The real beginnings of the London Co-Housing Group were at a meeting in the Lambs Conduit pub in January 2007 in Holborn. After a series of small meetings to assess the level of interest (just of the two of us then!), this meeting was well attended by people of all ages, keen to organise a co-housing community in London or Greater London. We kicked around options - the sort of community people were aiming for, relevant experiences of communal or similar lifestyles, funding styles and so on.

By late spring 2007, the group began to discuss a constitution and to work towards setting up a website, which now exists, and Basecamp project management software with password access for members.

In June 2007 the group held a special workshop where we explored just what it was we all meant by co-housing and what the real deal breakers might be. David Michaels, the creator of Springhill Co-Housing Community in Wiltshire (and other projects) visited for part of the day and told us how the Springhill group had set about things, how it was all turning out, and how to set about financing a project commercially.

Since then we have continued to meet as a group regularly, we have our own logo and Basecamp works well for us, with members checking in to post messages and share tasks.

The downside is that there have been issues with maintaining good attendance and a stable core group so we do not have to continually brief new members, and very real divisions over the nature of funding and financing the project.

Right in early 2008 those of us who prefer the idea that the project should be open to all in the sense of combining renting and buying have a lot of work to do to investigate, among other things, green building societies, the London Development Plan, what land or empty buildings councils have to offer, and what other groups are up to.

We hope to come up with sufficiently good information that the whole group can agree on a future direction – or if not at least to understand that commercial forces are too strong and that the best we hope for, still very novel of course, would be a commercially viable intentional community.