Shops, cafes and round-the-clock care: life in a ‘dementia village’

It will be a new community within a new neighbourhood. As part of the 4,000-home Mountfield Park development near Canterbury, Kent, there are plans to build a village that will have its own homes, shops and cafes. All of the residents will be people with dementia. It is being modelled on Hogeweyk, a dementia village near Amsterdam, whose inhabitants live in shared houses, have a supermarket, park cafe, cinema, village squares and gardens, as well as round-the-clock care if they need it. “What struck us was how unrecognisable the lives of those with dementia were at Hogeweyk compared with those I’ve met in England,” Simon Wright, the chief executive of developers Corinthian Land, told the Times.

“A lot of nursing homes are based on a medical approach,” says Frank van Dillen, co-founder of Dementia Village Advisors and one of the architects who designed Hogeweyk. “We try to de-institutionalise that approach because people want to live as normally as possible.” So there is care and medication, but also everyday activities: “You want to go to a restaurant, do your own grocery shopping, sit in a bar, walk outside and meet people.”

This could be beneficial to some, but not everybody, says Stacy Cannon of the Alzheimer’s Society. “Our work is about making any community anywhere dementia-friendly [so that people] can stay where they’ve lived all their lives. A lot of the principles they’re talking about are ones that can be applied to any community by people behaving in a different way, adapting their surroundings, looking at the policies of their organisations.” These could include increased awareness of simple things such as being patient if someone is struggling with their coins at the supermarket checkout, or improving signage around buildings.

The Hogeweyk concept, Van Dillen points out, is coming up to 25 years old (it opened in 2009, but had been planned for years) and it isn’t necessarily right to replicate it across Europe. It’s expensive, at about €6,000 (more than £5,300) for each resident a month. “I often say the whole world is a dementia village,” he says, “and we have to make a lot of effort to include people with special needs in our normal society.”