In Cambridge, there’s a big waiting list for its first communal development. Could it solve the housing crisis or is it just a middle-class utopia?
On a crisp morning Helen Mulligan, 45, is giving me a tour of Marmalade Lane, the 42-home co-housing scheme in Cambridge where she and her husband bought a home last year with their two young children. She steps through her patio into the central pedestrianised lane — there’s no garden gate — as her three-year-old daughter, Gwennol, zooms past on her bike over a giant chalk pattern she and her friends have drawn on the tarmac.
Gwennol disappears towards the communal building where residents gather once a week to share a meal. “You see these maps about how close the average eight-year-old stays to home and shudder,” Mulligan says. “Here they can roam with children of different ages and learn what to do when something goes wrong.”
The houses sit around shared spaces rather than cul-de-sacs. There are few fences, cars are kept to the edges, and neighbours share communal space and — seemingly — gardens, toys and tools. “We’ve moved to this community with intention of being part of it. We have met so many friends,” Mulligan says.
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