The history of UK Cohousing in an hour or so
Blog by Tim Larner, pictured at ChaCo in Leeds
Last Saturday night, Simon, Marilyn and I had the pleasure of enjoying the hospitality of ChaCo - a 33 unit cohousing project in the Sheepscar area of Leeds - while we listened to a fascinating lecture by Chris Coates of Diggers & Dreamers about how cohousing has developed in the UK over the last century or more. D&D’s strapline is ‘Intentional Community in Britain’, and Chris is part of the Forgebank community just outside Lancaster.
Chris traced the start of cohousing back to Leeds in 1845 with the formation of the Leeds Redemption Society, building on the ideas a few decades of Robert Owen (of New Lanark fame). Out of the same group of Leeds-based thinkers and doers came the Leeds Union Operative Land and Building Society now the, still mutually-owned, Leeds Building Society. But perhaps he was just being nice to Leeds! Doesn’t cohousing go back to the pre-history of mankind?
There is a wide range of manifestations of cohousing, but there are a few common threads that seem to link them: a desire for self-government, an agreement about the basic philosophy of sharing power for the common good. Chris and his colleagues in D&D have developed a classification of cohousing along the following lines:
· Big house Commune
· Urban Communal
· Spiritual Community
· Low Impact Community, and the rather boring…
· Cohousing Community!
I reckon YoCo falls into the latter but, as you can imagine, there’s room for a lot of overlap here. I’d like to think that we were also ‘low impact’, but I have no ambition to live in a Yurt, so perhaps not!
And every single one Chris went through was different. Common threads but different interpretions – variations on a theme. And YoCo will be different again. But it good to think of our project as being the latest of a historical pattern getting on for two centuries old.
But the big question is: can York rival Lancaster – with a strong spirit of cooperation, of course!
Illustrative image of YoCo’s proposals (and an Editor’s Note:- YoCo might just challenge that classification list by bringing “urban cohousing community with local facilities and economy” to the party…)