In 1976 a permanent community, originally for single people, was founded by the Patchwork housing association in the borough of Islington, London. The community housed 18 people of all backgrounds and ages in a 24 bedroom house near Highbury & Islington station. In 2014, I moved in. My youngest housemate was nineteen, my oldest seventy-nine. A few people had been living there for over thirty years by that point. Thousands more had passed through.

Around the same time I moved in, the community - informally named the Fig Tree community because of the big fig tree in the garden - was served with a notice to quit. Patchwork had been taken over by a different housing association in 2005, and ever since there had been various attempts of getting rid of the highly successful community. This time, they succeeded, and the last resident left Islington Park Street in April 2017.