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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 powerfully recorded by Denis Hardy and Colin Ward in their work Arcadia for All.

Immediately after the Second World War, with a pressing need for accommodation of any kind, an increasing number of families became involved in large-scale squatting campaigns, particularly to make use of decommissioned military camps and other decommissioned dwellings. There was an acute shortage of properties for households leaving service life, and for those whose homes had been destroyed by bombing. Local ad hoc ‘committees’, often of ex-service personnel, installed homeless families in vacant houses under cover of night, there to remain until the absentee owners could initiate legal proceedings against them. In the following years, such action grew to include the forced occupation of hundreds of army and air force camps no longer needed for military purposes. Settlers in the Sheffield area formed a Squatters’ Protection Society and linked up with other pioneer squatters from similar urban areas like Scunthorpe. The government announced by October 1946 that 1,038 camps in England and Wales had been occupied by 39,535 people, and that 4,000 people had squatted in Scotland. Later in the year the Ministry of Works offered the Ministry of Health (then the department responsible for housing) an additional 850 former service camps to use.

Substantial numbers of permanent new dwellings were clearly essential, and the post-war government instigated an entire revised town planning regime as an integral element of what was sought from the new welfare state, with a programme for building new towns across the UK from the later 1940s onwards. In the new towns themselves, the ethos was substantially that housebuilding and neighbourhood development should be the responsibility of the local state and its local development corporations. Nevertheless, construction within the urban settlement areas during the 1950s and 1960s still saw contributions by private engagements through organised self-build groups where future residents pooled their trades and skills together for common benefit. The promotion of self-build plots in new towns was modest in scale, at times just targeted at attracting senior executive households into specific local areas – in later developments, like in Milton Keynes, more opportunities were included for self-build activity, as this had been receiving wider coverage in the public debate on housing opportunities at that time.

As the euphoria of the first new town developments began to wane and core political support began change, criticism of local authority competencies to manage and maintain the public sector housing stock became more strident. Opportunities were sought by council tenants to establish new tenant management organisations, set up to take over the direct management of local and neighbourhood housing services by local tenants themselves. Government assistance programmes in the 1970s and 1980s subsequently promoted grant finance towards the management of homes for low- and middle-income families from new housing co-operatives and other self-help housing organisations, at times set up as ‘short life’ co-operatives for temporary use of properties emptied under plans for wider urban redevelopment programmes or left under-used by absentee owners.

A further impetus to co-operative housing activity came in the 1960s with the promotion and development of co-ownership schemes – property built and managed by a collective group of residents, paying a monthly rental to redeem the mortgage originally borrowed to build their homes. The affordability of the tenure was in turn assisted by government tax relief on the mortgage loan. Over 40,000 co-ownership homes were built and operated up to the early 1980s. From the 1990s onwards, when state support began to diminish, larger housing associations become a more favoured social housing delivery mechanism, rather than through small bodies like the co-ops. Some co-operatives subsequently developed other independent means to raise building funds, such as innovative ideas for new loanstock arrangements.

The focus on doing things in common with others was also apparent within the 1960s and 1970s by a rising interest to create ‘alternatives’ to orthodox or mainstream social settings, informed not least by interest in the international ‘hippy’ movement. A classic (and stereotypical) feature of this time was the rise of communes as a basis for alternative communities between people sharing similar ideas and values, often as a means to avoid any adoption of conventional forms of individual ownership or property speculation (even drawing from precedents like the Diggers protests in the Jacobean age). As memorably summarised by Chris Coates in his two works Utopia Britannica and Communes Britannica, what developed from the 1960s onwards was a variety of permanent and transient communities in which families and groups explored the latest ideas about personal and social relationships and the impact of these upon political commitments.

Whilst substantial amounts of public housing were still built into the 1970s, it was also a time of growing political and social engagement with ideas to support private sector home ownership, an interest that can be seen to have initiated the present-day dominance by private sector developers and housebuilding firms over new supply. An individualistic appeal of building a new property for one’s own household grew in tandem with this, and independent self-build consultants found sites for small schemes on which groups of self-builders would collaborate and then purchase the properties on completion of the scheme. By the 1980s further initiatives for low-tech self-build (like the Segal simplified timber-frame technique) and community self-build schemes were set up in order to help households on lower incomes take part in such activity, with programmes of public grants being available to local groups and their development partners – usually local housing associations.

