We pay £80,000 to live on a country estate with free childcare. Here’s how
I arrive in the Suffolk countryside on a quiet Monday morning to experience an alternative way of living. Sixty-three acres of this farming community stretch out in every direction: meadows, vegetable plots, a homemade sauna that seats a dozen people and a barn housing cheerful brown cows.
Perched on the farm is a sprawling manor house – where 60 people live in an “intentional community” – a type of commune, though they wouldn’t call it that.
There are retirees, parents with young children, doctors, teachers, lawyers and financiers, as well as 20-somethings in search of an antidote to modernity. All of them are united by one thing: radical optimism. They are lucky to be here: applications to join the community have skyrocketed, with hundreds on a waiting list patiently hoping to get the call-up. Once a space becomes available, the group invites them to visit for the day before vetting them for cultural fit.
The estate is tucked away in a quiet, postcard-perfect village in Suffolk, close to Colchester (I have agreed not to reveal the name or the specific location of the community).
Naomi Leake, a 61-year-old art teacher who has been resident here for six years with her partner and teenage daughter, meets me at the gate on a day in early spring. The tulips are just beginning to break through the soil – residents can be seen toiling on the farm or toiling on their laptops in quiet corners. Naomi points out firepits and makeshift hideaways where members have hosted weddings and celebrations over the years and a quieter corner of the land where some have been buried amongst the trees.
In the kitchen, the giant high-ceiling doors have been flung open to let in the light and Martha, a fellow resident, is preparing curry in a large pot for lunch for 20 fellow members who work from home.
Demand for shared living is booming
This is one of more than 400 intentional communities and cohousing projects across the UK, with many more in development. The number of people living in communal living projects has quadrupled to 14,400 in recent years, according to Diggers and Dreamers, a network for the movement. The growth reflects a wider search for solutions to some of Britain’s most persistent social challenges, including rising housing costs and increasing social isolation. Many adults now live far from their families: people over 35 live, on average, around 100 miles from their parents, often in pursuit of affordable housing. Almost half the UK population now reports experiencing loneliness.
A glance at the Diggers and Dreamers directory shows a group in the north east with just six members who are ready to expand and another living communally in sought-after Edwardian terraces in Camden, the sort many dream of buying but will never afford.
Many communities have a strict ethos for entry – LGBTQ+, veganism or female-led but others, like this Essex farm, are built around sustainability and security; growing their produce, baking their own bread or making their own hard cheese.
“People come here because they want to do more on the land, but not be totally responsible for everything,” says Naomi, continuing our tour. “There’s loads of skill sharing, loads of expertise about land stewardship, hedge laying,” she says as I struggle to keep up with her. “Some people are interested in animal management, husbandry, killing – sorry, yes, we kill our own animals here and eat them.”
“Nick makes the cheese,” she says as we stand in a Victorian-style dairy room that looks out onto the garden. “Then come Christmas, he’ll make this big black wax-covered wheel of hard cheese that has a star on it.”
The community was established more than 50 years ago in 1973 by “the hippies”, as they are lovingly referred to here – 14 families who pooled their resources to buy the land. Originally, the estate was owned by wealthy cloth merchants, but in the mid-1800s, it was turned into a nunnery and then became an army barracks in the inter-war period.
In the kitchen, we bump into one of the founding members of the community – John, now in his nineties. “Why are you here?” he asks me abruptly, seemingly confused. Naomi explains John has dementia – but has no plans to leave this sprawling manor house. “He is cared for here”, she says. “He has 60 people to look after him. He has all his meals cooked for him and we can all keep an eye on him.”
Though several people left the farm during the pandemic, when living in a large community came with significant risk, membership of the community remains highly sought. Naomi says there are many reasons for the uptick in interest – the climate crisis, the cost of living and also the role of social media in reaching previously untapped parts of the population. “I set up an Instagram page about daily life here, and three days later, I had 33,000 views,” she says. “People are interested in developing useful skills and learning about it could be an option in these difficult times.”
It costs between £80,000 and £300,000 to join the community
To join, would-be members have to buy a “unit” outright or with a Housing Association (UOSHA) stock loan; a one-bed costs around £80,000, with a three-bed reaching into the £300,000 mark. “For the younger generation, they might not be able to afford a house, but they might be able to afford a unit,” she says.
She and her family own a two-bed unit inside the main house, with high ceilings and a sitting room. These “units” don’t have kitchens and most don’t have private bathrooms. If you want such a luxury, you have to pay to build it yourself. “We pay £250 a month for [communal] food and everything else we need to buy,” she says. Every unit-owner contributes a service-charge like fee (Naomi pays £400 a month) which covers electricity and heating. This money also goes toward maintaining this 63-acre estate. “That means that if the roof on the chapel goes, which it did last year, we can replace it.” We are having this chat by the barn, as we watch the brown cows grazing. “We’re not skint here, which makes it quite secure.”
Grand romantic notions of love and togetherness aren’t enough to get you past the waiting list. Single people in their fifties and sixties hoping for a “unit” are likely to be disappointed. Like all stately homes, there’s a lot of upkeep and so the community, like the general population, is crying out for more young people to keep the community alive in the decades to come. They are prioritising new members who can bring useful skills, such as electricians, farmers, and legal experts, to help with planning permission. The old pipes are particularly troublesome; plumbers apply now.
Naomi herself didn’t have many of these technical skills when she joined – she arrived before social media had shown the masses just how appealing this sort of life can be – but her husband is very handy, so she assures me they may have still got in. As a climate activist, she was drawn to the community thanks to its self-sustaining farm and environmentalism.
Members commit to 15 hours of work a week
When most people hear the word commune, they think of radical hippies, cults and anarchy. Naomi concedes that this estate does seem a lot like a commune. “Intentional communities are a spectrum, with co-housing at one end, where everyone has their own space and own kitchen, and communes are at the other. This is somewhere in the middle.”
A commune, she says, is much more restrictive. This group might be self-sustaining but they also have their freedom. Members commit to roughly 15 hours of weekly work (such as tending the vegetable patch, milking cows, churning the cheese and butter or maintaining buildings). Jill, 93, has lived in the commune for 50 years and still gets up at 4am every morning to milk her much-loved cows. This responsibility has kept her fit and healthy in her old age. “Oh my god,” says Naomi. “She is a testament to this kind of lifestyle.”
The windows in the manor are all single-glazed, and in the winter, its waste wood-burning boiler (“The Dragon”) barely scratches the surface. It can be hard to stay warm. “Don’t make any decisions in February,” Naomi says as we trapeze into the farm. “February is the worst month here.”
I am generously invited into Martha’s “unit”, a two-bed she shares with her daughter. Her window looks out into the manor’s flower garden and an armchair sits in front of a wood burner. It is cosy and elegant and would probably cost triple the price if this stately home had been converted by a property developer. Instead, it sits quietly, loved by its occupants who plan to stay here for a lifetime.
Lunch time is the exact same time every weekday – 12.30pm- but is usually around 1pm on the weekend. Food is largely taken from the farm and harvest, but any extras, such as rice, are bought and paid for communally. As midday arrives, I am taken to the kitchen and kindly offered a portion of the curry. We queue up, canteen style. Soon, the chitter chatter bubbles out into the garden and dozens of us collect on the wooden picnic benches. I tuck into my flavourful daal.
Children love the community – teenagers do not
I listen as the parents around the table discuss the benefits and challenges of bringing up children here. “It can be hard when some of us have different rules from others,” says Naomi. Group eating and a shared kitchen make this harder. Some children might be allowed lots of sugar, others none, meaning the baked cookies on the side suddenly become a minefield. Some parents are closer than others, and it can be tricky to know whose child you can tell off for not helping out and which ones are better off left alone.
But for most of the parents and especially single mothers, this living arrangement has more positives than negatives. One mother, Susan*, tells me how life-changing it was to join the community at 26 with a young baby. She felt isolated in her two-up-two-down, alone all day with a newborn and no community. She had grown up visiting the manor (she had friends who lived here), and in those isolated days of early motherhood, she yearned for connection again. “There were so many people to help out when I came here,” she says. “I ended up with enough free time to join a rock band.”
Naomi’s teenage daughter has a tumultuous relationship with the setup. “She’s currently in the ‘it’s really cool’ phase, but sometimes she’s in the ‘it’s not cool’ phase. But when she was a child, she was in the ‘yay’ phase. They just love it here at that age. They know everybody and their social skills are really good. They all just play on their bikes, on the trampoline or they’re in someone’s unit having a sleepover.” Naomi has noticed that at around 17, when the teenagers get old enough to host parties in the chapel, they begin to like their unusual upbringing again.
There is no curfew, and on weekends parties can last long into the night, to the irritation of some members. But the home is still a democracy. There is no assigned cleaner and deep cleans are done by all. Just before my visit, the group had done a spring clean of all the living areas. The system operates entirely by consensus, rather than any strict dogma. Naomi hates to be asked if members are “allowed” to do anything. “Allowed by who? There are no rules here,” she frequently says.
But there are some agreed directives – for example, around guests. “I wanted my sister to come and stay for a few days,” one former City worker in her sixties, Linda*, tells me as we perch in the garden. “This has to get signed off by the group. That took a while for me to get used to.”
This is the more tiring part of communal living. “The hardest bit about any community,” Naomi says, “is the people.” The walls have job rotas – “these are barely used,” she notes, as I admire the tall chalkboards – and car-share lists. Personal politics have to be frequently navigated. “You develop a lot of emotional resilience,” Naomi tells me. She likes her own privacy occasionally. “There are times when I spend most of my day in my own unit.” She tells me of another community that had to expel a particularly difficult member who caused too many arguments; legal battles and bitterness ensued.
“You don’t have to get on with everybody you know, in the same way that you wouldn’t in a village, but there has to be general goodwill and all the rest of it,” she says. She laughs as she reflects on the characters that live in the house, “There’s a guy who likes to suck eggs at 4 am. He just gets up super early and sucks six eggs. That’s just how he was taught to eat eggs.”
Linda*, who joined a few years ago, tells me it was difficult letting go of ego; of the label that things are “yours” and not for others; of the routines most of us grow accustomed to when we live with just two. “You no longer have a favourite mug, for example,” she says. “Little things like that.”
But there is routine elsewhere. “In the winter, we have wassailing because we’ve got loads of orchards, and so we’ll prune them all, and then build this huge bonfire, and then invite everybody. We anoint the trees and all that stuff. Then musicians turn up.”
It takes well over an hour for her to give me the full tour. We pass through long corridors and large rooms with bay windows, stuffed with sofas and bookcases.
Naomi was hesitant, at first, to let me visit this community. This large home has become famous in the local area and sometimes, intruders break in, curious to know what life is like here.
I can see why these invaders are curious. For all its troubles, politics and haphazard democracy, there is a peacefulness here. These lucky families enjoy high-quality housing surrounded by nature and the sort of freedom from solo responsibility that the majority of us could only dream of. They might not be able to decide their own dinner, but instead they have the privilege to live through some of the hardest stages of life – from cradle to grave – with the support of a committed community. Many, like John, can look forward to living into old age with dignity, surrounded by acres of land and friendly faces.
Naomi has no plans to leave this place. “Intentional community is a very real option in these emergency times,” she says, as we stand at the gate, saying our good-byes.
“Community is a strong word, isn’t it?” she reflects. “It’s got loads of associations of togetherness and solidarity and belonging, and there’s a kind of morality that comes with it, but there’s lots of reasons why understanding each other and having tolerance and emotional intelligence and being educated in a multi-generational way would be good for us all.”
She means, of course, the climate crisis and the eye-watering housing market. “We have to think about sharing resources – and we have to really think about getting on with each other.”
