Could you handle life in a commune?

Hirsch and Jones are just two of The Drive’s nine members, who are aged from 29 to 69. The 11-bedroom building was purchased at auction in 2010 by a group who had grown disillusioned with the housing market and decided to start their own co-op. As we move into the garden, where residents grow fruit and vegetables and host regular socials, we’re joined by Cecile Remy, a 44-year-old youth support worker who moved to the UK from France, and Philip Mason, 65, a bookkeeper and permaculture practitioner and one of the founding members of The Drive, though he didn’t move in until 2015. Remy tells me that she lived around the country for years but when she came to London in 2014 she struggled to make friends. ‘I tried really hard for five years and nothing really happened. So I started looking for more of a community, that’s how I found The Drive.’

Combatting a sense of social isolation was a motivating factor for Hirsch’s move, too. She joined in 2015 after only six months of living on her own in north London. ‘I absolutely hated living alone,’ she says. ‘I thought, oh shit. It’s just so hard to meet people in London.’ She found out about The Drive, and having lived in communal houses and squats in the 1970s (‘I’m that generation of hippies’), it felt like a suitable alternative.

Though some remain for much longer, tenants tend to stay for an average of three to five years. In the past three, two people moved out of the co-op to live together as partners, another because she wanted to have a baby (there are no rules against starting a family, though The Drive is currently made up of single adults). There are also no restrictions on guests and partners visiting, though if someone stays for more than a week, they’re asked to contribute to the house fund.

As I discuss communal life with four of the residents, it strikes me how good they are at listening. They don’t talk over one another — quite a rarity in group interviews — and there is no sense of hierarchy; they clearly respect each other. This, they tell me, is crucial when you live in an intergenerational co-op of nine people and share all spaces except bedrooms. Everyone who lives here takes turns to cook, members eat dinner together most nights of the week and there’s a weekly meeting when the community can check in with each other and discuss any issues that have arisen.

‘We have fantastic times and we have really difficult times,’ explains Hirsch. ‘You might come here and think, “Okay, we’re all left wing,” but then you discover the person sitting next to you thinks about things in a completely different way. One of the things I’ve really learnt here is the importance of tolerance.’

Like many co-ops, The Drive struggles with a diversity problem; the current group is largely white and middle class. ‘We’re talking about holding rooms for people of colour, which is a bit contentious because we’re also competing with the fact that we need to make rent and pay the mortgage; we can’t hold rooms empty forever,’ says Jones.

Housing co-ops like the Drive are a form of ‘intentional community’, an umbrella term that covers everything from spiritual communes to co-living, where each resident has their own private unit but shares communal areas. During the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of the hippy movement created a huge swell in appetite for this kind of close-knit communal living. Disillusioned by modern society, a new way of life developed that celebrated pacifism, a connection to nature, drug experimentation and a ‘free love’ attitude towards sex.

Many communes formed during this period, and 60 years later the stereotype often prevails, though the reality of modern intentional communities is far from the clichés of unwashed, guitar-strumming crusties. Everyone at The Drive has a life outside of the co-op. They work, they go to the pub and while they share cooking duties they’re not against ordering a takeaway on a Friday night. ‘I would argue that quite often intentional communities reflect the period in which they were formed,’ explains Kirsten Stevens-Wood, a senior lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University and lead for the Intentional Communities Research Group. ‘If you trace along the timeline of politics, as a society, we very much shifted from a left-wing, collectivist ideology of the 1950s, 60s and 70s — when we all put a bit in so that we could all look after each other — to the Thatcherite 1980s when public housing was sold off and it was all about individual home ownership; that was a move from collectivism to individualism.’

While much of the 1970s commune movement has long been disbanded in favour of the private housing market, the concept of co-living is finding a new expression during the pandemic and communities such as The Drive are seeing a significant surge in interest. When they put out an advert last year to recruit new members, they received more than 150 replies; they usually receive 15 to 20 responses. There are currently 400 ‘intentional communities’ in the UK (most try to distance themselves from the word ‘commune’ and its hippy associations).

‘They exist on a very broad spectrum,’ says Stevens-Wood. ‘There’s the communities that started in the 1970s — a lot of big, old houses that revolved around everybody sharing, farming, getting back to the land. Then you have that smaller, more urban version, which includes things like housing co-operatives. Modern examples, such as Lilac [Low Impact Living Affordable Community] in Leeds appeals to people who perhaps want a more organised version of living communally that maintains [some] separation. [Residents] have their own front door, their own kitchen and bathrooms, which means they have benefits of private space, and the additionality of communal space.’

In the wake of the pandemic, the political climate is once again affecting our attitudes toward housing. With sky-high housing prices, communal living can provide a cheaper alternative, and a rising number of people are now considering communal living for the first time. Eve, 31, an operations manager from south-east London, recently visited Bergholt Hall, one of the oldest intentional communities in the UK, with a view to joining. Located in rural Suffolk, it is home to 40 adults and 10 children. It’s a largely self-sufficient community thanks to its 70 acres of land and a flock of sheep and dairy cows.

What led Eve, who lives alone, to consider such a dramatic switch? ‘The pandemic is the short answer,’ she explains. ‘I’ve been in London a long time, and spending so much time in my one-bed apartment by myself, I just wanted to get back to nature and be around people. I’ve always enjoyed living in groups and that’s something I’ve missed. It’s not about the deep meaningful conversations — I’ve got my friends for that — it’s more about the cups of tea, the smaller things. The pandemic made me realise those seemingly pointless interactions aren’t pointless at all.’

It’s this renewed sense of connection and community that is the key lure of intentional communities, driving people to seek out what would once have been considered radical living situations. ‘I’m convinced that when we spend all our hours at work, when we leave our house at seven in the morning and we quite often don’t re-enter until seven at night, we deplete the communities from which we come,’ says Stevens-Wood. ‘We’re not buying in local shops, we’re not saying hi to our neighbours. People have suddenly gone, “I’m investing my entire waking life in unhealthy work patterns and living, and I’m forfeiting social relationships, leisure time, community and investment in humanity.” Intentional Communities are not for everyone, but for some they offer up this image of how that might be different.’