The Rural Urban Synthesis Society (RUSS) is a members-led Community Land Trust based in South London, founded in 2009 with the aim of creating sustainable community-led neighbourhoods and truly affordable self-build homes. RUSS is guided by ten principles that were developed by the local community. These principles embed an ethos of affordability, sustainability, self-governance and community engagement into everything we do.
Governed by a board of Trustees, our work is delivered by our members mainly through weekly members’ meetings. RUSS is registered with the FSA as an Industrial and Provident Society for the Benefit of the Community (30624R) and is an exempt charity registered with HMRC (XT18342).
2016 was a landmark year for RUSS: after a long members-led campaign in 2015 and a successfully public procurement process, we signed a Development Agreement with Lewisham Council in April 2016 for a ‘community-led, affordable, self-build housing development’ in a derelict former school and industrial site at Church Grove in Ladywell, South East London.
The project will provide 33 new sustainable, customised, high quality homes that are permanently affordable and partly self-built in order to reduce construction costs. It will also design in opportunities for training in construction for self-builders as well as apprentices and volunteers from the wider community. The project will contain a range of houses and flats of different tenures, sizes and levels of self-build in order to create a truly mixed community made up of people from diverse backgrounds in the local area.
One of RUSS’s principles is that residents should have input into the major decisions that will frame their living environment. They have been involved in the design process through a series of co-design sessions from May 2016 to March 2017 led by the architects Architype and Strategic Advisors and Self-Build Facilitators Jon Broome Architects. After each session decisions with the relevant material were assembled to form a ‘Design Menu’, which has been used to elaborate the final Design Brief. We aim to begin building in 2018 and complete the project by 2020.
