HARRY CHARRINGTON on designing and building as a group Harry Charrington is an architect, lecturer and one of the directors of the co-housing group who successfully selfprovided Springhill cohousing in Stroud, UK. He was not the architect of the scheme, but formed part of the group of residents who developed the project. He lectures at the University of Bath. So you were involved in the Stroud project, but not as an architect? Well, to go back to the beginning, there was this cohousing group in Stroud. Rather like an endless number of cohousing groups that I’ve come across since, they knew about what was going on in Denmark, they attracted people in Stroud probably more from a sort of communal aspect than a volunteerist aspect you might say. Like most of the groups in Britain the problem for them was finance and land really. How you bought the land, how you organise money for land and that financial collectivism is a problem that ran through the building contract as well, because how to do you get everyone’s money into place to be able to release to a builder all the way through the project. So it was more than a talking shop. I know a few others, and that’s been more or less what’s happened, there’s a sort of despondency that sets in at some point. Because the obstacles are so huge? Or there’s a group of people go and are like; ‘this is quite nice: meeting, having a chat with like-minded people’, that’s ok! I must be cautious about everyone I talk about, but I think I will go so far as saying that everything that happened at Stroud happened because of and in spite of David Michaels... I think David saw that Stroud might be a very good place to do it, its a very, inverted commas ‘green’ town – it has a green town council, all of that... The prescribed vision was very much that it would be in the town centre. Anyway, a piece of land came up for sale which is where the cohousing is now built. It came up for sale I think in early 2000. It was fairly affordable because it was scree, very unstable, sloping land. The history of planning permissions on it were probably seven or eight that had gone to a point and then fallen through because they couldn’t add it up. You couldn’t get a housing estate on there because you couldn’t get wiggly roads on the site and get the number of dwellings – which is great. Basically David made this proposition which was to buy this piece of land because I think he’d been involved in property development in London. So he had enough money to buy the land outright?
08 / 2010
He had enough money to buy it – this is quite a critical thing – he had enough money to buy the land outright or enough money to secure the loan to buy the land. What then happened was that some of the group left, thinking this was not the way to do it. Because of course, what you’re immediately looking at is the tension of doing it together. Because you have an unequal power arrangement in the group? Yes. This does run through TO JOIN THE the history of the whole thing. GROUP YOU HAVE I think if you talk to people in the cohousing in Stroud, TO PUT £5000 AS a lot stems from there. The SHARES, AND group wrote a protocol, a set of articles. What they said THOSE MADE was that to join the cohousing YOU AN EQUAL group you had to put £5000 as shares, and those made you an DIRECTOR. equal director. David only had £5000 worth of shares also, so there was a company to which David had loaned x.. but he was an equal. So in legal terms it was a plc. Everybody who was going HAVING BOUGHT to develop it and live it was THE LAND a director of it. Then, to pay the loan off, everyone had to TOGETHER buy their plot. Of course this THOSE PLOT is really interesting because having bought the land COSTS WERE together those plot costs were INCREDIBLY LOW incredibly low. ... They appointed architects, engineers... (and) shook out a plan which was roughly what they might put on the site and agreed that what they’d have is a number of 900 square foot houses, 1300, 1600 and some flats. Then they said, right we will price the plots to the number of square metres, so everyone is paying per square metre. So the plots were equivalent to the square metres necessary to build those houses. That also carries forward in that everyone would pay for building their house by the square metre, that square metre was a division of the total build cost, so it included the landscape, it included the common house. This was deliberately get round the problem of a lot of cohousing whereby the common house is built last and you run out of money. So basically the pound per square metre was even across the whole development. Exactly. And in that is not so different to how you buy