Published: 01 March 2012

JOAN Jarosy, who has died aged 89, had a remarkable life story.

A foundling, who never knew her birth parents, she went on to launch a pioneering housing charity, based in Camden.

.She remained a radical – always a member of CND, for example – all her life.

Joan was born on November 19, 1922.

Shortly after the birth, her mother handed her over at the old Foundling Hospital in Coram’s Fields, King’s Cross.

From there, Joan and a young boy called Peter were both transferred for adoption to a rich, childless, single woman, whose money came from the manufacture of sewing thread.

The two of them grew up like brother and sister in a classic upper-middle-class home near Hampstead Heath.

However, the children’s new mother suffered from bipolar disease and killed herself when Joan and Peter were very young.

They moved into the care of “Aunt Marjorie” – their adoptive mother’s sister – who lived in Hexham, Northumberland, where her husband ran a prep. school for boys. Joan was sent there, as the sole girl in the school.

Joan went to the London School of Economics at a time when it had been evacuated from London to Cambridge to escape the German bombs.

There she met her future husband, Berlin-born Ivo, who later ran the Academy art-house cinema in Oxford Street.

Ivo was fascinated by this feisty, beautiful woman who smoked cigarettes, wore trousers and always knew her own mind.

They married in 1952.

Helped with some money left to Joan by Aunt Marjorie, they put down money on a house and lived in Camden all their married life, and had two sons.

In the late 1960s, dismayed by the growing shortage of affordable housing, Joan founded, in Kentish Town, one of the first of the new-style housing associations.

Called the International Neighbours Housing Association, it aimed to provide homes for families in poverty.

In 1973, International Neighbours merged into the larger Community Housing Association.

This eventually merged into the One Housing Group.

Today, One Housing owns about 13,000 homes, 2,500 of them in Camden.

Joan was a tireless fighter against injustice.

She loved theatre, classical music, the English countryside and foreign travel.

She found Ivo’s death in 1996 hard to bear, but she had an indomitable spirit and an unshakeable independence.

She gave her grandchildren the affection that was missing from her own childhood.

She is survived by two sons and three grandchildren.

Paul Barker