Page 4 - C.A.L.L. #31 - Spring 2009

Cohousing is the new name for commune living

From The Sunday Times - July 20, 2008
By Lucy Denyer

Fancy communal living, but want a home of your own? Co-housing could be the answer.
Every evening, John Franklin, 49, who works for a management consultancy in the City, takes
the train back to his three-bedroom home in the Sussex countryside - hopefully in time for a
spot of gardening. But Franklin is not growing roses in a cottage garden. He is helping to
produce vegetables for his 70 or so
neighbours. “It’s a wonderfully
inspiring thing,” he says.

This is not a random act of
generosity.

Franklin, his wife Melanie, 45, and
daughter Imogen, 14, are part of a
small but growing number of Britons
trying out a different way of living: cohousing. The Franklins live at the Community
Project, where 22 households have set up home together in 23 acres of rolling
countryside on the edge of the South Downs, just outside Lewes. Although they each own
their own property, they live together as a community. Call it a capitalist commune.

After work or at weekends, Franklin and his neighbours might take part in committee
meetings to discuss ways of making the site greener, attend a “pot luck” supper, where
every member of the project brings a dish to the communal dining room to share, or gear
up for the next “Busy day” – a monthly event when all the community’s members tackle
the endless jobs that need doing around the site, from mending broken door handles in
Shawfield – the house in which they gather for various activities – to mowing the lawns.

The project grew from a conversation between a group of friends around a dinner table
in London in 1989; the first members moved there nine years ago. Now 74 people –
including 34 children – live here, either in four detached wooden houses or in homes
carved out of the main building, a converted hospital built in the 1930s to house “high-
grade and low-grade imbeciles”.

Like Franklin, the other residents own their own homes on a 9,999-year lease and pay a
service charge, based on the square footage of each property, to cover heating and
water. The project has its own water system and produces its own heat via a biomass
boiler.

Each adult is also a director of the company that owns the site as a whole, and is jointly
responsible for taking part in decisions on subjects from finances to whether someone
should be allowed to build a garden shed. Nothing happens here without hours of
discussion – and there are subgroups to deal with everything from looking after the land
to general maintenance.

Co-housing schemes like this have existed in Denmark for 30 years and in America for

4