Update: Our housing Co-op journey

Last year we sowed the seeds for our dream of building a housing co-op, and already in the first few weeks of 2024 a small group of us have embarked on our first attempt to secure a property for us to live communally.

The last few weeks have been intense - with flurries of activity and turbulent emotions, as well as the discovery of useful resources and profound realisations. So we thought we’d start to document our journey more regularly - to help us to reflect, connect with other people who might share our values and dreams, and share useful insights with those following a similar path.

Small stories, big dreams

At the start of the year I sent the following prompt to our community living WhatsApp group of 9 people: “When you think about living in community, what are the images that come to mind? What feelings do you want to experience as part of this possibility?”

I initially joked that my brain can often hyper-fixate on really tiny things, like having a fully stocked lentil dispenser for people to easily help themselves to, but Joni came back with a really thoughtful expansion on this. She said the ethos behind this excited her - that when sharing resources and energy, there is profound power in everyone having free access to what they need when they need it, in a way that our individualistic society does not enable.

Over the course of a few days, the group exchanged hundreds of messages, over an hour of voice notes and a few different drawings visualising our hopes and dreams (including one from my 4 year old as we are all big believers in involving small people in building new possibilities).

Hearing people talk about the small experiences they imagined being possible when living as part of a co-op made me realise how painfully bizarre it is that connection, nourishment, safety, agency, creativity and rest are not easily accessible for many of people in our every day lives.

Conversation, assumptions and fears

A smaller group of us then met in person at &Breathe to delve deeper into what this journey towards living communally might look like for us. While some of us had known each other for years and had regular chats about our hopes and dreams, some of us were meeting each other in person for the first time.  We were all buzzing with ideas, inspiration and knowledge we wanted to share, but we decided that the most important conversation to have first was actually about how to have these types of conversation. This made space for vulnerability and trust-building, and pushed us to acknowledge and communicate the assumptions we might have.

We unearthed nuanced dynamics such as the fact some of us were present within the group as part of a couple, and that this meant we needed to take care to centre ourselves as individuals and try not speak on behalf of others. We also noted that we were all in different places when it came to commitment and capacity for this work, and while we didn’t have all the answers for how to navigate this, simply acknowledging it as a fact would help us to understand the competing pressures or conflicting feelings people were navigating.

And importantly we all came away feeling that regardless of whether all of us actually ended up living together, we could all see value in having the conversations in and of themselves. We were building community and friendships around shared values and ideals; we were generating ideas that would lead us to new ways of living no matter how far we travelled that path together; we were learning about ourselves and the world around us.

Everything everywhere all at once

Only a few days after this conversation a beautiful property at the centre of our hometown, Wirksworth, came up for sale. It is the old Grade II listed infant school, and although the work required to make it liveable is substantially more complex than I’d personally imagined pursuing as part of a project like this, the potential of a community asset like this to be repurposed into something that would continue to deliver value to our local community felt like it was too exciting to ignore.

So I shared it on the group chat, and within a few days four of us were going along to our first viewing. We were all holding the possibility lightly - we were still sussing out our desires as a group, we had not yet incorporated as a co-op, and we there were quite a few hurdles before we could secure the funds we needed. But on seeing the property we could instantly imagine the vibrancy of this sort of building as a co-housing and community space.

In the space of a week we had chats with building surveyors, architects, town councillors and heritage people. We pulled together our financial model, one of us set their house sale in process, and we engaged other existing co-ops as well as potential co-op members about the possibilities of the space. The energy building around it feels magical, and regardless of whether we secure the property, seeing the practical layers of this sort of project unfold has been invaluable for preparing us for this journey together.


We are in the midst of juggling many moving parts of the process, and many moving emotions among the group. It currently feels like an endless cycle of chicken and egg, lining up dominoes that may never fall.

The power of mycelium

That said it has been amazing to experience how rapidly a community can mobilise. The power of the connections we’ve been building and the foundations we’ve been laying for years is exhilarating to see in action as it enable us to keep flowing towards our vision. Within our group we’ve been gaining a variety of relevant knowledge thanks to aligning ourselves towards our values. Laura choosing to spend the last year on a scholarship about the upkeep of historic buildings meant we went to our first viewing of the school armed with practical questions about the building. Myself and Nick spending time building connections at Radical Routes gatherings and understanding the slightly opaque financial routes to fund an endeavour such as this.

Thanks to being embedded in the local community it has also been easy for us to think about who else we’d need to engage on that journey outside of our group. The projects set up by Paul Carr, such as Haarlem Artspace and Northern Light Cinema, were one of the many things that inspired us to move to Wirksworth originally, and he agreed to share his knowledge of navigating building projects like this as soon as I told him about our idea. We’d hosted the Wirksworth festival at our &Breathe space last year, and we knew instantly that we would want the infant school to continue to offer creative space for important community celebrations and gatherings such as this.  And thanks to the Wirksworth Arts Trail last year I stumbled across GRT Architects who had stuck in my mind thanks to the beautiful colouring books they’d made. As soon as they heard about the potential of co-housing they too wanted to join us on our second viewing and have already given us so much time and support to explore the possibilities of the space, as well as helping to demystify assumptions we might have about converting a listed building.

Holding doubt

All of this said, we are still far from securing the school as our co-housing and community space. The infrastructure simply isn’t there to enable groups like us to move rapidly with transformational opportunities like this. While we’ve discovered helpful resources such as Project Viability grants from Architectural Heritage, and we’re lucky to live in an area where you can access Pre-planning advice from the council, it is nothing in comparison to the ways our systems favour high-earning nuclear families and individuals to secure traditional mortgages, or cash buyers and property developers who are able to take the risks we can’t afford. Triodos Bank are working quickly to help us agree a loan so that we can make an offer but already there have been two offers on the site, and the possibility of losing out to commercial property developers feels very high.

As Joni from our group articulated so well, the infrastructure around property purchasing is designed for those seeking to turn assets into profit - we’re seeking to turn an asset into so much more than that but the system does not make that easy.

In addition, while some of us have fallen in love with the idea of the school as a viable site for co-housing, there are others in the group who are not yet sold on it being the right space for the type of living they want to create. This is natural and we are exploring ways to hold all of our doubts and excitement simultaneously, and are committed to bringing more people on the journey with us even when things are far from certain.

Commitment not clouded by romantic love or familial obligation

Finally, one thing that feels substantially different to traditional routes to house ownership, and more powerful when it comes to manifesting this collective way of living, is that it isn’t dependent on romantic love or familial obligation. It is a profound feeling to have so many people commit their time and energy to this sort of journey together in spite of many of us not having romantic or familial ties to each other. As a result it feels like we are able to have deeper and more honest conversations.

Whereas many of us might compromise when living with partners or family out of fear of losing their love and the security that comes with it, in this scenario we are all explicitly navigating the nuances of what we need and desire to make living together worthwhile. And because we intend to buy the property as a co-operative it means that every member will have ownership as part of that co-operative, and no individuals’ security is reliant on another individual persons opinion of us/connection to us. In other scenarios many people do not leave abusive relationships because their living situation is dependent on their partner or their biological family, but with this model there is a collective of individuals working hard to balance different needs within the space you all share.

If you’d like to be an active part of the group exploring co-housing (regardless of whether you want to live as part of our co-op),  want to hear more about our plans for the Wirksworth Infant School or want to offer us support to help make this project a reality get in touch via ray@and-breathe.org