Living Anarchy Today

I now live fully off-grid on twelve acres in mid-Wales, in a self-built and continually evolving collection of structures centred around a converted 7.5-ton Ford Cargo horsebox. A static caravan, physically bridged to the horsebox, and a shepherd's hut form a single home supplied by solar electricity, borehole water, wood-fuelled heating and bottled gas.

Oakwood is more than somewhere to live. It is an ongoing practical experiment in reducing dependency, sharing resources, rewilding land and finding out how far ideas about autonomy, mutual aid and living differently can be put into everyday practice.

The route here was a long one. After I stopped drinking at forty, my university career took off and, after some time, I had enough money to buy the land, a story described in One Flew into The Cuckoo's Nest. Before that, I lived off-grid in various forms, including a Ford Cargo 7.5-ton horsebox on a farm near Lancaster and later a converted Iveco Daily laundry van. That became the FOD Wagon and is still used as my festival vehicle today.

I lived in the van in Derby while waiting for the land purchase to complete. Once the land finally came through, I moved on in the horsebox, then brought a static caravan alongside it. I welded a physical bridge between the horsebox and the static, fully cladded and insulated the static, and later interfaced a shepherd's hut onto the back of the horsebox. The result is a single, evolving, self-built living structure.