Anchor (housing association)
England’s largest non-profit housing association
Anchor was England’s largest not-for-profit provider of housing, care and support to people over 55 years old up until November 2018 when Anchor merged with Hanover Housing Association to form Anchor Hanover Group, the largest provider of specialist housing and care for older people in England.
Anchor had been a charitable housing association registered as a society under the Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies Act 2014, and one of the largest in the UK, with a turnover of £389.1 million in 2017/18.
Anchor's headquarters were in central London, with main offices located in Bradford. It employed more than 8,500 people nationally.
Its patron was Princess Alexandra.
History
Anchor was established in 1968 by Cecil Jackson-Cole, as Help the Aged (Oxford) Housing Association, to provide sheltered housing to older people. By 1972, the organisation had completed its first new-build properties and begun diversifying into both leasehold and rented accommodation.
The organisation became Anchor Housing Association in 1975, and launched its first care homes in 1982.
Anchor's multi award-winning Denham Garden Village – their largest development of retirement properties to date – opened in 2004.
Anchor continued to grow its existing services and diversify into new services such as retirement villages and extra care housing, becoming a thought-leader in caring for individuals with dementia and promoting equality for minority groups, such as LGBT groups.
“Anchor (housing association)” enters the record as england’s largest non-profit housing association. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Anchor, housing and association can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4752656. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2018, 2014, 2017 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anchor (housing association)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.