook friend suggested gratitude might be a better word for the kind of emotion I was describing than pride.
I like that idea. It certainly neatly evades all the ambiguities about “pride” and therefore makes the experience of the feeling easier.
Was I proud to see Arch playing the part of a star in his first nativity play earlier this week?
Let’s put it like this. The day he was born I dropped to my knees and said: “No matter how long I live, I will never be able to express the depth of my gratitude that this archangel has come to make his home with us.”
I haven’t stood up since.
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