Designing a collective self build

There are many challenges along the route to building your own home, but one way to increase your chances of succeeding is to band together with like-minded people and tackle a collective project

Julian Owen

The Ashley Vale collective self build venture was born in the late 1990s out of a local desire to stop a piece of land being developed into 35 properties by a volume housebuilder. An action group was formed to offer the opportunity for local people to construct their own homes on the Bristol site instead. They set up a not-for-profit limited company and raised the money to buy the site. The original plan involved 20 individual self builds and six housing association dwellings. However, the association involved later dropped out of the project, so the community group developed these properties instead. Over the course of 10 years, 41 homes have been created

In the UK, a wide variety of groups have successfully united to create new housing – from friends that club together and use their own money to buy land through to larger sites with 50 or 100 plots.

All sorts of people and families become involved in these schemes from every walk of life – they can be well-off or on low incomes, live in the city or countryside, be young or old, and have plenty of building skills or none. But what generally unites them is an enterprising spirit and a capacity to help each other reach a common goal of achieving bespoke housing.

There is only a modest tradition for this kind of cooperation in Britain, with a fairly small number of projects getting off the ground each year. But a rise in popularity for UK collective projects took off in the 1980s, when community architecture concepts began to promote the idea of people grouping together to design and build their own housing estates. In more recent years, increased government support for self build has led to new legislations that make these schemes easier to accomplish, for instance, new laws passed this year compel local authorities to keep a record of people in their catchment area who are interested in self build, and act to make land available for them (don’t miss the article about the Right to Build on page 62 for more info).