5 films showing what life in a commune was really like

Around the corner from where I live in north London, a battle has been playing out between the 18 residents of the Islington Park Street commune and their housing association landlords, One Housing Group (OHG). The building has operated as a commune housing a diverse group of people since 1976, and the current protest, which has won a huge amount of local support, is in response to an eviction notice served on the residents by their landlord, who has other plans for the £12m site. No prizes for guessing the outcome – the residents have been forced out of their home. Other inner city communes – including Islington Park Street’s sister commune, the Crescent Road Community in Kingston upon Thames, also owned by OHG – are facing a similar fate.

While the vestiges of the 1960s/70s commune movement are being eroded, the concept of co-living is finding new expression in the current climate of soaring house prices, skyrocketing rents and shrinking urban development land. From the lowest paid workers who post bedroom shares on websites like SpareRoom.co.uk, to well-heeled urbanites scrambling to bag a bijou pad in one of The Collective’s slick co-housing complexes sprouting across London, to the environmentally conscious fleeing the city to set up off-grid eco-havens.

With this in mind, I’ve selected some films from the Britain on Film Collection (several of them brought to my attention by the East Anglian Film Archive, Yorkshire Film Archive and The South West Film and Television Archive), which depict communes in their heyday, the 1960s and 70s. And if, for you, that conjures long-haired, pot-addled, tie-dying layabouts, you’ll only be partly right.

A commune movement was established in the east of England in 1965, with its headquarters at the vegetarian restaurant Arjuna in Cambridge and, by the time this film was made, nearby Norfolk, with its relatively cheap property prices and remote rural landscape, had become something of a commune hotspot.

The film offers a rare glimpse of life inside two artists’ communes in Norfolk: The Old Rectory Farm, Scoulton, near Watton, and the Crow Hall Commune in Downham Market, by all accounts both thriving in 1971. The Anglia TV crew give voice to the creative freethinking inhabitants who include artist and novelist Cressida Lindsay, a resident of the Watton commune, at a time when much of the media derided the hippie type.

Look out for Sarah Eno, the commune movement’s first secretary, who was married to ambient music pioneer Brian Eno at the time of filming. They’re a creative mix of individuals who “share a derision for what they call the bungalow society and the blatant commercialism that feasts upon it”, as the reporter observes. The Ravi Shankar-inspired sitar soundtrack enriches these priceless vignettes of 1970s counterculture.

What do James Lascelles, first cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II; Sir Simon Stewart-Richardson, a baronet; and Mike Medora, a world authority on holograms, have in common?

Answer: They were co-founders of the psychedelic rock band Global Village Trucking Company (known to its fans as “The Globs” in the early 1970s), along with lead singer, Jon Owen and bass guitarist, Nicky Prater.

In this 1973 film, the band, road crew, managers, families, friends and pets are shown living in a rundown thatched cottage, in Suffolk, close to the Norfolk border. The same year this film was made, the commune also attracted the attention of a BBC documentary film crew, who produced a portrait of the band, By Way of a Change (1973), which was later updated it for the BBC’s first edition of the What Happened Next? 2008 series.

Pop Group Settle for Commune in the Country is a wonderful prism by which to experience a slice of 1970s alternative culture, so sit back, light up, and allow yourself to drift into a kaleidoscopic world of flower power and trippy tunes.

Far away “On an island lost in Clew Bay, off the Mayo coast, the word of hippie takes on new meaning”. Tribe of the Sun was directed by Alan Sidi, a talented and prolific amateur filmmaker – he made more than 100 films – who was a key figure in the amateur film society, Leeds Mercury Movie Makers.

The film describes the tranquil lifestyle of the Tribe of the Sun, who set up a communal camp on Dorninish, an island off the west coast of Ireland which was owned by John Lennon at the time. The young carefree types seize the opportunity to refute the mainlanders’ impression of them as “dirty unwashed beatniks” to camera.

They’re certainly an industrious lot. When not working the allotment or building their first permanent living space, they are shown jamming Jethro Tull-style, carving totem poles, practicing phrenology (reading bumps on heads) or making flatbreads – not a spliff in sight. But did this utopian idyll stand the test of time? Watch and find out.

Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear portrays a different kind of commune, one sadly born out of necessity as opposed to lifestyle choice. The film takes us inside Britain’s first refuge for “battered wives” (as survivors of domestic abuse were commonly referred to at the time) and their children, Chiswick Women’s Aid centre in west London, which was founded by feminist campaigner Erin Pizzey, who appears in the film.

It’s testament to Michael Whyte’s sensitive directing style that the film’s vulnerable subjects felt comfortable enough to recount their harrowing experiences to camera. In lesser hands the film might easily have erred towards sensationalism. The film was shot over eight weeks and for the 18 women and 46 children living in the refuge life is challenging, chaotic but safe, and at times fun – intuitively captured by Nic Knowland’s unobtrusive camerawork. His talents have been more recently put to excellent use in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2011) and The Duke of Burgundy (2014).

At the time of filming, prosecution for domestic abuse was very rare in Britain. But through ardent campaigning by Pizzey (who also wrote a book on the issue of domestic abuse with the same title as this film) and her peers, legislation in the form of the Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act 1976 was passed two years after this film was broadcast.

While many of us wouldn’t choose to live in a commune, we might well opt for a holiday that entails some communal elements, such as shared dining and leisure facilities. The people in this film take the idea of a communal holiday a step further and embark on a communal honeymoon, as facilitated by Mrs Barnard, the proprietress of the Honeymoon Hotel in Torquay. She offers “beat the budget” honeymoon breaks, replete with shared “champagne supper parties, little banquets” and an ubiquity of cupids to help induce a romantic mood.

This short magazine item made for Westward TV’s Westward Diary slot is something of a curio and sheds light on a little-known aspect of 1960s working-class life. It’s worth noting that at the time communal living in the form of cross-generational households was the norm, in that people remained living with their parents long after they married, until they could afford a place of their own. The pithy vox-pops style encapsulates the various couples’ views on communal honeymoons and was a relatively new conceit in broadcasting.