Reconnect is moving to a new location!
As some of you may have seen on our instagram stories, we’ve had an absolute nightmare trying to keep our original Reconnect cabin in it’s location on private rural land just outside of St Albans. We’ve been battling for 17 months with St Albans City Council to allow our small, off-grid cabin to remain where it is. However, we recently got given notice that it has to move.
This cabin was our first little cabin baby. Our first launch with the brand and as such it holds a really special place in our hearts. Also located close to where I (Monica) grew up, it’s served as a beautiful way for me to spend more time with family and feel connected to the other small local businesses and the countryside.
Because of it’s importance in our hearts, our business and our livelihood you can imagine that this has been a very stressful process for us. Our temporary change of use of land was rejected because it is in Greenbelt land and the inspectorate concluded that we ‘impeded the openness of the Greenbelt’. None of our special considerations were given any weight (i.e. economic benefit to the area, employment of locals, completely off-grid and sustainably built, and participating in the local community). We have some pretty strong views on how archaic and backwards the Greenbelt planning rules are, but we’ll save that for another time.
We also relied heavily on the advice of planning consultants. Which meant that we paid a lot of money to fight this. All of our profits from the first year of operating have gone into fighting this appeal. As such, we’re starting over from square one.
And for a while this felt incredibly scary, sad and overwhelming. When I tell you I wanted to bury my head in the sand and cry all day, that’s true. But, as painful as this process has been, it also forced us to rely on the community that we’ve built. And boy, did you guys come through for us.
Posting the story about our problem (having to move the cabin, on a deadline, without any options of where to move it to) was SCARY!! We lost followers as people assumed we were going under and lost faith in our product. 💔
BUT, you lot really showed up. You connected us with so many landowners in the UK. You offered legal help, planning advice and offered to put us in touch with so many people who are aligned with our ethos. And we couldn’t be more grateful to you all. The power of humanity = 💛.
One angel connected us to a farming family not too far away from us. They have a 1500 acre regenerative farm, run regenerative farming conventions and are opening up a Farm School in 2026. They instantly offered to help us with space, set-up and ongoing support. We walked the farm with them and identified many spots the cabin could go (what a luxury!) and have been incredibly kind. We had been wanting to speak to this farming family anyway, but assumed it would be hard to reach them. When we got connected with them we couldn’t believe our luck. One of them said to me when we first visited, that ‘if we found each other, then we were meant to’.
I know to some people that might feel a bit ‘woo woo’, but honestly it closely aligns with my worldview. Things that are supposed to happen, happen. My belief in the kindness of strangers has never been stronger.
Our new location
We can’t wait to show you. We’re going offline for 2 weeks at the start of July to move the cabin.
And then we’re open for bookings in our new location from the 16th July onwards. We can’t wait to welcome you to this very special, new location. Still so close to London by train! 30 mins from Kings Cross and 20 mins from Finsbury Park by train. From there it’s a quick 15 minute taxi to the cabin. Making it easy to escape the city whenever you need it.
Thank you to everyone who supported us, continued to follow along and gave us words of encouragement when we needed it most.
Thank you. Monica & Luke x
Written by Monica Innes - 21 May 2025
