At home in your own tele-office

Teleworking need not be an isolating experience. A new development in south Wales aims to make its residents feel part of the community. Stephen Pritchard reports

Teleworking from the greenest valley, with only a fax, PC and modem for company, sounds ideal. But there are problems. Few family homes are suitable as offices. You may feel isolated. You will have to pay a lot for communications links such as fast phone or data lines. And you will miss the facilities office workers take for granted, such as a fancy photocopier or secretarial help.

Telecottages, also known by the less twee label "telecentres", are a partial solution: they are wired up, they have good office equipment, and you can rent space there without breaking the bank.

So far, however, telecentres have not fulfilled the promise of a few years ago. Some have failed, often when public funds for activities such as training ran out. Others have become little more than glorified business service bureaux.

Even high-profile projects such as Kington in Hereford and Worcester, a village that was given state-of-the-art technology by the likes of BT and Apple have failed to bring the jobs the founders hoped for.

By their nature, teleworkers are a hard market to target. They are dispersed and, largely, invisible. Just building a telecentre and hoping that clients will come is not enough.

But advocates of teleworking have not given up. Ashley Dobbs, chairman of the Telecottage Association, is a property developer who is trying a new approach. He is constructing a televillage in the village of Crickhowell, on the edge of the Brecon National Park in south Wales.

He takes the logical view that a televillage - providing living accommodation, workspaces and communal facilities - is a better way to meet teleworkers' needs than the telecentre. Designing the village from the ground up means that buildings suit modern, technology-based working.

At Crickhowell, for example, all houses are connected to a fibre-optic ring for local networking, making voice or data communications within the development free of charge. It should also be possible to link the network to the Internet. These innovations, and the hope of bringing new work to the area, have helped Dobbs gain permission to build the only new homes in the national park for some years.

Dobbs believes that teleworking should not be taken to mean homeworking. The houses at Crickhowell can accommodate studies or offices, and they are built so that it is easy to change the internal layout as needs change. But Dobbs would prefer residents to set up their businesses in the workshop units. "Some houses have office space, but we don't encourage people to work from the houses but from the workshops or studios," he says.

Another option is a cabin-style office that he will put in the garden.

There is no requirement to be a teleworker to take up a house in the development. Dobbs expects to see a mixture: the semi-retired, commuters, and people who need a base that allows them to have a long weekend away from the city, but stay in contact with base. He describes this as a "mosaic of jobs".

Full-time teleworkers will share the workspaces with local people, who can rent them for their businesses. At Crickhowell, management consultants and software developers could be joined by furniture-makers and blacksmiths.

Another aim of the development is to provide spin-off jobs for people from the village, and even attract the sort of firms that will persuade local young people to stay in the area, or return there after college. These are likely to be hi-tech organisations. In total, there will be 14,000 square feet of business space on the development.

Crickhowell is the second development of its kind by Dobbs' company, Acorn Televillages. The first he describes as a "telehamlet", and was built at Perton Farm, in Herefordshire. The televillage is the next step up the evolutionary ladder. It offers the housing of the telehamlet, and the business space of the telecentre.

The combination of business and housing space also meets Dobbs' environmental goals. In isolation, telecentres or telecottages may not reduce pollution, especially from travel, to the extent that environmentalists want. "If you can't live in a village with a telecentre, you still have to travel to it," Dobbs points out.

The televillage is designed for pedestrians, and cars will be kept out of sight behind the houses. But houses in the development are not cheap; there is no public subsidy for the project and it must cover its costs.

The smallest, two-bedroom, cottages start at pounds 49,950, which is in line with local property prices. Crickhowell, and the surrounding villages in the national park, is a desirable area. Dobbs claims that there is no premium for the additional features of the televillage. At the top end, a five-bedroom house costs pounds 179,000.

Looking at the village - with just a showhome, show office and Dobbs' own house built, the rest a construction site - on a cold Welsh morning, it is hard to visualise Dobbs' vision of a wired-up community at the forefront of a technological revolution. But interest has been strong and eight of the 34 plots have been sold.

To work, a community must be more than the sum of its buildings. "A televillage is more psychological than technical," Dobbs says. He puts much store by the business benefits of like-minded people exchanging ideas, contacts and even work.

As much as 70 per cent of the UK population could telework, according to its promoters. "I have to think that televillages are the flagships of the way all communities will go," says Dobbs.