We’ve had a variety of questions, queries and challenges in response to the project over the years. Below are some verbatim questions which came our way during an initial local open day on site before we had even started on planning permission, others during the planning process itself. Contact copperlanecohousing[at]gmail.com if you’d like any other questions addressed.
Q. How did Copper Lane Cohousing come about?
Q. How many residents live on the development?
Q. What is the real idea behind this? Isn’t this just a private ‘gated community’?
Q. How does this development improve or benefit the actual local community?
Q. If this project wasn’t commercially viable then how was it financed?
Q. What kinds of enviromentally responsible things are incorporated into the scheme?
Q. What about parking? How will Springdale Road cope with all your cars?
Q.What is ‘cohousing’?
Here’s a definition from the UK Cohousing Network website:
“Cohousing is a way of living which brings individuals and families together in groups to share common aims and activities while also enjoying their own self-contained accommodation and personal space.
Cohousing communities are a means of compensating for the alienating effects of modern life where neighbours don’t recognise each other and where day-to-day collaboration is minimal. They offer particular benefits for children in terms of secure play-space and shared activities with their peers. Older people can also find companionship and mutual support in such communities.
The main features of cohousing communities are:
- They are set up and run by their members for mutual benefit
- Members are consciously committed to living as a community
- Developments are designed to encourage social contact and a sense of neighbourhood among members.
- Common space facilitates shared activities and other amenities like laundries, heating systems, guest rooms, transport, etc. may be shared.”
We have not adopted any particular philosophy beyond the basic principles of cohousing and a wish to work democratically and considerately, and we are entirely independent from any other organization.
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Q. How did Copper Lane Cohousing come about?
A. We got together by chance over a year or two, starting from a core of two neighbouring families in Stoke Newington who wanted to explore the possibility of a cohousing project in our local area. Others joined the group in the first year and we formed a limited company to buy the land. All members of the group are the ‘directors’ of the company, which owns the freehold and the common parts. Individual householders own the leaseholds of each unit within the project.
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Q. How many residents live in this development?
A. We are currently 6 households, the number of people living here at any one time varies between 9 to 14.
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Q. What is the real idea behind this? Isn’t it just a private gated community?
A. Cohousing is basically about people getting together to build new homes together because they can do things collectively that they couldn’t do individually. This ranges from simply having the chance to own and have some long term security in an affordable home, to sharing things (such as gardens and laundry facilities) that make much more sense to do collectively, especially in dense, urban settings.
There are all kinds of ‘gated communities’, ranging from social housing to developer-led ‘luxury’ conversions. We have no interest in ‘securing’ ourselves away behind gates either in a literal or metaphorical way. The site is an unusual one in that it doesn’t correspond to the typical London terrace form and thus has given us the chance to take a different architectural approach.
In terms of design, we were interested in something that we actually allow us much more interaction with each other than regular terrace houses which typically come with private gardens and a sense that the public sphere ends at the front door. In terms of how we might interact with other people living locally, it would be pretty presumptious of us to start saying how that ought to work out! But we hope it’s clear from what we are saying here that we are not ‘gated community’ kind of people and are keen to maintain good relations with our neighbours.
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Q. If you are all so ‘community minded’ then why not just seek to improve the community that you already live in rather than setting up on your own ?
A. We don’t want to make any high-minded claims for the public moral worth of what we’re doing with this development – others will be the judge of that. We would be the first to acknowledge that cohousing on the scale of this project isn’t the solution to the chronic shortage of suitable housing in the UK. There will need to be multiple, local solutions to that issue that respond to specific conditions on the ground, enabled by changes to national planning policies and strategy. There are a variety of ways to implement the principles of cohousing and some inspiring projects have come to fruition in the UK recent years, including LILAC in Leeds and Lancaster Cohousing. On a purely pragmatic level, we’ve returned a derelict site to use in a way that’s hopefully appropriate to the local situation. (Islington) Council originally sold the school premises because they had found more suitable buildings elsewhere and presumably didn’t see any potential in it for other development. A different community use (a church) was opposed by residents in the mid-2000s and we imagine any other proposal that involved significant numbers of people visiting the site would have been opposed for the same reasons offered in opposition to that scheme.
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Q. So how has this development actually improved or benefited the local community?
