KAreem Dayes story will be familiar to many millennials. Moving between rented house shares, with stints in leaky warehouses and spells at home with his parents, Dayes led a precarious existence – moving from one temporary structure to another, constantly subject to evictions and rent increases, with little hope of ever finding a stable and affordable place. “I thought I would have to leave London,” says Dayes, “or even abroad. There were no options left.”
A few years later, there was an unlikely twist. He hasn’t won the lottery – but now lives in a four-bedroom flat in Lewisham, in leafy Ladywell, where his two children enjoy running a large shared garden and play area. Dayes and his neighbors grow food together and organize the daily life of a place they collectively own and manage, in homes that will forever remain affordable for people in the surrounding area.
“I can’t believe we did this,” says Dayes, sitting on his front porch with his wife, Amalia Syeda-Aguirre, taking a break from painting their stairs bright blue. Their spacious shared deck overlooks the garden, where a wooden community center with a kitchen and meeting and yoga space sits next to a large bike shed with a green roof. “It has felt like running an ultramarathon for the last 18 months. But watching the kids play outside with their friends, it finally clicked. That’s why we did it.”
Over the past year, they have been plumbing, laying floors and hanging plasterboard ceilings as part of the biggest community-led, part self-build housing project ever undertaken in London. Thirty-six permanent affordable homes now stand as a testament to the collective will of residents – the result of 15 years of planning, negotiating and battling fiendishly complex bureaucratic, legal and financial hurdles, followed by the equally complex struggle to build true of things on land prone to flooding.
Occupying a plot left at the end of a Victorian terraced block, backing onto the River Ravensbourne by concrete, the apartments are spread over two four-storey blocks raised on columns above flood level. They are joined by a pair of raised walkways that wrap around the facades, forming the spacious shared deck, shading the south-facing windows and framing views of a large silver birch where a playground will be open to the public. Colorful cladding and matching front doors give each house its own identity, while mesh screens and planter-topped balustrades await to be smothered by climbing plants. The swings will cover the entire complex, giving it the appearance of a spacious treehouse, where children can walk across bridges and down open staircases at both ends.
“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 the main gate, but otherwise do whatever you want.’ He now wants to be outside all the time, instead of sitting in front of a screen.” During a recent sunny weekend, it was all hands on deck to clean up the garden. “It’s a very nice community atmosphere,” Onono says. “Everyone gets stuck in, kids and adults alike.”
This unlikely piece 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 has more than 1,000 members, each owning £1 shares. The DIY approach to housing was in the blood: Dayes grew up in Walters Way, a pioneering community of 13 self-build houses nearby, designed by radical German architect Walter Segal in the 1980s. These timber-frame houses, where his parents built their family home, were eventually bought by their residents through Right to Buy – making them now as expensive as other properties in the area. However, Dayes was determined to get his generation’s version out of the market’s speculative lottery.
“The whole 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 regard – nobody’s here to make money from home Theirs.”
Essentially, a resale price agreement means the homes value is permanently tied to the original construction cost, increasing in line with the retail price index rather than tied to the vagaries of the market. property. Prices here range from £290,000 for a one-bed to £590,000 for a four-bed, but what sets Russ apart from other community land trusts is its wide mix of properties, created to meet the full spectrum of local needs.
There are houses with shared ownership, where residents own a percentage and pay rent for the rest; smaller flats for full sale, intended for downsizing; social rented housing managed by a housing association; and some flats to share, with rooms let out at what is called affordable London rent. The resulting community – which was chosen by ballot, with applicants required to have a previous connection to Lewisham – ranges from singles to young families and older retirees.
“It’s our idea of what a sustainable neighborhood looks like,” says Anurag Verma, who runs Russ. “Much more than just being affordable, it’s about the idea of agency – having control over where you live. It is self-building in the broadest sense of building a community, going through the whole process together. By the time people moved in, strong neighborly ties had already been established.”
Learning how to become a developer from scratch was not easy. The group identified the vacant parcel of council-owned land in 2013 but had to bid competitively in an open tender process, demonstrating that their vision would deliver long-term social value, compared to what the council was flogging to the bidders higher. Russ received a seed grant from the Mayor of London’s innovation fund to cover planning costs, 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 his scheme – developed in a co-design process with Architype architects – ran hugely over budget, largely due to the builders’ high praise 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 advised Russ throughout “So it had to be redesigned in concrete”.
This was a major blow to the project’s environmental aspirations, but the finished result – redesigned by Shepheard Epstein Hunter – retains much of the spirit of the original, with the low-energy performance provided by triple glazing, high levels insulation and solar panels. if not in the embodied carbon of the materials. The wood cladding was replaced with fiber cement board and some of the planned communal facilities were scaled back, but a communal laundry and office space remain, as well as the community centre, which hosts everything from local choir practice to workshops. run by the fledgling Russ School of Community-led Housing.
The “self-build” ideal also came with complications. Today’s health and safety regime has made the process a far cry from when Dayes’ father was on a ladder hammering away with one of his children on his back and not a hard hat in sight. A 36-unit concrete apartment block was clearly beyond the capabilities of an untrained group of DIY enthusiasts, so a contractor, Roof, built most of it, with the self-build element limited to adaptation – that only part small number of residents chosen to do in the end, receiving a small additional discount for their “sweat equity”.
“It was a lot more work than we expected,” says Syeda-Aguirre, who had no construction experience but learned how to install pipes and pressure-test plumbing. “I felt very proud when the children took their first bath. It was like, ‘Yeah! I made those tubes and they work!’”
After hearing all the lawsuits involved, and the odds against them, it’s surprising that community housing groups ever make it this far. “It’s still incredibly difficult,” says Levent Kerimol, director of the mayoral center for community-led housing in London, organized by CDS Cooperatives. “We have a regular flood of people saying, ‘I like the sound of it, I want to live in it.’ But no one says, ‘I want to spend 10 more years on a risky project that may or may not happen. ‘.
However, momentum is building. Since 2019, the Mayor has provided planning funding for 12 projects for approximately 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 the places 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 being tired, the energetic members of Russ, trying to continue their next project, are currently searching the town for another location. “This is our lifeblood now,” says Verma. “Creating social values and truly resilient and sustainable communities. Politicians and developers talk about housing in units, but this is lost. Why settle for just one house when you can have so much more?”