The Drive Housing Co-op
The Drive Housing Co-op owns 8 The Drive, Walthamstow. This is a 10-bedroom former childrens’ home, a detached house within a reasonably sized plot of land (for London). In summary there are three aspects to this project:
- a housing co-op, which enables its members to have a say in the running of the accommodation that they live in, with no external landlord to have to deal with. For us, making decisions by consensus is at the heart of this.
- an intentional community, where people live together as one household, and experiment with new ways of living more sustainably together, within the context of a city and urban lifestyle. This encompasses bulk-buying of food, sharing facilities, and pooling resources in many other ways; acting as a community by providing care and social contact for one another within the house, but also engaging with the local neighbourhood through community events (in the house, garden, or elsewhere), and other involvements.
- a permaculture garden, which will enable us to produce a proportion of our food on-site, reducing food miles and our living costs
The longer-term aim is that The Drive will act as a living and working demonstration that a group of people can live together in an organised and sustainable way, which moves beyond the normal house/flat-share situation that many single people typically find themselves in.
We are looking for our 10th member at present. We have recently acquired the property but there are still many aspects of the project still to be worked out. So now is a really exciting time to get involved!