A. Three of the families involved previously lived 200 yards or less from Springdale Road – so we already considered ourselves as local to a certain degree. Most of us have lived within a couple of miles of the area for over 20 years. We feel confident that what we’ve achieved has had a more positive outcome for existing residents than anything that would have been viable for a commercial developer. We know that one developer interested in buying the site was looking at a minimum of 10 units, compared to the 6 in our proposal.
We have signed off on a compulsory section 106 agreement between ourselves and the council. These are conditions that a council can require in order to grant any form of planning permission.
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Q. If this project wasn’t commercially viable then how was it financed?
A: It’s wasn’t commercially viable at the scale we envisaged because developers expect to make a sizeable profit on what is a risk-laden and time-consuming activity (e.g. buying land without planning permission, taking minimum 3 years from start to finish, many of unknowns along the way). That is why they would have wanted a significantly denser level of development, to create more individual units (the larger the number of smaller units that they can include, the higher the return usually) as is clearly evident from most developer-led new-build projects in cities.
An important factor was being able to buy the land without finance, using cash released from selling our existing homes and moving into rented accommodation – quite an expensive and risky option that simply isn’t possible for the vast majority of people interested in cohousing. When the site came up for sale in 2009, lending for this type of development had completely dried up after the banking crisis of 2008. Access to affordable finance for land acquisition is still a major stumbling block for many cohousing groups.
Once planning permission and been secured and initial architectural drawings had been drawn up, we were able to obtain individual mortgages from the most excellent Ecology Building Society. But that took process took almost 2 years, during which time we had to be self-financing, with members lending to each other where necessary to meet the costs of obtaining planning permission.
We took a fairly conventional route in terms of finance – there are other models, but they can be complex to set up and administrate. LILAC used a very interesting model (a community land trust, CLT) that seems to have great potential for cohousing groups and is now receiving much greater attention and even some government financial support (see the National Community Land Trust Network).
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Q. What kinds of enviromentally responsible things are incorporated into the scheme?
There are multiple factors are included in the calculations required for the Code for Sustainable Homes, which is the main legal framework for sustainability standards in UK residential construction. Issues dealt with in the Code range from choice of materials, micro-power generation to recycling of waste and water. Current thinking on sustainability is less about green bells and whistles (e.g. photo-voltaic solar panels, ground source heat, etc.) and more on the basics (e.g. high levels of insulation, low carbon building materials, structural airtightness). To that end, our buildings are based on a highly insulated timber frame structure, triple-gazed windows and heat recovery ventilation systems. Solar water heating panels are incorporated into the external roofing structures in addition to green roof – these enable a substantial reduction in energy used to heat hot water, even on winter days. We’ve installed rainwater harvesting and reused most of the bricks from the buildings previously on site for paving and gabion walls. Many of these things we had to do because meeting the Code level requires them, not because they actually make the best ecological sense, according to many of the expert views. But what the views of the Code assessor dictate to a large extent what kind of measures and approaches we had to take, even if there might have been better ways to achieve the same (or better) end result. It’s complicated. Building on an inner city brownfield site with very limited access is tricky: everything had to come down a 50-yard lane lane less than 8ft wide wide, including long spans of the timber frame, windows weighing over half a tonne and 50 tons of topsoil – no cranes, trucks or big JCBs to do the heavy lifting. These peculiarities of the site meant making different choices about materials that would have been the case building on a semi-suburban setting, as as LILAC and Lancaster cohousing schemes and elsewhere, where there is a little more space to play with when it comes to, for example, build-ups of walls, ceilings and floors.
Q. What about parking? How will Springdale Road cope with all your cars?
A. A condition of the section 106 agreement (a legally binding agreement between us and the council) is for a car-free development. That means that residents cannot park cars on site or receive permits for on-street parking. As a group, we want to stop owning cars individually purely on financial and environmental grounds.
Copper Lane Cohousing 
Your project is very inspiring, well done! I am an self employed architect based in Hackney and I know what it must be like to weave through all the obstacles and challenges of our creaking planning system. I would like to be involved in a similar group with the intention of building my own small dwelling within a co operative housing group. If you need new members or hear of other groups in London who need members with architectural expertise I’d be grateful if you could let me know.
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