What is it?

City farm, based on appropriate permaculture practices, features animal husbandry, market garden, eco cohousing settlement, community learning zone, stimulating play scape,  & therapeutic training facility. A meeting place, wholesome food canteen featuring home produced dishes and a convivial space for serendipitous occasion.

Supported by a camp site plus eco cottages in micro hamlets in the woods & meadows serving as visitor retreats and accommodation for range of activities.

Elements

Affordable housing 

An eco cohousing settlement with a range of common facilities  based on an ethos of durable affordability and shared equity. The settlement is entwined with co-operative enterprises dedicated to the following activities:

Permaculture & husbandry - horticulture & market gardening.

Producing chemical free food for the local market, on site use in a canteen and in “pop-up” camping kitchens. Food production systems support range of courses and involvement opportunities for learning, relaxation and therapeutic benefit. Featuring renowned tutors and practitioners. Community involvement is integrated with sessions on food preparation and cooking skills linked to weight loss and guides to healthy life styles for youth and elders alike.

Woodland creation & management

An evolving story of trees. Trees and woods filter our air, cool our cities, purify our water and enrich our soil. They should be home to a host of animal and bird life, plants and fungi.

The Biophilia Project works to enrich the Goffin Lands with a diverse range of fruit and timber trees interspersed with new selections offering enriched year round beauty for the babbling brook sides, pretty woods, nooks and dells where guests and visitors can become one with a beautiful oasis from the steel and concrete of our modern built environment just a mile away.

  

On mindfulness, healthy living & well-being

Meditation and yoga are linked with social activity and therapeutic training with specialist support for wounded souls and those down on their luck. These activities are anchored on the accumulated knowledge of our species innate tendencies and the negative effects of modern western societal influences - indoctrinating education, Hollywood and the mass corporate media.

A recognition of the influences of early childhood and developmental years. Acknowledging the effect that low family income can have on these factors.

A recognition that as a species our brains are running 21st Century software on hardware mostly not updated for 50 000 years. This heritage results in a rigidly programmed pattern of behaviour labeled Sphexish:

“Our species possesses an ancient heritage, forces of evolution honed and sculpted our bodies and our minds - [the physical brain if you believe, more or less in the Darwinian theory of evolution].

This patrimony has enormous impact on how we see the world and how we live our lives”

David Livingston Smith

Full life learning on our Sphexish heritage.

We are all one but we are not the same and many personal traits can be recognised as part of our immediate, two / three hundred years, of family history. Our early childhood, later childhood, adolescents and adult life shape and reshape our being. Play is enormous part of learning and delight in living. Play will feature strongly in all aspects of the project's programmes.

Since the early 1990’s robust research has revealed that our brains and therefore our abilities and proclivities can evolve dramatically.

The education system in Finland, Save Our Childhood Movement UK and other pioneering initiatives are revealing amazing potential for raising our personal aspirations, intellectual abilities as well as revealing innate empathic, sharing and caring behaviours. When viewed as evolutionary skills central to our progress and now domination of this planet, this spiritually offers immense opportunity to develop new models of collective enterprise, responsibility and a new meaning to the word “democracy”. 

The project will develop opportunity for people of all ages to engage in especially via heuristic learning and play.

Eco building techniques

Learning, developing, teaching and constructing ecologically sound buildings. The focus is on utilising natural local resources, earth, timber, recycled waste for ongoing construction of eco lodges / vacation units to serve as essential income for the custodianship of the land & overall project and as a facility to link with courses and volunteering "off season".

Featuring eco cottages, micro homes, timber yurts, cob summer houses, earth ship biotecture and more. Off season these eco units also provide essential security for animal stock and the accommodation itself plus protects farming resources for vandalism.

Magical adventure trail

A puzzling and fun trail from Beacon Heath bridle path through Corinne's Wood following the Pin Brook and along Corinne's Way to Serendipity and the reciprocal framed Round House and Barn Canteen.

WHO IS IT FOR?

* Families and individuals seeking a more shared life in a cohousing eco village. This will include housing association tenants from the local community. (based on the example of Threshold Cohousing)

* The diverse range of people interested in living and working on the land. This includes participants on courses from sustainable building techniques to permaculture, chicken rearing, bush craft etc. 

* Directly and indirectly, NHS patients who might benefit from psychotherapy, mindfulness, meditation, yoga etc. enriched by a connection with the outdoors (eco psychology).

* Directly and indirectly, NHS patients who seek to combat obesity and acquire skills for greater wellbeing and healthy living. Target groups being adolescents and young adults.

* Ex servicemen effected by PTSD

* Students engaged in "Inclusion services".

* Over 50’s seeking to acquire skills to live a longer healthier later life. 

* Local school children via the education services or private engagement in forest school / play activity.

* Woodcraft Folk / Scouts movement.

* The ecological movements in Exeter and beyond for wide ranging activity

* Holiday makers seeking ecological / cultural engagement.

* The immediate local community of Beacon heath / Mincinglake related to many of the elements above.