Affordable, sustainable, rural: How a group of volunteers embarrassed the government and built some of the best new homes in the country

In the 1900s, not long after it was founded, Country Life entered into the debate about the use of agricultural land. With cheap grain being imported from the Americas, land in the British Isles was not as profitable for agriculture and the magazine was supportive of the Liberal policy to grant more rights to more people to keep the rural economy going, encouraging large estate owners into dividing up their property into viable plots with tenant rights. It was an attempt to preserve rural England through adaptation and gave rise to a golden era of housebuilding: work by Philip Webb, Richard Norman Shaw, C. F. A. Voysey, and Sir Edwin Lutyens graced the magazine's pages. It was a historical moment that came back to me when I visited Bridport in West Dorset.

The architectural debate around land use has changed. It is no longer solely about preserving agriculture, but about the rural economy generally and our need for decent affordable housing.

On one hand you have places like Foundry Lea: a development for about 760 homes by Barratt and Bovis on the western fringe of Bridport. The publicity claims that ‘green space and sustainability are paramount’ and ‘natural stone paving is planned for key locations’. A cursory look at the renderings of what the buildings will look like reveals that this is the same boxy, tiny-windowed offering fringed with what can only technically be called a ‘garden’ that infills the ring-road of every market town across the land. In West Dorset, average house prices exceed 11 times the average local income, so the products that will be on sale here are beyond the reach of most.

Nearby is Hazelmead. Nestled into a tiny valley beneath the ancient woodland of Allington Hill, it is what Foundry Lea pretends to be: a genuine community. It is a development of 53 homes — 45 houses and 8 apartments. It is relatively simple: two rows of smart, but modest terraced houses in brick and timber, following the contours of the hill. Two blocks of flats sit beneath them, as does a communal room that is still under construction.

What is quickly apparent is the importance of the spaces between the buildings. This is a co-housing project, meaning it has separate homes with their own rear garden, but shared community facilities: benches in front of every house, strips of vegetable gardens, and a nascent two-acre orchard to the rear. There is a big Tesla battery tucked away, surrounded by a wooden fence, collecting solar energy from the roof panels.

Judith Griffies lives in Hazelmead and is chair of the co-housing group that built and still closely manages this idyll. ‘ It started 16 years ago with a small group of people getting together to find a way to deal with the lack of affordable housing for local people in Bridport,’ she says. Guided by members with previous experience, and encouraged by local MP Oliver Letwin, a group of devotees formed to create a Community Land Trust, to buy land together, just three miles from West Bay beach. The group went even further, forming a community-benefit society to ensure that housing would be managed collectively and be affordable in perpetuity.

Hazelmead doesn’t just look co-operative, it is owned and managed to be so. There are shared littoral pathways and indeterminate spaces in front of each home that are both communal yet belonging to each property. The solar panelling applied neatly to the pitched roof satisfies the electricity requirements of the homes (although there is some buying and selling to the grid). Much has been integrated into the architecture of the property. A system of heat extraction takes ventilated air and recycles the warmth from it back into the building. This is legible as a blank dormer window, topped with chimneys, just above the roof line to the rear. A small intrusion in the clean lines of the terraces for an excellent bit of technology.

The costs of each house may now be nominally low, but the project didn’t come cheap. Judith counts her contribution to making Hazelmead happen in years. Linn Scrannage, another of the early Hazelmeaders, reckons around 1,000 hours of volunteering time. But then there are many people in Britain who dedicate their lives to fixing up old buildings to live in.

What makes the Hazelmead gang unique is that they built new collective housing — a fraught process. They were lucky to find a landowner willing to wait seven years for them to get Homes England and Dorset Council funding. They were lucky too to have friends and family to lend money at short notice when the landowner’s patience ran out. But they needed sheer will to get things going in the first instance and then later to face down the Treasury when they threatened to scupper the project in its latter stages.

It takes a lot of work and some good luck to navigate a system that sees landownership as nothing but a means to making money. The Hazelmead group are torn between explaining how hard it was to create their own small enclave — ‘it’ll take a long time’ is their number one piece of advice to those who might follow their lead — and not overdoing it so as to discourage others.

The decision making processes they use to manage the property, which is called sociocracy and was created by Dutch and English pacifists in the early 20th century is not for everyone. It speaks though to a deeper value that enabled them to carry on and create something admirable. The Community Land Trust owes a debt — to use a term alien to it — to the Garden City movement, where legal means of holding shared value were explored and created. But it shouldn’t be needed to create decent places to live in rural settings.

Between July 9, 2024, and June 15, 2025, there was a net addition of 186,600 homes in the United Kingdom, just over 12% of Labour’s target of 1.5 million over the course of this parliament. Given that this is being delivered in a planning system that favours volume house builders, we are going to witness a lot of the same pseudo-Georgian boxes with appliques of different stone on the surface to respect local conditions, being built at the edges of towns or in new rural communities.

The product is uniform and aimed at relatively well-off purchasers. Large housebuilders, working at scale, are currently the only entities that can afford to navigate a planning system that enables local groups to protest against schemes on a case by case basis. As the Hazelmead volunteers will tell you, no certainty exists anywhere in our system of housing provision.

There should be space for small developers to deliver projects of this scale with unique responses to local conditions. At Hazelmead, they have been aided by a clever design by Barefoot Architects who have co-opted the industrial barn aesthetic. (At nearby Poundbury it is noticeable that the industrial barn look has been used for the new business park. The traditionalists and the modernists are not as far from each other as they used to be). Clad in larch and the lower reaches faced in brick, the slender terraces following the contours of the hill are far less of an imposition into the landscape than the blocky neo-Georgian units at Foundry Lea will be.

The pitched roofs give the building a familiar quality in the landscape and also create more generous interiors. High ceilings and vaulted roof spaces, which together make the relatively small plan of the homes feel bigger. The large windows are generous too, requiring a narrow wooden trellis — perfect for climbers — to provide shade on the south side. The windows prove that when volume housebuilders blame planning law for paltry windows they are being more than a little disingenuous. These are well-made buildings, put together by C G Fry and Son, the company trusted by The King to build much of nearby Poundbury as well as the latest settlement on Duchy of Cornwall land, Nansledan.

The volunteers of Hazelmead have embarrassed the building industry and the government. Why isn’t the expertise that produced Hazelmead part of a well-resourced local authority planning department, staffed with those who want to enable good buildings? Imagine a team delivering not just 50, but 1,500 homes — maybe a handful built by the council itself, but others by developers and small builders, for a fair profit, confident in planning permissions. Council and business could work according to Local Plans so different types of house builders could create different types of housing for different sectors, rather than the one-expensive-product-fails-to-fit-all situation we currently have.

As was the case over 100 years ago, more rights to build more, will lead to better buildings, counterintuitive though it may seem.