COVENTRY PEACE HOUSE

Walking towards utopia

travelling by communities and ecovillages

COVENTRY PEACE HOUSE

www.covpeacehouse.org.uk
+44 (0) 2476663031 / 2476664616

It´s situated about 1’5 km. far from the center of Coventry (West Midlands). It was founded in 1999 and it´s a fully mutual housing co-operative, which means that the members are people who live there and basically they pay rent and the rent pays the mortgage. There is no private ownership but neither is there an outside body controlling it. While you live there you are like a steward of the property and when you leave, you just leave.

You can read more about their history in the website.

There are about seven rooms for residents, which most of them change with time. The project prefers the people work part time to be able to have time for the communal life and tasks. In the weekly meetings, the members-residents talk about domestic tasks, about how to be more ecologic in the house or about activities for social change like promoting cycling and campaigning.

Coventry Cycling Centre opened in 2004 and it´s a workshop to fix bikes, to resell them and to promote cycling. At the moment of my visit John was in charge of it, and he provided me bikes to go riding to the nearby canal. The Community Space was inaugurated in 2005 and some of their users are a women group, an environmental group and asylum seekers.

A woman –Penny- looks like the soul of the project. She is always very busy and, nevertheless, she is really worried about people, being glad or growing sad about their lifes.

It belongs to Radical Routes, network of radical co-operatives whose members are committed to working for positive social change. The network is made up mainly of housing co-ops of various sizes (but none have more than 15 members), a few workers co-ops and a couple of social centres.

The diet is vegetarian and it has internet acces and phone. There are shops and people from Middle East and Southern Asia through out its street.

Due to I had little information about this place, I only was one week there, although I could have been more time, but I had commitment with the next destinations...

The night shelter

Because of the bad living conditions of asylum seekers, Coventry Peace House tries to meet those needs through voluntary donations of different kind. That means to give them hot dinner and breakfast (those are usually their only meals of the day), and a place to sleep on folding beds. A monthly rota about 50 people look after the shelter, sheltering about 10 people when I was there, sharing moments and talks with people from Africa, Iran and Eastern Europe.

The working days the food is provided by a temple of the sikh community, where it´s made and offered to everybody. The only requisite is to observe the access rules: to take off your shoes, to wash your hands and to cover your hair. This temple has good equipments. It was the first time I came in a place like that.

The book

With the title “I came here for safety”, Coventry Peace House published it in 2006 and it approachs and goes deeply into the actual British asylum system. That system, described as inhuman, means the most of migrant people looking for safety are rejected, sometimes imprisoned and eventually end in destitution. The book is dedicated to a Moroccan man 33 years old who hanged himself in the garden of the night shelter.

It was a very interesting reading for me, and hard some moments. The book combines two visions which are not always linked: extensive documentation and personal experiences. It´s also interesting because of dismantling prejudgements about this people and migrants in general.

You can download the complete book from the website.

TRAIN / BUS: Coventry

STAY: 18-25 September’06

Included in Eurotopia

Link to PHOTOS