Our house: inside the communities who are bringing co-operative living to Nottingham

Established in 2001, Neds is a housing co-operative in Nottingham, where members live in a large Victorian house and former pikelet factory. There’s a good chance that sentence raised a few questions… What is a housing co-operative? Is it a commune? (Really, in Nottingham?). Who’s Ned? … and what’s a pikelet?

(We’ll get to most of these questions shortly. But to answer the last one, it is a thin crumpet.)

A housing co-operative is essentially a mutually owned business that exists to own property for its members to live in. And if you’re a member then you’re both a renter and a landlord. Confused? Well if you’re currently renting you’ll likely pay rent to a private landlord who is taking a juicy profit on top of any costs they might have. You pay your rent, then the profit disappears.

In a housing co-op there is no profit. You pay rent to the business you mutually own and that rent pays for any costs you might have, such as repaying loans taken out to buy your property, property maintenance, and so on. And then if there’s any surplus (what a private landlord would call profit) that remains within the business. So if you decide, as a house, to renovate the kitchen or bathroom, you’ve got a nice fund to dip into, all whilst paying significantly lower monthly rents too.

So what’s the catch? You pay less rent, any surplus is kept by the co-op, and you collectively decide how the property is managed, so why isn’t every renter doing this?

There’s a few reasons but the key ones are availability (there aren’t many co-ops in the UK), knowledge (people don’t know they exist or what they are), and preference (people don’t want to live communally).

Still confused? Well hopefully Sarah, who has been living at Neds for the past ten years, can help.

“Some people have ideas about 1970s communes and swapping partners, and you’re like, ‘Oh no, that’s not what it's about!’” she explains over a cup of tea. “It’s an intentional community for people who want to live in an environment which recognises and supports people that are doing work around social justice and animal rights. The rent is affordable enough that people can work part-time and be involved in those things.”

Not all housing co-ops are politically motivated, some exist as an economic or social alternative, but Neds is firmly rooted in activism and political action, right down to the name.

“Ned is Ned Ludd. The frame breaker who stood up for the masses against the enforcement of early stage capitalism.”

Ned Ludd is now remembered as the name behind the Luddite movement, a pro-worker movement originating in Nottingham that is often misattributed as being ‘anti-technology’. (It was also the name of the former pub on Friar Lane which is now being turned into offices - even in death Ned Ludd is suffering at the hands of commercial interests.)

As I asked Sarah more and more questions about how a housing co-op functions day-to-day - who does what, and trying to gently scratch the surface to see if any horrors lie beneath - it becomes increasingly apparent that it's like any other shared living situation, just with a couple of big differences. At Neds, and other housing co-ops, there are explicit intentions and expectations set and perhaps most importantly, people want to live communally rather than being forced by circumstance.

“There’s a collective living agreement. It's a set of principles we’ve agreed by consensus. If you’re in an intentional community, that takes a bit of time to do,” explains Sarah.

Agreement by consensus is when everyone has to agree, so in theory everyone is happy - or at least no-one is unhappy.

“It’s time well invested to get the principles correct, how you want to operate and work together, otherwise it's not going to work,” Sarah says.

Essentially, everyone pitches in; you might cook for the house once a week which means food is cooked for you for the rest of the week; there’s a cleaning rota; and there’s a house meeting every other week.

The phrases ‘cleaning rota’ and ‘house meeting’ might fill you with dread, creating an image of pressure-cooker living and trodden toes, but Sarah does not paint that image.

“Our newest member was like, “It’s very quiet” around Easter. Someone who was looking to move in and had a look around asked if we spend lots of time together, and well, it's sort of a mix. It was one of the member’s birthdays and we had a little birthday meal, so we will do things. But some nights a few of us cook together and you might cook for six people but - someone is at a choir rehearsal, someone at the climbing wall.”

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that a housing co-op that has existed for nearly 25 years functions well, finding a gentle balance of communal living and individual autonomy. But it can’t all be good, can it?

“We’ve had our ups and downs here, where we haven’t had masses of finance, we’ve had situations where a person here is a bit of a challenge to live with. We’re not pretending we’ve never had any issues,” Sarah says.

It’s another reminder that between romanticising and reviling the idea of housing co-ops, you find a far more grounded reality.

