Church Grove: A Case Study in Self-Build Housing

Deborah Gans and Lawrence Blough are professors at Pratt Institute and co-directors of the Housing Futures Lab. Together they studied the Church Grove collaboratively-built housing project designed by Architype and Shepheard Epstein Hunter for the Rural Urban Synthesis Society (RUSS) Community Land Trust, inspired by architect Walter Segal’s earlier self-built community in London, Walter’s Way.

From the transit station Ladywell in Lewisham, if you walk west, you find yourself in a small enclave of charming shops and cafes, an indicator of how the Ladywell District is fast becoming desirable after a period of decline common to many small urban centers. If you take a right, you enter the District of Lewisham Center, passing by Ladywell Fields, a park  assembled from three historic water meadows used for irrigation when the borough was farmland, before farms became manor houses in the 19^th century, and then housing estates in the twentieth, with an acceleration in development after the bombing of Lewisham during WW2 and the housing shortage that ensued. From there, you can glimpse the residential towers built beginning in the 1960s, some now in disrepair, that still speak to our ongoing struggle to meet housing needs and overcome inequities. Across the road are the Baines Villas, a row of tidy modest rowhouses built in 1858 with the arrival of the railroad, a type that now appears desirable. Along that row, you come upon the entry to a small mews lined with more urban cottages ending with the unexpected, a great 4-story portal crossed with walkways opening on to a view of the River Ravensbourne. You have arrived at Church Grove, a complex of 36 apartments arranged in two wings bending along the river and connected at their center by continuous walkways facing onto a community garden. With its cheerful patches of color, various sidings and active geometry, the architecture communicates an ambition to launch a new chapter in the history of housing observed on the walk from the train, but a chapter still deeply connected to a distinguished local legacy- that of local self-builders.

The “how” of community building and the “what “of architecture are perhaps nowhere better conjoined than in the self-build housing movement, founded on the premise of collective process from project inception and construction to its ongoing shared management. Most often, these endeavors have taken the form of agricultural cooperatives or communities of individual homes united by a legal property structure or a social understanding that is more or less a formal covenant. Lewisham is host to a series of such self-build endeavors begun in the 1970s, the mews of Walter’s Way, Segal Close and Nubian way, all conceived and directed by Walter Segal who was also architect of the Segal Method, the system of timber frame and panel infill from which these individually tailored houses were self-built. For Segal, the method was a means to greater ends of sustainability, adaptability and reuse, and the possibility of homeownership for those who, without the self-build system, could otherwise not afford it. By disseminating his method and the values embedded in it, he hoped to make it a replicable model.

Church Grove is the first project of the Rural Urban Synthesis society (RUSS), a land trust begun by with intention of breathing new life into Segal’s model. While the built work and its collective amenities are admirable simply for the architectural quality with which they concretize our current affordable housing aspirations, for RUSS and for this PennPraxis study-series, it’s deepest significance is the invention of a process that brings collective self-build into the urban present, scaled up to meet current demand  for housing, in ways that address the social and financial needs of those most often left out of market-based opportunities- even so-called affordable ones. The story of its 15-year journey thus far follows.