The Vision
We are designing and building a beautiful place to live to the highest sustainable standards, and in the process, a strong and cohesive community.
Using consensus decision making, we have designed a site which will enable both deliberate and chance encounters through inclusion of communal gardens and a Common House. These will allow us to meet for both business and social activities and shall be maintained actively and co-operatively.
We will share resources, perhaps car sharing, tool sharing and skill swapping where possible – allowing us to live more sustainably.
Each household will have their own energy efficient home and private space, but we will be spending time with each other as a community, and doing things together on a regular basis.
We want to live somewhere where our shared values are prioritised, where we all feel safe and secure. We are a community where everyone is valued equally and everyone pitches in. We are making a safe space for us and our children to play and grow older. Together we will be drinking tea (and the odd beer) whenever we can.
The Project
We have lifetime homes as part of our design and hope this will allow for a less transient population and help foster a strong and happy community.
Our site is designed so that every house gains the optimum levels of light and sunshine whilst at the same time blocking noise from the A14 and Kings Hedges road. It has been carefully thought through by us, the people who will live there, in collaboration with the technical expertise of our developer and architect.
Our houses are build using Trivselhus Climate Shield System, so we will have warm comfortable homes all year round. They will be quiet and peaceful too due to triple glazed windows and high levels of insulation.
We will get to know our neighbours well, the trust and security that that brings is invaluable. We will see each other regularly due to the design of the site making us feel safe and secure.
As we are all different ages we hope our neighbours will become like a second or extended family – people we can trust and rely on. We’ll be able to ‘borrow’ children, grandparents, brothers, sisters and even pets!
We’ll be able to help and support each other; giving lifts, looking after pets or children, lending tools or elbow grease, picking up shopping and much more besides.
The group already has a huge diversity in skills, meaning there will always be an ‘expert’ on hand – someone who knows how to fix your computer or put up your shelves or paint your kitchen. This will benefit our environment too – our gardens will be kept by those who love gardening, our buildings maintained by those who have experience, our communal meals prepared by keen cooks.
We’ll be living more sustainably through our sharing of resources that might otherwise need to be bought individually and more wastefully. We will only need one or two of each tool instead of everyone needing their own.
The common house will be the centre of our community, allowing us to eat together whenever we like. It will have a large kitchen and dining space for all of us. For some of us this may be regularly, for others just occasionally.
We have a gym and workshop, and multipurpose rooms that could be used for yoga and meditation or music practice; bookable guest rooms; a living room; a games/tv room and a children’s playroom.
Imagine being able to go to the gym whenever you like, and having people to share that with who can motivate you. Being able to watch sporting events with friends on a big screen without needing to go to the pub and spend a fortune on drinks; watch films; play games or just enjoy a quiet cup of tea or meal with your neighbours and friends in a space which belongs to everyone.
We’ll be able to build and fix things in a proper workshop with the help of others, allowing us to lend a hand to each other with things like bicycle maintenance and DIY projects.
But at the same time as all of this being on our doorsteps, we’ll be able to retreat behind our own front doors when we wish to spend time alone or with our immediate families – allowing us privacy and peace whenever we want it.
We will each commit to helping to maintain our common areas and help our community work. This would most likely mean a commitment to attend a monthly meeting where we can raise issues affecting us, report back on projects we’re working on and make decisions about our community. Regular meetings are important to make sure that we can keep rules to a minimum and make sure that they remain relevant as our community develops.
We’ll also each join a working group of our choice and contribute a number of hours to the community and the site upkeep each month (we’ll be assessing how many hours once we have moved in). Being able to choose the group we join will mean we are able to use our skills for the benefit of everyone and enjoy the work we do. We may also have regular ‘work days’ for larger projects – everything is more fun when you do it with other people!
We will warmly welcome anyone who is interested in becoming part of our community.
We agreed on our first Visioning Workshop on 19 January 2013 on the following things that we’d like our project to be, or not to be:
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Transport |
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External Space |
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Buildings |
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Internal Space |
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Energy Efficiency |
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Common house |
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Other |
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More details and notes from that meeting: