‘We just held hands and jumped!’ How one of Britain’s happiest, healthiest communes was built

Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

‘Look at this – can you see what it is?” The architect Anne Thorne is showing me around Cannock Mill, the eco-village on the outskirts of Colchester, Essex, that she designed in collaboration with a group of her friends who had grown tired of London life. We are standing behind a terrace of terracotta and honey-toned houses; even on a dreich day, the 1-hectare (2.4-acre) site has a distinctly Mediterranean vibe. There are well-tended grounds, a communal allotment and a fire pit.

Thorne is gesticulating at a tiny path. “It’s a frog passerelle,” she enthuses. I have no clue. “So that frogs can get safely to the mill pond down there.” I can’t see any amphibious commuters, but Claudine and Piaf, the community chickens, are scrabbling around. There are three buzzing beehives, too.

Cannock Mill is the UK’s first co-housing community aimed at tackling the climate crisis and loneliness in later life. On paper, the project sounds a bit like Coopers Chase, the luxurious fictional retirement village featured in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series. In reality, it is nothing of the sort. The most popular communal activity here involves listening to Wagner, rather than solving cold cases in a room devoted to jigsaws.

When it comes to climate-considerate building development, it is the details that make the difference. Thorne points out a rainwater pipe that flows on to porous tarmac – a tank underneath catches the overflow, which then runs into a flower garden and finally down into the pond. “No surface water goes into drainage, so we get a reduction in our water rates, as well as it being good for the environment.”

There is a note of quiet reverence in her voice, as if each item she is showing me is nothing short of a miracle. This is understandable when you discover that it took 13 years of dreaming, financial peril and hard graft to turn the vision into reality.

We head into the Grade II-listed mill, which has been converted into a three-storey social hub for the 30 homeowners, who range in age from 60 to 83. The top floor, opened up to the rafters, serves as the communal sitting room, all Scandi-style pale wood and directional design. It is here that I meet some of the other “millers” (as they are known locally) for coffee.

The idea came about in 2006. “I was with a group of friends from a women’s walking group and we were all discussing our elderly parents,” says Thorne. “Everyone was facing the same dilemmas. People had to try to support them at home, in a nursing home or in an old people’s home. Our sense was that care tends to happen to someone, rather than them having any say in it. We agreed that we didn’t want that for our own futures – but what could we do about it?”

The friends, alongside partners including Thorne’s husband, also an architect, resolved to find a plot of land on which to build, ideally within 90 minutes of London, so that they could commute and be within easy reach of their families. At that stage, some were still in their 40s. By the time they moved in, at the end of 2019, nearly all were retired and their children had mostly been forced out of London by spiralling property prices.

“One reason it took so long to find the right site was because anywhere easy to build on was quickly snapped up by developers, many of them with local authority contacts,” says Thorne. Then, unexpectedly, they stumbled upon Cannock Mill on Rightmove. “I immediately thought it was ideal. But many others were sceptical, because it’s an 11-metre slope.”

Peter Tibber, who was once Britain’s ambassador to Columbia and Sudan, says: “I thought it was very muddy.” He and his wife, Eve, a French economist, joined after the founders publicised the project via the UK Cohousing Network and the website Diggers and Dreamers. “We had previously lived in some grand houses, but they were primarily hospitality facilities to promote UK interests. Our private living space was comparatively modest, hard to personalise. It was never ‘home’. Cannock Mill is ours, designed and built by all of us. To my mind, there is more grandeur in Cannock Mill than in any diplomatic residence.”

Did the search for a site take its toll? “It was agonising; it took so long,” says Tibber. “There were moments of despair, but it was actually quite helpful in terms of forming the group, figuring out who was good at doing what in order to get this thing built.”

A major problem was that they were building without any funding from a housing association or local council. The land cost £1.2m and the group, which was then just eight households, had to come up with the money themselves. “People got mortgages on their existing properties, but this was not always easy. Some cashed in their pension pots or moved into rental accommodation in order to sell their houses to fund it,” says Thorne.

Once the land was secured, there was the small matter of getting planning permission – not a given, since the previous owners had been rejected. The final costs included fees of £2m and building costs of £6.8m, but, after the plans were approved, the group grew quickly and people were able to sell their homes or get mortgages in the usual way.

“I remember someone said: ‘Right, we’ve just got to hold hands and jump.’ That was what it felt like – a total leap of faith,” says Thorne. At the time, most of them were living in London. “We were concerned about that, because we didn’t want to be isolated from the local community here. The ideal of co-housing is not to be some inward-looking group, but that we are an active part of the neighbourhood. So we did a lot of leafleting and invited neighbours to come in and have a look.”

Their decisions to run a car club (currently five cars for 14 people) and share bikes were received well by locals, who had rejected a previous development because of fears about an increased number of cars. “Meanwhile, the planners insisted we had 2.5 parking spaces per house, which was unbelievable to me, given that, when you design housing in central London, you’re not even allowed a parking permit any more,” says Thorne. In order to fulfil this demand, each of the terrace houses has a ground-level garage space. These have been converted into home offices, a home for Tibber’s grand piano and, for the ceramicist Emma Sutherland, an artist’s studio.

“I’d previously been living in Brighton,” Sutherland says. “Moving here has made me much more productive as an artist. My last studio was cold and damp, at the back of the house. I felt very isolated. Here, people walk past my studio and come and chat and see what I’m making. I teach classes here for up to four people as well. I’ve been inspired by the landscape and have made beehive lamps and linocuts of the chickens.”

Three months after the group moved in, however, they were hit with the first lockdown. “It was hugely ironic,” says Tibber. “Here we were, a group of people who had done all this to form a communal life, socialise and eat in a common house, and we couldn’t do any of it. It changed everything, in terms of the way we did things. What it didn’t change is what we wanted to do. So, we would sit socially distanced in the car park and talk to each other; we held a few meetings outdoors, did some singing and set up a WhatsApp group that we still use.”

During lockdown, Sutherland’s son Finn, 24, moved in with her. “I was very reluctant about it,” he says. “I said: ‘Why on earth would anyone want to leave Brighton?’ But now I’m saying: ‘Why would anyone want to live there?’” It is easy for Finn to travel to his job at the University of Essex and every week he has friends over to play the card game Magic: The Gathering. “I’ve learned so much from everyone here,” he says. “People all have way more practical skills than I do. I’m surrounded by all this knowledge.”

Lindsay Wright used to work for Islington council in London and is celebrating her first year living at the mill. “I got to hear about it because I’d attended an art workshop in the area for years. After meeting everyone, I was accepted on to the waiting list. I’ve loved living here as a single person with no children. It’s a great way to live. You can be as involved as you like. I’ve enjoyed all the things we do together, like communal meals, opera nights, planting vegetables and French conversation classes.”

She says she even loves the task days, which happen every eight days, where everyone helps out with the gardening and maintenance. “Living here has made me feel safe and certainly not lonely. Of course, things are not always perfect. It can take time to resolve issues.”

Has having an in-house diplomat helped them to iron out disputes? My question is met with shrieks of laughter by all. “I’m not sure that 35 years of diplomacy really prepared me adequately for living here,” Tibber says. “No one’s been thrown in the pond yet. But there were long discussions about whether we should have a telly in the sitting room. The thing is, there are 30 of us and none of us are shrinking violets. You need to have quite a lot of conversations before coming to a decision.”

There is a lot of talk about how to share meals, for example. The millers have twice-weekly communal dinners. In the beginning these were organised with different groups doing the cooking, but that didn’t prove popular. They have also introduced “bring and share” meals.

Sutherland says living in such close proximity to others can lead to surprising personal revelations. “It’s taught me that there are some people in life who are natural nit-pickers and it’s ridiculous. But I have started to appreciate the value of that trait, because it changes the way things are done. People like that spot things. I’ve always been the easy-going, no-need-to-have-an-opinion-on-anything type. Now, I’ve started to think that I need to get better at confronting people and telling them when I don’t like something, or I don’t agree. That’s been good for me.”

Later, we take a look inside one of the homes. The topsy-turvy design, with kitchens on the top floor, creates a light and airy space. The eco credentials came about because Thorne’s practice had been focused on environmentally friendly design for 30 years. She helped to set up Matrix, the feminist design co-operative.

“I wanted to create a Passivhaus design – where the focus is on the fabric of the house before considering any other details, to make it as warm and airtight as possible. Luckily, I managed to get everyone else to agree.” The walls of each house are 400mm thick and the windows are triple-glazed. Even the letterboxes are housed in special sealed cupboards, to stop cold air coming in, while each home is equipped with a heat-recovery system. “Our heating and hot water bill for a three-bedroom house was only £300 for the whole of the past year,” says Thorne.

It is idyllic, but the looming challenge for residents is attracting younger people to live there when a property comes up for sale. To that end, there is a membership group geared at creating a pool of future buyers. “We do want young, fit people to come and live here,” says Sutherland. “There are a lot of grounds to look after. We are always looking at ways to make that more enjoyable and less of an ordeal. Some people apply and look fabulous on paper, but then really don’t gel with us in person, and vice versa. We had one 34-year-old guy who was fantastic. He cooked us a great meal. But, ultimately, he couldn’t afford to move here.”

In 2019, each miller paid between £220,000, for a one-bedroom flat, and £630,000, for a three-bedroom house with a garage. That included a stake in the mill and grounds. The latest recorded sale on Zoopla for a house on the site was £689,000, in December 2022; for a flat, it was £271,000, in September 2022. Prices are significantly higher than usual for the area because it includes shared ownership of the mill and grounds.

“At the beginning, we were really determined to include rental properties,” says Thorne, to encourage a broader range of residents. “But we are just a group of ordinary people. For a self-build group, it proved impossible for us to fund even three houses that could be rented. In Scandinavia and the Netherlands, the local state buys the land for the co-housing group. If we had that, we would have been able to do all sorts of things.”

However, they have built a strong presence in the local community. Tibber runs the Colchester food bank, which recently received a King’s award, and other residents are active with a refugee charity and local arts organisations. There are also regular open days to which neighbours are invited to enjoy the gardens. They will be featuring in Essex Open Gardens this year, too.

As I am leaving, I notice a framed tapestry of the mill house, inscribed with a line by Henry Miller: “One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.” It seems like an apt summation of what co-housing in general, and Cannock Mill in particular, is all about.

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