Rode Housing Co-op are a group of artists, gardeners and housing workers who got sick of how hard it is to find modest, secure places to live and work. So, they took matters into their own hands, and have just had an offer accepted on a property. It is a huge achievement for Rode to get this far, whose members have been working towards stable and affordable housing for the past 6 years.
Collective Ownership is working with Rode and now need to raise £150,000 investment to secure the purchase of the large mixed-use building in Lewisham, which will combine a residential co-op with affordable artist studios on the ground floor.
Rode is driven by the connection between London’s housing crisis and the disappearance of affordable cultural space. Extreme rentierism renders our built environment inaccessible to most people and erodes the city’s social fabric. As rents rise, artists, community groups and ordinary residents are increasingly pushed out of the places where they build relationships, create work and put down roots.
Freya from Rode explained their reasons for deciding to work with Collective Ownership:
“Studio space is more and more monopolised by temporary providers, often only lasting a few years or even months. This adds to the general feeling in London that nothing can be secure or permanent unless you are extremely wealthy. We want to change that by working with Collective Ownership to create our own model – whereby the stable, secure co-operative housing essentially nests permanent, secure and affordable spaces for artists. If it works, we think this could be a model that others could follow in London and beyond.”
The group argues that many of Britain’s most heralded artistic and social developments date back to the 1970s, when an abundance of empty, cheap buildings allowed people to develop artistic and political spaces that pioneered new ways of working, producing and distributing art and social knowledge. Today, those spaces are increasingly temporary, commercialised or disappearing altogether. People are either fighting over the scraps of an ever-dwindling and instrumentalised pot of government funding, or, much more commonly, completely excluded from cultural spaces, social centres, pubs and other important places where people meet, socialise and learn about themselves or others.
