Diggers & Dreamers is the starting point for many people in Britain who are interested in communal living and want to find out more.
If that includes you then take a look at our UK Directory to see just how many different ways there are to experience life within an intentional community. Volunteering and WWOOFing are amongst the best ways to to try it out for yourself. Once you've decided that you really want to go for it then Places needing Members is the next stop. You can also try putting a message on People needing Communal Places but communities rarely headhunt so don't expect a huge number of responses!
Perhaps you'd like to get involved in setting up a new place. People forming a Group is our noticeboard for those at the very early stages whereas Forming Communities are usually quite a bit further down the developmental road.
Properties might suit Communities is where people who are trying to sell or make people aware of a particular vacant property can place a message. Finally our General Noticeboard is for anything else that might be of interest to D&D users - perhaps educational and retreat centres that offer some experience of communality; organic smallholdings looking for help and much more!
Diggers & Dreamers first appeared in printed form in 1989 and - in its various incarnations - has now been an invaluable resource over many decades. In 2019/20 we were awarded the Geoph Kozeny Communitarian Award by the Foundation for Intentional Communities. Publishing books about communal living remains very important to us. The 25th Anniversary edition contains many fascinating articles as well as a directory. Our popular Review series looks at particular ways of shared living (currently Cohousing and Low Impact Living) in more detail. D&D's various history books (like Communes Britannica) underline the fact that communal living has always been around and is here to stay!
If you really want to then you can buy all these books from Amazon but it's much better to get them from a co-op! Order online from Edge of Time.
The Cohousing Company received planning permission in June 2005 for the first Co-Flats community. CoFlats is similar to Cohousing but it's just flats.
The related Cohousing Company built the first new-build cohousing community in the UK in Stroud (see Springhill Cohousing entry).
The principles of Cohousing are that decisions are made by consensus, the site is pedestrianised...