Community-led innovations continued to emerge during the 1980s and 1990s, and many local initiatives were progressed by new community development trusts that could function as the means to focus local concerns into activity that could bring commercial and financial benefits back to local communities. Concerns also emerged on how construction and development projects might reduce their impact upon the health of local people and upon the natural environment. Low-impact housing schemes promoted ‘green’ designs and eco-architecture, and proposals for large and holistic ecovillages emerged from groups of eco-minded professionals and prospective residents seeking to implement such ideals on significant scales. There was also the first successful examples of UK cohousing neighbourhoods, demonstrating the dynamics to be achieved from collaborative engagements between households at a slightly smaller scale.

Finally, now well into the 21st century, new initiatives continue to be explored, such as the community land trusts established by local communities seeking to secure affordable housing as a long-term local asset, or to be the vehicle for acquiring larger areas of land, such as the purchase of the island of Eigg by a community heritage body set up for that end.

The contemporary context

Initial response to the ‘financial crisis’ in western industrial societies during 2007 and 2008 brought forward a number of observations from political commentators on the apparent failure of international housing and finance markets to meet social needs in a sustainable, efficient or prudent way. The first months of that crisis included frank public criticism of the malevolent aspect of prevailing ‘market forces’, and how the actions of influential speculators had proved to be so destructively self-serving. Yet in a short space of time, a willingness to explore what could remedy the causes of a ‘failing market’ has been subsumed within an alternative focus and narrative of a ‘crisis’ in providing enough new properties, especially affordable and accessible properties, for the future. Even the Government White Paper from 2017 – starkly titled ‘Fixing Our Broken Housing Market’ – quickly moves from a critical stance on housing provision being unduly reliant on the dominant interests of volume housebuilders to a set of proposals for increasing future supply largely through a greater level of output from the same providers. The conclusions of that White Paper were that an increased number of new homes would be sufficient to transform the failing market and usher in a more affordable future, rather than the market needing more fundamental change.

This focus on a perceived crisis in delivery levels obstructs a real challenge being promoted on what could persist as underlying factors of the original market failure. Evidence continues to come forward of the shortcomings in conventional planning and construction undertaken by the same suppliers that are still courted by government policy. Among these shortcomings are the significant limitations in housing design and the poor quality of new neighbourhoods,³ where a lack of basic community facilities raises serious concern that such areas will in no way be ‘sustainable’ places for future social interactions. Nor does the ‘crisis in delivery’ narrative adequately account for how the UK’s housing and property markets have emerged as even more expensive and unaffordable to many households in the years following the financial crash – as Bob Colenutt has recently highlighted, there is a real naivety in the simplistic belief that having more housing units available will by itself reduce market prices, when so much of the UK market context is controlled by the interests of the biggest housing suppliers. The Affordable Housing Commission⁴ contains some excellent contemporary analyses of what ‘affordable’ may now mean to UK households and other stakeholders, but it has been quiet on macroeconomic considerations that could inform a critique of why there is such an apparent shortage of properly affordable dwellings and how to respond so that future households will not see housing costs consume such an unsustainable proportion of their finances.

It is pertinent to recall observations made more than a century ago on the history of inequalities in socioeconomic conditions between social classes in the UK and their respective access to political and economic power:

The more closely any period of history is studied, the more clearly does it appear that the mistakes and troubles of an age are due to a false spirit, an unhappy fashion in thought or emotion, a tendency in the human mind to be overwhelmed by the phenomena of the time, and to accept those phenomena as the guide to conduct and judgement, instead of checking and criticising them by a reasoned standard of its own. [People] come to think that it is their business to explain, rather than to control the forces of the hour.⁵

One of the less well-publicised responses to the UK’s financial crisis of 2007–8 is that a number of UK organisations representing housing and neighbourhood interests at the ‘grassroots’ level saw the opportunity to raise discussion beyond a narrative that would focus solely on a ‘crisis’ and promote a broader debate about the holistic nature and accountability of the UK’s housing future.

