A Place to Call a Short Lease Home

Everyone I know at Barts lives in fantastic, affordable homes” -this is something I would love to be able to say one day... if you choose to keep reading, we can hopefully move a little closer in that direction…

Hi, my name is Adam & I'm a final year student at Barts and The London! Therefore, I’m feeling especially optimistic about the long game right now… even if it’s thankless & with trials and tribulations aplenty along the way. Good luck to everyone still studying - know you absolutely are going to get here too one day, finished! I have loved my time at Barts since I started here in 2017. I've met hundreds of beautiful people from our community in sports clubs, faith spaces, academic societies, activist groups and working for the SU.

Unfortunately, many friends & peers along the way have experienced massive difficulty in finding a safe, secure and affordable place to call home while studying at Barts. Even my dissertation supervisor during my iBSc randomly went missing for a month - turns out she was given a no fault eviction and had essentially a month to pack her life up and find a new place. It feels like no one is fully stable under these conditions, & we all suffer the consequences - let alone how bad this is for the health of those we serve…

Many of us are familiar with the housing crisis in London through experience, but it's not talked about enough in my opinion. I feel sad that we don’t learn the language for renting power relations or get educated about the many solutions/responses available.

It is a great thing to know about and is the only way we can enable collective action - collective action, in my humble opinion, being the best way that we’ve achieved safe, secure and affordable housing for the majority of people in our recent history. Shoutout to post-war Britain and Barts student project “Griffin Community Trust” - even if there’s a lot to unpack about colonisation & colonised peoples’ dispossession that the former shoutout ignores.

To today, with ever-increasing rents, social isolation, black mould, loss of connection to nature & food growing and increasingly normalised slum-like conditions in the London… I’m a little fed up! That’s why a group of Barts med students & young people from many different backgrounds - architectural, legal, design, social justice - joined me in starting a project a little over 2 years ago called homefolk.

Together we learnt a lot and became active participants in turning around the housing crisis. To do this, we’ve proposed:

A novel legal and conceptual model for genuinely affordable housing

This is the ‘homefolk model’: for community-owned tinyhome villages. The tinyhome village model is designed to re-centre community, health and the planet. Intended sites are underutilised paved urban commons, bypassing the limitations of existing commercially available land for housing.

The model aims to increase diversity and density of housing provision in existing city spaces. We estimate tens of thousands of genuinely affordable new community-owned homes could be added in cities like London.

Our next step is creating a pilot of this model in East London - we hope it can be stepney green. The proposed site is next to Stepney City Farm - they are a strong community hub many of us Barts students are familiar with. They are longtime supporters of our project over the last 2 years. Many of our 30+ volunteers are students at Queen Mary or Barts and know how difficult finding housing has become in Stepney.

To solve the polycrisis of issues facing our generation (climate, mental health, housing) we need intersectional approaches & hope. If you’re interested in learning more about what we do, visit our website at www.homefolk.org.uk or our youtube for a 5 part series we’ve made detailing our vision. Lastly, we are looking for a team of community coordinators for the next year ahead - if interested, get in touch to admin@homefolk.org.uk.

I’ll end by saying this student project has been so incredible and connected me to some stunning spaces - in Bristol, Glasgow, Sheffield and beyond. Even if we don’t get to prove our model, the work we’ve done has forever left me empowered and knowledgeable about this crisis. ‘homefolk’ has also impressed on me the importance of encouraging other med students to reach across the divide and do interdisciplinary work, outside of the academic cage, to try and find solutions to the deep issues that keep our generation awake at night.

Back to where we started.. medical school is a long game! Addressing our culture’s housing, climate and health crises is the same in many ways. Speaking from experience, working a little bit at it every week (not daily!) and you never know what over the best part of a decade you might achieve.

~Finally finished finalist Adam over and out

(Current, above) Current area of access only Garden St running through Stepney Green Park

New homefolk homes (early stage conceptual graphic, above)