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    The Welsh village where everyone has been told to leave and find somewhere else to live
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    The Welsh village where everyone has been told to leave and find somewhere else to live

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    19 Comments

    1. Express-Doughnut-562 on

      Honestly such a frustrating story. Brithdir Mawr is a great example of people living a low impact lifestyle and became a study for the Welsh Governments One Planet planning project. They do a lot for the welsh language in that area and generally its just a cool thing to have in existence that harms no one.

      The fact that the new owner is evicting them to turn it into a retreat, no doubt marketing itself on the legacy of Brithdir, is just so anti the ethos of the whole thing. Especially as the retreat will most likely fail leaving the place abandoned.

    2. Life_Put1070 on

      “shadow work coach” what a wanker.

      I am increasingly sick of landlords playing the “uwu I am not a corporate landlord owo I’m just a smol bean landlord” card. You’re just as bad as the rest of them. I do not care if you sold your home to “invest”, that was your own decision.

      Anyways. My heart goes out to the people of this co-op. I know there will be people who come down against those living these alternative lifestyles with the land, and I will just agree to disagree with them. I don’t think they have much recourse and I just hope they manage to find a new place to set up. It will be a shame to lose such an interesting community.

    3. Neither-Stage-238 on

      They did this in my hometown in Kent by building no affordable housing and now a flat costs 350k

    4. spidertattootim on

      Why do people put so much energy and effort and personal investment into something like this when they don’t have the security of ownership? Do they have some reason to think the owner will never want the property back?

      Similar to this story last year: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/22/radical-pay-what-you-can-restaurant-faces-eviction-from-mill-it-refurbished

      It just seems incredibly naive to me. It certainly doesn’t demonstrate a truly sustainable alternative way of living if it can just be wiped out by a landlord’s whim.

    5. Downtown-Chard-7927 on

      I used to live there. The place was in trouble over a decade ago. Its just never quite worked financially without the support of the loaded family that established it sadly. Such a shame that it’s ended because it was idyllic but there’s always more to it

    7. StrawberriesCup on

      🤷‍♂️ why would you expect to have land and a home given to you for free.

      If the new landlord can get some tourists to pay for the experience that then subsidized that way of life, then fair enough.

      I believe there’s parts of Alaska and Russia that are giving away land for people to settle there. Maybe get a group together and give that a try, instead of pretending to be a settler.

    8. WanderingLemon25 on

      “live completely regeneratively” – complete with a picture of them will ceramic plates, metal pans, items in colourful cardboard packaging, polyester oven gloves, and unless they’re green glass I swear there are 2 plastic bottles on the table.

      None of that stuff grows from trees or out of the ground, it requires electricity/chemical processes, transportation and contributes towards GHG emissions.

    9. pikantnasuka on

      I hope anyone who ends up paying to go to the inevitably overpriced and pretentious ‘retreat’ the owner wants to replace these people with has a really, really bad time.

    10. apple_kicks on

      > It is ironic because the new landlady of Brithdir Mawr, Rachel May – a teacher, doula and shadow work coach – has purchased the land from Julian Orbach and has since issued the residents of this 30-year-old unique community with an eviction notice. She is taking legal action in the hope of removing the final residents before setting up her own healing retreat for visitors. Orbach had wanted to sell the site to the community and the community say they believed that offer was going to stand until the end of 2025. They maintained they had confidence they would find the funds to make the purchase.

      Agh the old capitalist gentrification style take over. They always put up pictures or PR photos of ‘the unique community’ and avoid mentioning they evicted them and brought out the land. I wonder if they told the past owner they’d keep the community stuff when buying.

      New life influencer grifters do this a lot. Especially in third world or Indigenous tribal land. They are always ‘good vibes and Mother Earth’ unless you are in the way of their money grabbing.

      Sadly community before benefited from squatters rights from sound of things but that was destroyed

    11. GopnikOli on

      I’m sure this will massively help the housing crisis impacting Pembrokeshire and the rest of Wales.

    13. Terrible_Dish_4268 on

      Hopefully they’ll make things so difficult for her that she only keeps going due to sunk cost and all that, the venture fails, and the Community – living right next to it all along in several vans, and part of the reason it fails – reclaim it.

      Can’t just be happy they have some money, these cunts. Always got to find a way to fuck someone with it.

    14. bunglemullet on

      It should have been given protected status and Govt support as a model of sustainable and affordable living 😒

    15. Sea-Caterpillar-255 on

      When you pay your bills you are free. When you rely on someone else to subsidize you, you are at the mercy of their loss of interest…

    17. ConnectPreference166 on

      Respectfully when she brought the place surely she should’ve thought this may not be the best idea. The amount of bad press she’s getting even if the eviction happens and she sets up her business most won’t go.

      The previous landlord who sold must be laughing. No other person in their right mind would’ve paid to get into this much drama. No matter how decent the land is.

    19. Astriania on

      This is why you should always own your property.

      I do have some sympathy, especially if there was an unwritten agreement that they had first refusal on buying it. But at the end of the day you can’t expect a landlord to allow you to use a property for a token rent forever, and if you don’t have some plan for buying it, this will happen to you eventually.

      And we are really only getting one side of the story in these articles – the new landlord says she has tried to negotiate and doesn’t want to just kick the commune off, but they didn’t negotiate in good faith so she couldn’t.