An embryonic coalition was formed, informally termed the ‘Mutual Housing Alliance’,⁶ to collaborate on ways to promote an increase in practical opportunities for future local housing projects. There was an acceptance by members in this Alliance that each could have a discrete focus on what initiatives local people might wish to instigate at local levels – it could be facilitating housing to be collectively owned or managed (such as by co-operatives or trusts), or a focus on the building of new properties by individuals or by neighbourhood groups (such as with self-build or cohousing groups), or even simply to renovate and reuse buildings in disrepair. Yet it was also acknowledged that a collaboration of work between bodies would provide a complementary and common view on how the core accountability of all kinds of successful local activities should rest with the households and communities seeking the local change.

Members of the Mutual Alliance subsequently contributed to a variety of government initiatives and working parties instigated by both Labour and Conservative governments, and a narrative began to emerge demonstrating to a wider audience what ‘community-led’ activity represents at its heart. This was subsequently enshrined in definitions commissioned by members of the Alliance from the Building and Social Housing Foundation (BSHF)⁷ to confirm that ‘community-led’ housing is:

[where] people are involved in meeting their own housing needs and wants. The route taken depends on things like the nature of the demand, available resources, location and type of activity. Approaches encompass new build, regeneration and the use of existing buildings. Community-led housing groups may form on the basis of a geographical connection or something else they have in common [….] the ‘community-led housing’ sector supports people to decide how they want to live, and make it happen.⁸

The coherence between the common interests of different forms of activities and organisations within the ‘community-led housing sector’ was also clarified in a working definition of what principles constitute the practical workings of such projects:

The legal form and activities of each community-led housing scheme depend on the outcomes needed, but share common principles:

a)the community is integrally involved throughout the process in key decisions like what is provided, where, and for who. They don’t necessarily have to initiate the conversation, or build homes themselves;

b)there is a presumption that the community group will take a long-term formal role in the ownership, stewardship or management of the homes;

c)the benefits of the scheme to the local area and/or specified community group are clearly defined and legally protected in perpetuity.⁹

This understanding of what is intrinsic to local people’s housing and neighbourhood projects has subsequently informed other extensive work and collaborations with government parties, undertaken by a secondary grouping of bodies that were initial members of the Mutual Alliance. From 2017 a fourfold practical collaboration between the National Community Land Trust Network, the UK Cohousing Network, the Confederation of Co-operative Housing and Locality has created the ‘Community Led Homes’ alliance, and helped steer the recent political and financial support from central government provided through the Community Housing Fund.¹⁰ More comment on this Fund will be considered in later chapters, however it is salient to recognise that the Prospectus of the Community Housing Fund virtually repeats the definition of ‘community-led housing’ as given in the definitions above. The Prospectus stated that proposals for funding would be considered if they ensure that:

•meaningful community engagement and consent occurs throughout the development process (The community does not necessarily have to initiate and manage the process, or build the homes themselves, though some may do);

•the local community group or organisation owns, manages or stewards the homes and in a manner of their choosing;

•the benefits to the local area and/or specified community must be clearly defined and legally protected in perpetuity.¹¹

Core motivations

To understand the kinds of core motivations that drive contemporary activities forward, information can be culled from a combination of information sources. These will include experiences from members of the original Mutual Housing Alliance and the current Community-Led Homes partnership; data from other comparable or associated UK bodies; national and international academic reports and different ‘advice notes’¹² on community-led, collaborative or ‘self-organised’ housing projects; and views that come forward from other national and international networks linking local communities and their community developments.¹³

Table 1.1: Key drivers behind local people creating their own homes in the UK

•to build new property for individuals, groups or neighbourhood organisations

•to extend choice and variety within local housing provision

•to provide affordable housing, for rent or sale, for allocation to local people

•to have a collective or communal ownership of dwellings by the residents

•to be influential over local housing management and maintenance services

•to meet a change in household needs (like ‘downsizing’ for senior residents)

