Co-op News March 2023

to live. These include Burnage Garden Village,
established by Manchester Tenants Ltd in south
Manchester, which incorporates facilities such
as tennis courts, as well as Broadway Garden
Village in Fairfield, east of Manchester, which was
designed by the renowned architect Edgar Wood
for Moravian Tenants. The co-operative housing
movement was closely linked with the garden city
and garden suburb movements, and incorporated
amenities such as playgrounds and green spaces.
Even in those developments that are no longer
co-operative societies or tenant run, he has found
that residents were proud of their history and
“know there’s something special about where
they live”.
Bibby is a founder trustee and volunteer
with Calder Community Land Trust, whose first
development, bungalows for older people, was
completed in 2020. Community land trusts, he says,
provide a way for people come together to “create
decent housing through community endeavour”.
This is an idea which is very closely linked to the
co-operative movement, as a grassroots movement
founded on self-help that seeks to find bottom-up
solutions to social and economic issues.
“We have a problem, the housing crisis, and we
aren’t building the houses that are desperately
needed,” Bibby explains. “The market isn’t meeting
the need, so we are asking what can communities
do for themselves. It’s providing affordable housing
that a generation ago local authorities would
have provided.”
He is interested in what contemporary
community-led initiatives can learn from the
experiences of earlier societies. As the book shows,
many of today’s challenges are strikingly similar
to those facing nineteenth-century reformers,
from a shortage of affordable housing at decent
standards to tourism and second home ownership
– something that remains particularly acute in
areas such as Cornwall and the Lake District.
“What is extraordinary is how similar what
community land trusts are doing today is to what
was being done 100 years ago,” Bibby observes,
“We have the same desires, the same issues and
the same dilemmas, for example, how do you
raise the money? We can learn from some of those
early examples.”
Community land trusts can also encourage a
different and less reactive approach to planning,
he argues, where people feel more empowered to
have a say and communities get the opportunity
to discuss and decide how towns and villages can
develop to meet their needs, rather than being
shaped by outside developers.
Bibby is encouraged by a sense that co-operative
housing is “back on the agenda in a big way”, for
the first time in 20 years, and hopes that his book
will provide a source of inspiration.
“I hope that those involved in co-operative
housing, co-housing or community land trusts can
get know their history and that they’re not starting
from scratch,” he says.
“They can build on the legacy of hard-working
people over 100 years ago and learn from what
they did right, as well as from what they didn’t do
so well. Lots of people are now getting involved in
bottom-up, community-led housing ventures and
I hope this history can directly affect what we’re
doing and have meaning and relevance for our
efforts today. We can’t create as many houses as
are needed but we can create really good quality,
decent housing and show the way to the type of
housing we’d like to have in the future.”
p Andrew Bibby (pictured
far right)
Purchase These
Houses Are Ours
by Andrew Bibby via
Gritstone Publishing
Co-operative at
gritstonecoop.co.uk/
product/ab-houses
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MARCH 2023 | 49