A brief summary of how the UK’s housing sector plans for the construction of homes and delivery of neighbourhood services would include the following observations:
•The UK’s present culture of housing provision is a tried and tested framework for mainstream participants to plan and provide housing and neighbourhood services.
•It is intrinsic to the nature of the UK’s ‘open market’ practices that, notwithstanding some occasional innovation, existing relationships remain unchanged until dominant interests accept reasons to change.
•Ideas for new forms of, or gaps in, housing provision are best assessed and addressed by the experienced partnerships and frameworks already in place – the extent of any local demand (such as represented by community-led housing solutions) is not proven, or will only be present on a very modest scale.
•The established networks which interact on land, finance and construction services are not ones in which ‘community’ projects can easily compete – proposals for solutions from the grassroots of local communities are not seen to have the governance skills or practical expertise to drive new projects forward.
This publication centres around the nature and ways in which the individual and collaborative actions of people in the UK have sought to challenge the above positions. An underlying theme is an awareness of the tension between how local people can obtain lasting and secure homes and neighbourhoods at affordable costs and how there should be accountability to local communities and their local residents for the homes and places created. What follows are extensive descriptions of the innovative responses of local people to achieve the homes and neighbourhoods that can meet their personal and collective ambitions, plus ideas on the kinds of benchmarks for how the public, private and community sectors might be accommodating of such activities.
Identifying motivation at the grassroots
The historical context
Whilst the main purpose of this publication is admittedly to detail and explore contemporary settings for how people in the UK are shaping their homes and neighbourhoods, it is important to recall the rich legacy that new projects might use for inspiration. Local communities have consistently adapted to key circumstances of the day in order that the benefits from using local resources can be properly shared – whether that be the appropriation of land by the Diggers and Levellers of the 17th century or the ‘community buyouts’ of Scottish highland estates in the 21st.
The persistent nature of how people have sought to create their own homes can always be understood as a response to key and prevailing issues of the time. An early 19th century focus of workers within industrial trades challenging their exclusion from prevailing political and financial systems resulted in the creation of the first ‘friendly societies’, based on a simple premise that if a group of people contributed to a mutual fund, they could then receive benefits at a time of future need.1 Working class families without access to the main banking system of the age established the first building societies from 1775, for members to pool funds for purchasing land and building houses. Over 250 societies had been created by 1825, originally set up as terminating societies, which closed when all the members had been housed or had purchased land for that purpose. In the 1830s and 1840s the permanent building society gradually emerged, continually taking in new members as earlier ones completed their purchases and became suitably housed.
The middle years of the 19th century also witnessed the emergence of Chartism as an aspirational working class movement for political reform. It was named after the People’s Charter of 1838 and aimed to reform the democratic nature of national and local politics. In 1843 the Chartist Co-operative Land Company was established (later called the National Land Company) to enable working people to acquire land for their own housing and to challenge the private appropriation of land by Enclosure Acts. Funds collected from contributions by workers were used to purchase rural sites, which were then subdivided into smaller plots for occupation by households chosen through drawing lots. Between 1844 and 1848, five estates were purchased, subdivided and cottages were built: former Land Company houses remain in use in Oxfordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire.
Parallel to these endeavours for new settlements of individually owned properties, the Rochdale Pioneers were meeting their members’ housing needs through other innovative collaborations. This led to the first co-operative housing being built in 1861 by the Rochdale Pioneer Land and Building Company, which went on to provide 84 homes for its members by 1867.
Gillian Darley’s work Villages of Vision provides evocative details on the many kinds and scales of community-centred settlements that emerged around the nation in the later years of the 19th century – not least the well-publicised ‘model village’ settlements like New Lanark, Saltaire, Port Sunlight and Bournville. The superior living standards available within such planned settlements certainly represented improvements in domestic circumstances; however, such developments were firmly controlled by the representatives of their respective founding figures. There was limited opportunity for tenants or residents to shape what dwellings were being offered, and on what terms. Other kinds of communities therefore emerged based upon different political ideals than the rather authoritarian kind of governance found in the model villages. These were interested in a more communal and co-responsible life, with a sense of how residents could live in local places through holding shared values in common with each other. Denis Hardy and Lynne Pearson have listed the diverse communities of ‘utopian’ socialists, anarchists, Tolstoyans, communists and others. Some are still evident: the Whiteway Colony in Gloucestershire continues to exist over 100 years after being originally set up as an ‘anarchic settlement’ with explicit principles against any individual ownership of land. It is (in)famous for holding a ceremonial public burning of all the title deeds to the estate in order to destroy any legal or future basis for individuals to claim ownership of its land.
The focus on acquiring land for the large-scale benefit of future local communities was a fundamental driver behind the creation of the first garden cities, such as Letchworth Garden City, in the period at the start of the 20th century and immediately prior to the First World War, and a subsequent creation of administrative structures to extend this drive to new ‘garden suburbs’. These ideals underpinned intentions to safeguard the community stewardship of local land and other facilities and informed the kind of co-operative housing developments built by tenant co-partnerships, starting in 1901 with the founding of the first co-partnership co-operative at Bentham Garden Suburb in Ealing, and subsequently other examples, such as at Hampstead Garden Suburb in Hampstead.
The end of the First World War in 1918 brought a huge demand for new housing and community growth to the fore, with the campaign slogan of ‘Homes for Heroes’ repeated throughout Britain, in part due to the recognition of the substandard slum properties still evident across much of the nation. It was at this time that the first local council housing provisions emerged and the first suburban estates built from public funds were constructed, yet there remained a strong individualistic attraction in the idea of possessing a few square yards on which to build something more permanent – small holiday homes, country retreats or even a cherished ‘smallholding’.
In sparsely populated places, especially those close to more isolated coastal areas, plotland developments began to appear, the term ‘plotland’ being coined for those places where land was divided and sold in small plots (often in unorthodox ways), not infrequently from an enforced sale of bankrupt farms at knockdown prices. These areas frequently developed characteristics as local arcadias of landscaped enclaves and grassy tracks, randomly filled with a collection of dwellings made from army huts, old railway coaches, sheds, shanties and diverse chalets,2