November 9, 2024

From movie stars to rock gods: the amazing Village People of Shenley Wood …

ShenleyVillage2Hats off to the residents of the Shenley Wood Retirement Village for their brilliant 2016 calender.

Residents have dressed up as rock gods and pop divas to produce a calendar for the Christmas season.

For their 2015 calender the residents, aged 64 to 93, produced cover versions based on calendar, based on famous films. The full selection of pictures can be seen at here with a Youtube video here

The calendar contains iconic scenes from films such as Star Wars, White Christmas, and the Wizard of Oz. Proceeds from the calendars are used by the Charity to support activities that will benefit residents.

Shenley Wood is a retirement village run by the ExtraCare Charitable Trust, and Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation was lucky enough to be invited by the trust’s chief executive Nick Abbey to visit the site in July last year.

The ExtraCare Charitable Trust is a plausible provider of care-oriented retirement housing. It marks a considerable change in culture from the mainstream retirement offerings of volume housebuilders, who seek to maximise sales and management revenues.

For Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation the visit was a change in discovering a retirement site that was not seething with resentment towards the freeholder, with references to all sorts of dark practices (a large part of which turn out to be only too true).

We would very much welcome other thoughts on the ExtreCare Charitable Trust and its model.

The Shenley Wood Village, in Milton Keynes, has a website here

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