“The easiest positive is the sense of community and support. People have had difficult times here and people have been amazingly supportive, you can absolutely rely on people. It's a bit cheesy but it's sort of like a family.”

The family created at Neds is maybe best demonstrated by the party they threw for their twenty year anniversary and how many people of the fifty odd members came back.

“Nearly all of our old members came back. People travelled huge distances because the people who have been involved are really invested in it,” Sarah recalls. “Off the top of my head, I would say there were four people that didn’t come. It wasn’t just the people who lived here, there was someone who showed up from the Netherlands who was handing out prosecco, just popped over from the Netherlands as you do… I mean we put on a good party.”

If your interest is piqued, Neds are currently looking to fill a space. Or perhaps you’re interested in finding out more about starting your own housing co-op?

“Come and talk to us. That's what we said to Kunsthaus, they invited us over for dinner, they started asking us questions we’d never even thought of and we thought we should do this more often because it’d just be really helpful.”

Kunsthaus Housing Co-op are the new kids on the block, named after a former arts collective that previously lived in their current rented property. Currently an unhoused co-op, meaning they don’t yet own their own property, I spoke to members Robin and Rowan about the journey so far.

“In some ways we’re still very early days even though it's been quite a process to get here,” Robin tells me. “It’s been over a year now. You think about how many meetings you’ve had”

Radical Routes, one meeting Kunsthaus mentions to me, is a mutual-aid network for co-ops where full members can access various means of support, including financial support - the biggest sticking point for new co-ops. It's no different for Kunsthaus as they’re currently looking to raise funds to buy a property.

“Lots of banks who previously gave mortgages to housing co-operatives have stopped that now,” Rowan adds. “Quite a lot of new co-operatives who are buying properties are having to do it purely through short-term loans from friends and family, from grants, self-finance, and potentially a Radical Routes loan as well.”

Despite the evident difficulty in getting a new housing co-op off the ground, the passion for living cooperatively is equally evident from Kunsthaus. 

“There’s a feeling that if people live together then what you can do politically can become supercharged to some degree,” Robin says. “There’s the potential there, but it takes a bit more organising and less chance to talk about things because we don’t live together.”

“Not everyone involved in a co-op is politically active,” he adds. “We’re all politically active and very passionate about that. But some people go into it purely for the financial side and that's a valid way of being in a co-operative.”

A third of the UK population today are renters, with renters facing rising prices each year thanks to a lack of supply, as well as precarious regulations and often substandard conditions. Rental payments can be anywhere between a quarter to half of monthly earnings, which then further contributes to the widening the gap between renters and property owners.

“Some people can’t afford to have the deposit to get a mortgage, simple as that,” Robin tells me. “Renting is so precarious; sometimes the properties are not fit for purpose, sometimes they’re very expensive, but you can also get turfed out.”

With housing co-ops you cannot get evicted in the same way - in theory you could live there forever, typically people leave due to personal choice and in rarer cases due to personal conflict. But what does happen when you leave?

“When you live in a co-operative you don’t own any of the property,” Rowan explains. “So if you left you would have no stake, it's not like you’re doing a shared mortgage. It doesn’t give you that long term security, its security for as long as you want to stay. But if we had more co-operatives that would be less stressful.”

Being unable to build equity is a valid concern but with significantly lower rents there is greater potential to save for if your next move isn’t going to be another housing co-op.

Rowan points out that the benefits, however, extend beyond the financial: “If you’re having a down day or you have a project you want to talk about, there’s people generally who are around who have similar views to you,” Rowan says.

“Living with people can be annoying at times, but then I remember what the bigger picture is - maybe I’m a little bit annoyed that someone didn’t wash their plates but we can have a really nice film night together or I can talk to them over breakfast.”

Kunsthaus are looking for new members to help get their housing co-op fully up and running with its own property. “Please come and talk to us if you’re interested in joining,” Rowan says. “There’s a lot of really good information available. This will sound super cheesy - keep hope. It's difficult to go against the systems we’ve been trained to live in - living alone or owning your own property. It's kind of a radical choice to want to live in this way.”

To get in touch with Neds or Kunsthaus, or find out more about Radical Routes;

Neds Housing Co-op - nedshousingcoop@gmail.com

Kunsthaus Housing Co-op - kunsthauscoop@proton.me

Radical Routes - radicalroutes.org.uk