In 1998, Shirley Meredeen was in her late 60s and had recently retired from her job as a student counsellor. But she had no plans for a quiet life.

This, after all, was a woman who got a degree from the Open University at the age of 56; who had worked full-time and raised two sons after her divorce; and who, together with Madeleine Levius, had founded Growing Old Disgracefully - a network that challenges preconceptions of older women as passive and past it.

Meredeen was keen to change the world, or at least the way the world saw older women. In the summer of that year, she attended a workshop on co-housing at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) in north London. Co-housing is a fundamentally different way of life in which people live close to, but not with, each other.