Labour’s housing targets may also be able to provide the social and community spaces we so urgently need. Community centres are disappearing at speed, and with them the social fabric that holds many neighbourhoods together. Lessons from Cambridgeshire New Town, Northstowe has shown us the importance of starting with social spaces if we want to build thriving communities for the long-term. This article seeks to outline the lessons from community led housing that can be applied more widely.
For generations, community centres have been the quiet glue of local life: places to gather, celebrate, disagree and organise. But that fabric is unravelling. A joint report by New Local and Rayne Foundation estimates there are around 21,000 community centres and halls across Great Britain. Many are operating under what it calls “fragmented and precarious” conditions. Between 2010 and 2023, 1,243 council-run youth centres were closed in England and Wales, according to UNISON — more than two-thirds of the total.
This is about more than buildings. As Dr Parth Patel from IPPR puts it: “Where shared spaces are lost, a sense of decline and disconnection takes root — and with it, dangerous alternatives thrive.” When the third spaces that bring people together are eroded, others fill the vacuum.
The UK is living through the long tail of austerity. Youth centres, working men’s clubs, cafés, pubs and church halls — the spaces between home and work that make places feel alive — are disappearing. Three-quarters of working men’s clubs have closed over the past 50 years.
Unlike hospitals or schools, the value of these spaces isn’t always obvious — until they’re gone. They are where trust is built, small conflicts are resolved, and a sense of belonging is forged. They anchor everyday life.
A dangerous void
The consequences are real. As Dr Sacha Hilhorst of IPPR noted after the Southport riots: “In the absence of shared spaces, misinformation and hate can fill the void, creating tinderbox conditions for violence.”
The crisis isn’t just in existing towns as new developments often repeat the same mistake: build the houses first, promise the cafés, gardens and community halls later. In Northstowe, a new town in Cambridgeshire planned for 10,000 residents, early phases offered little beyond bricks and tarmac. No community centre. No café. No shared garden. Residents felt stranded. Only after public pressure did Homes England step in to accelerate community facilities — including cohousing schemes — for phase two of development.
Cohousing points to a better way
Our organisation promotes cohousing. We believe this model may be of growing interest to the wider housing sector because it flips the traditional order of urban design. Originating in Scandinavia, it plans neighbourhoods of around 20–40 homes around shared facilities — typically a community centre, kitchen, garden or workshop — before designing the private homes themselves. Long-term stewardship is held collectively by residents, which makes these spaces financially resilient and well used. When communities themselves hold responsibility for the places they share, with guaranteed access built into the structure, these hubs can generate and sustain income over time.
In Lancashire, Lancaster Cohousing demonstrates how shared infrastructure can anchor a neighbourhood. Alongside homes, it includes co-working spaces, a vegetarian café, and public river access. Linked to Halton Senior Cohousing, a community hydroelectric scheme, woodland, and Clune Valley Community Land Trust, the site forms a local hub of social, environmental and economic activity — integrating housing with community enterprise and ecological stewardship.
The Dutch project Vrijburcht illustrates the commercial and social potential of this approach. It pairs 52 homes with a café and theatre open to the wider neighbourhood — a living piece of social infrastructure that also generates revenue.
In South London, Imani Housing Co-operative offers a powerful example of this approach. Founded in the 1980s, it emerged from a community hub created by members of London’s Black community — a space to organise, build trust and shape a shared vision before any housing existed. This early investment in people and place became the foundation for a housing co-operative that has endured for decades.
In Liverpool, Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust aims to create “a thriving, vibrant mixed community where people from all walks of life can live, work and play.” Its Granby Winter Garden is a community-run hub embedded in the housing, hosting cultural events and everyday activities that connect residents with the wider neighbourhood.
On London’s South Bank, Coin Street Community Builders speaks of being “at the heart of a diverse, vibrant and inspirational community.” Its neighbourhood centre, café and workspace are fully integrated into the housing cooperatives, offering both social and economic value to the area.
A wider opportunity
These projects show that designing for shared space early on can strengthen neighbourhoods, support inclusive communities and offer long-term economic value This approach shouldn’t be confined to cohousing. Public-facing community hubs can be embedded in affordable housing, regeneration projects and new towns. They can be cafés, kitchens, co-working spaces, gardens or workshops — but crucially, designing for community must come first, not as afterthoughts squeezed in once the houses are built.
The same principle can help revive high streets, bring abandoned farms back to life and turn brownfield sites in rural areas into thriving community anchors. When shared spaces are built in early and stewarded by residents partly for their own use, they create places that are more resilient, better loved and cheaper to maintain. They start building trust before and after the homes arrive — and make communities harder to fracture. In a time when our shared spaces are disappearing, building them in from the start is an act of collective strength — a commitment to the kind of society we want to be