•to renovate and rehabilitate under-used or vacant property

•to create sustainably constructed ‘low-impact’ dwellings

•to live in ‘intentional communities’ (or groups), sharing similar values

•to establish homes within collaborative neighbourhoods

•to use flexible forms of movable or ‘non-settled’ accommodation

•to secure the stewardship of local assets by ‘community’ organisations

•to sustain social dynamics within existing settlements and neighbourhoods

•to stimulate wider opportunities for local skills and employment

Table 1.1 brings this information together to summarise what can be identified as driving people to create or shape their own homes and neighbourhoods in the UK. This summary demonstrates some key ambitions of local people to shape local housing and neighbourhood circumstances:

•to have a deciding role in the creation of the dwellings that will be most appropriate for local households, particularly on the design, cost and tenure of those properties;

•to acquire and manage empty or ‘under’-used property in order to give it a suitable and positive use;

•to influence how housing resources are allocated and properties are maintained;

•to shape the design and facilities of entire neighbourhoods, not just the quality of some residential dwellings, at times in order to provide for ‘communities of interest’ sharing ideological, political or social backgrounds;

•to meet a diverse range of needs of individuals and of groups, which themselves may be organised in a variety of ways and scales and be from varied cultural backgrounds.

The list above also includes aspirations less frequently included in descriptions of households seeking control over their home environments, such as the motivations of ‘travelling’ households, or for creating ‘eco-housing’ that will minimise energy consumption for low-income households.

There is lastly an inclusion of some associated community-based aspirations, such as enhancing the skills and employability of local residents, or to establish a local stewardship over cherished buildings, places or facilities (similar to the historic description of being a steward over the assets of a country estate).

What is not included in the summary is any reference to individuals or community agencies being motivated to undertake building or property development primarily to generate capital profit. Some local projects may certainly hope that funds could be generated to cover the costs of other community-centred activities (or even for further building plans), but that hope for the future is rarely sufficient reason to devote such time and energy to complex activity in the present day. The information in Table 1.1 deliberately also excludes motivations to raise profits for personal gain, even if, here and there, that may be an intention of some private individuals. The message of the list above is fundamentally what galvanises a variety of collaborative works.

How such motivations have subsequently informed specific practices is explored in the next chapters.

Notes

1Around 200 or so societies remain in the UK, offering a range of financial services products to their members.

2These have invariably undergone a series of successive renovations such that they now resemble leafy but orthodox rural and suburban development.

3See the report in the Guardian online, 19 January 2020, www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/19/housing-giants-put-profit-before- peoples-needs-report-reveals

4Affordable Housing Commission (2019), ‘Defining and Measuring Housing Affordability: An Alternative Approach’, AHC, Smith Institute, UK.

5Hammond, J.L & Hammond, B. (1917), The Town Labourer 1760–1832, Longmans, Green & Co, London.

6The UK Mutual Housing Alliance included CDS Co-operatives; Community Gateway Network; Confederation of Co-operative Housing; Co-operatives UK; National Community Land Trusts Network; Community Self-Build Agency; Locality; National Custom & Self-Build Association; National Federation of Tenant Management Organisations; Radical Routes; Self-Help Housing; UK Cohousing Network.

7Now called ‘World Habitat’ (see www.world-habitat.org/publications/).

8Building and Social Housing Foundation (2015), ‘Scaling Up Community-led Housing: A proposal to the Nationwide Foundation’, Coalville, UK, p 3.

9Building and Social Housing Foundation (2016), ‘Community-led Housing’, Coalville, UK, p 2–3.

10Homes England (2018), ‘Community Housing Fund Prospectus’ (Open Government Licence).

11The CHF Prospectus also notes ‘this may be done through a mutually supported arrangement with a Registered Provider that owns the freehold or leasehold for the property’.

12See the very useful summary compiled by Lang, R., Carriou, C. & Czischke, D. (2018), ‘Collaborative Housing Research (1990–2017): A Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis of the Field’, Housing, Theory and Society, 35(1): 10–39.

13Including National Self-Build Centre; Canal and River Trust; Community Finance Solutions; Diggers & Dreamers; Action on Empty Homes; Shelter; Global Ecovillage Network; Eurotopia; European Network for Housing Research.