Kareem Dayes’s story will be familiar to many millennials. Moving between rented house shares, with stints in leaky warehouses and spells back home with the parents, Dayes led a precarious existence – going from one temporary set-up to the next, continually subject to evictions and rent hikes, with little hope of ever finding an affordable, stable place. “I thought I’d have to move out of London,” says Dayes, “or even out of the country. There were no options left.”
A few years later, there has been an unlikely twist. He hasn’t won the lottery – but he now lives in a four-bedroom flat in Lewisham, in leafy Ladywell, where his two children enjoy the run of a big communal garden and play area. Dayes and his neighbours grow food together and organise the daily life of a place they collectively own and manage, in homes that will remain affordable to people in the surrounding area for ever.
“I can’t quite believe we made it happen,” says Dayes, sitting out on his porch with his wife, Amalia Syeda-Aguirre, taking a break from painting their staircase bright blue. Their expansive shared deck looks out over the garden, where a wooden community hub with a kitchen and space for meetings and yoga stands next to a big bike shed with a green roof. “It has felt like running an ultramarathon for the last 18 months. But seeing the kids play outside with their mates, it has finally clicked. This is why we did it.”
Over the last year, they have been plumbing, laying floors and hanging plasterboard ceilings themselves, as part of the largest community-led and partly self-built housing project ever undertaken in London. Thirty-six permanently affordable homes now stand as a testament to the collective will of the residents – the result of 15 years of planning, negotiating and wrestling with fiendishly complex bureaucratic, legal and financial hurdles, followed by the equally complicated struggle of actually building the things on flood-prone land.
Occupying a leftover plot at the end of a cul-de-sac of Victorian terraces, backing on to the concrete-sided Ravensbourne river, the apartments are spread across two staggered four-storey blocks raised on columns above the flood level. They are joined by a pair of elevated walkways which wrap across the facades, forming wide shared decks, shading the south-facing windows and framing views of a big silver birch where a playground will be open to the public. Colourful cladding and matching front doors give each home its own identity, while mesh screens and planter-topped balustrades await being smothered with climbing plants. Creepers will engulf the whole complex, giving it the look of an extended-family treehouse, where children can scamper across the bridges and down the broad open steps at either end.
“The kids are already in and out of each other’s houses all the time,” says Pete Bell, who lives here with his wife Emma Onono and their seven-year-old son. “We can say, ‘Don’t go out of the main gate, but otherwise do what you want.’ He now wants to be outside all the time, rather than sat in front of a screen.” During a recent sunny weekend, it was all hands on deck for weeding the garden. “It’s a really nice community vibe,” says Onono. “Everyone just gets stuck in, kids and grownups alike.”
This improbable slice of collective utopia is the vision of the Rural Urban Synthesis Society, or Russ, a community land trust that Dayes founded in 2009, and which now counts more than 1,000 members, each owning £1 shares. The DIY approach to housing was in the blood: Dayes grew up on Walters Way, a pioneering community of 13 self-built houses nearby, designed by radical German architect Walter Segal in the 1980s. These timber-framed houses, where his parents built their family home, were ultimately acquired by their residents through right to buy – making them now just as expensive as other properties in the area. Dayes, however, was determined that his generation’s version would be removed from the speculative lottery of the market.
“The entirety of British society,” he says, “is based on building wealth by owning property, which is why we’re in such a mess. Russ couldn’t be more against the grain in that respect – no one is here to make money from their house.”
Crucially, a resale price covenant means that the value of the homes is permanently linked to the original cost of building, rising in line with the retail price index rather than tied to the vagaries of the property market. Prices here range from £290,000 for a one-bed flat to £590,000 for a four-bed, but what sets Russ apart from other community land trusts is its broad mix of tenures, designed to cater to the full spectrum of local needs.
There are shared-ownership homes, where residents own a percentage and pay rent on the rest; smaller flats for outright sale, aimed at downsizers; flats for social rent, managed by a housing association; and a couple of flats for sharers, with rooms let out at what’s called London affordable rent. The resulting community – which was selected by ballot, with applicants required to have prior connections to Lewisham – ranges from single people to young families and older retirees.
“It’s our idea of what a sustainable neighbourhood looks like,” says Anurag Verma, who chairs Russ. “Much more than just being affordable, it’s about the idea of agency – having control over where you live. It’s self-build in the broadest sense of building a community, by going through the whole process together. By the time people moved in, strong neighbourly bonds were already formed.”
Learning how to become a developer from scratch was no easy ride. The group identified the vacant plot of council-owned land in 2013, but had to bid competitively in an open tender process, demonstrating their vision would provide long-term social value, compared with the council flogging it off to the highest bidder. Russ received an initial grant from the Mayor of London’s innovation fund to cover the costs of planning, while the £10m construction cost would be covered by a mix of grants and loans from social investors and banks.
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But it hit a wall when its scheme – developed in a co-design process with Architype architects – proved wildly over budget, primarily due to builders’ high estimates for the proposed timber structure. “It hit the perfect storm of Brexit, Covid and Grenfell,” says self-build veteran Jon Broome, who worked with Segal on Walters Way, and has advised Russ throughout “So it had to be redesigned in concrete.”
This was a big blow to the project’s environmental aspirations, but the finished result – redesigned by Shepheard Epstein Hunter – retains most of the spirit of the original, with low-energy performance provided by triple-glazing, high levels of insulation and solar panels, if not in the embodied carbon of the materials. Timber cladding was exchanged for fibre-cement board, and some of the planned communal facilities were downsized, but a shared laundry and office space remain, as well as the community hub, which hosts everything from local choir practice to workshops run by Russ’s nascent School of Community-led Housing.
The “self-build” ideal also came with complications. Today’s health and safety regime made the process a far cry from when Dayes’ dad was up a ladder hammering with one of his kids on his back and not a hard hat in sight. A 36-unit concrete apartment block was clearly beyond the capabilities of an untrained bunch of DIY enthusiasts, so a contractor, Rooff, built most of it, with the self-build element confined to the fit-out – which only a handful of residents elected to do in the end, receiving a small additional discount for their “sweat equity”.
“It was a lot more work than we were expecting,” says Syeda-Aguirre, who had no building experience but learned how to lay pipes and pressure-test plumbing. “I felt so much pride when the kids had their first bath. It was like, ‘Yes! I made those pipes and they work!’”
After hearing all of the trials involved, and the odds stacked against them, it is astonishing that community housing groups ever get this far. “It is still incredibly difficult,” says Levent Kerimol, director of the mayor of London’s community-led housing hub, hosted by CDS Co-operatives. “We get a regular flurry of people saying, ‘I like the sound of it, I want to live in it.’ But no one says, ‘I want to spend 10-plus years on a risky project that may or may not happen.’”
Nonetheless, momentum is growing. Since 2019, the mayor has awarded funding for planning to 12 projects for around 215 homes, with capital funding allocated to support the delivery of 200 homes. “We’re seeing more and more groups coming together,” says Tom Copley, London’s deputy mayor for housing. “It gives people a lot more say in shaping not just their homes, but also the places where they live. And it allows us to support a much wider range of housing, such as Tonic, the first LGBTQ+ retirement community.”
Back in Ladywell, despite the exhaustion, Russ’s energetic members, raring to get going on their next project, are currently scouring the city for another site. “This is our lifeblood now,” says Verma. “Creating social value and truly resilient, sustainable communities. Politicians and developers talk about housing in numbers of units, but that’s missing the point. Why settle for just a home, when you can have so much more?”