Building an intentional community
Radical Routes Gathering at Wild Peak
In principle there are thousands of different ways people can live together, but with steep rents, narrow social norms, and destructive property building and acquiring regimes, it’s no surprise that so many of us go along with what is feasible for us or expected of us rather than consciously designing the type of life we want to live and the community we want to share it with.
Alongside this, we are repeatedly sold the lie that the only route to security within a precarious world is to create a ‘stable’ ‘home’. Myself and Nick have both been part of the toxic nuclear family house-owning culture. When we met in 2020 I believe we were both deeply disembodied from the race to secure this lifestyle. Nick had accumulated a lot of debt from unaffordable mortgages and I had spent my first year as a homeowner with mould growing up the walls of a house steeped with depression. We were both deeply isolated and alone in a life we were sold as the epitome of happiness and security. Neither of us felt safe. Neither of us felt happy. In addition, one of the reasons I embarked on the journey to own a home is because we are told that it is an investment in the future, particularly your children’s future.
At the same time there are individuals, and generations of families, who will never be able to access secure, affordable, safe housing to rent, let alone any form of home ownership. There are large families crammed in terraced housing and at risk of eviction at any time, and landlords turning living rooms into bedrooms as they squeeze an extra desperate tenant in to pay extortionate rent for a single bed (my first house share in london was an ex-council flat where we had no living space - it was £500pcm per person in 2010). These financial disparities, along with the belief that a home is better than no home, is also one of the many reasons so many people have no choice but to remain in abusive households.
Whichever way you look at it our approach to housing and living in the UK is destroying our mental, physical, financial and spiritual wellbeing. The nuclear family house-owning ‘dream’ is tearing us apart, both in a communal/collective sense and within the depths of our individual souls and psyche. We urgently need to reconfigure the ways that we live together, and rediscover a different sense of security and safety in community with one another and the land.
Where we are on the journey
Hockerton Housing project Nottinghamshire
Nick was the first person to meet me with the same level of energy to explore the possibilities of living more intentionally and in community with others. For our first Christmas together, he bought me a copy of Diggers and Dreamers, and shortly afterwards he asked me to set up a company with him with the intention of completely transforming how we lived and worked and learnt to flex that around our respective needs, rather than burning ourselves out for corporate employers. We visited Hockerton Housing project at the start of last year, and when we started to think seriously about relocating we decided to set up the &Breathe space in Wirksworth as a step towards having people flowing through our home, and as a way of connecting with communities out in rural Derbyshire.
Already we have been running regular low or no-cost retreats for our extended network to connect around alternative ways of working, living and being. I started volunteering regularly a few months back with Pingle Farm to build up my growing skills, and in turn this led us to Wild Peak Housing Co-op who invited us to our first Radical Routes gathering in September.
We overflowed with excitement at meeting so many housing co-ops as part of this gathering, it made everything feel possible. And while we somewhat wished we could just move us and our kids into an existing set up, we believe that the capacity, resources and community we have should be directed towards reclaiming more land as a communal asset. With the climate crises literally flooding many of our doorsteps, there is an urgent need for many more housing co-ops that can make sustainable ways of living more accessible to more people… which is why we are setting up our own housing co-op.
Why a co-operative model?
One route for us to access some of the benefits of communal living would be to rent or buy a larger property with one or two families in a similar position to us. But for us this journey is about a political stance not just a way of living. We don’t believe that land and housing should be owned by individual people at the expense of others, and we certainly don’t believe that private wealth should be hoarded and inherited by the few.
A co-operative model would allow us to contribute the resources we have from the houses we have previously owned, while also ensuring the property is owned by a collective regardless of whether the people who are part of that collective are in different financial situations. It also protects the group from one or two individuals holding too much power within a living situation, which is something we’ve heard about in other communal set ups whether it’s simply a homeowner and their tenant, or a retreat centre where people live and work and risk both their home and their livelihood if they end up on bad terms with the owners.
How you can get involved
We have many hopes and dreams about what a co-living set up could look like, and how it could offer joy, safety and freedom to a diverse range of people. Sustainability, as well as disruption of familial norms, are just a couple of the outcomes we hope to centre through our co-housing set up, but we want more voices to work with us to shape what is important to prioritise.
Over the coming months we are hoping to start to form a more explicit group that share our desires to find a space to live that offers us both more community and more agency. We wanted to offer a couple of ways for people to connect with us if you are interested in what it could look like - whether you have the intention of living as part of a housing co-operative or simply want to support more spaces like this to exist.
Pop along to our monthly gathering
Lunch at our space in Wirksworth
Starting on the 25th January we’ll be hosting a regular monthly dinner or lunch at &Breathe in Wirksworth for those wishing to explore the possibilities of co-housing. Even if you aren’t sure that co-living is for you right now, we are hoping that whatever space we set up will be of benefit to a much wider community than just those who live there so we’d love to learn more about what you’d like to see.
We’ll have a mixture of free-flow conversation and regular workshop-style topics which the group feel are relevant to learn about and explore together. Email us on tesscooper25@gmail.com to let us know you want to come.
If it’s difficult for you to attend something in person in Wirksworth drop us an email as we may also run an online version or host a longer gathering for those who need to travel further.
Join us at the next Radical Routes gathering on 17-19 November
We’ll be attending the next two radical routes gatherings with the intention of becoming a member in order to access their brilliant support and extended community as we go on this journey. Drop us a line if you want to see if its possible to tag along with us, or are already going along as part of your own project and want to share ideas and plans with one another.
