January 2021
Our Church Grove project was granted planning permission by Lewisham Council in 2018 (with the decision formally issued on Friday 14 December 2018). But the Church Grove story starts a few years earlier when, after a campaign led by RUSS members, we successfully completed a public procurement process and signed a Development Agreement with Lewisham Council for a ‘community-led, affordable, self-build housing development’ on a former derelict school and industrial site at Church Grove.
The project will provide 36 new sustainable, customised, high quality homes that are permanently affordable and partly self-built in order to reduce construction costs. It will also provide 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.
You can find out more about our plans for the development at page 20-25 of RUSS’s vision – An innovative approach to Community-Led Housing.
A ballot to select the residents for the Church Grove project took place at Lewisham Town Hall in March 2016.
One of RUSS’s principles is that residents should input into the major decisions that will frame their living environment. Residents were involved in a series of co-design sessions in 2016 and 2017 with our architects and our self-build facilitator, Jon Broome, and again in meetings with architects SEH in 2020.
There are a small number of homes available for sale and for rent. For more information on how to apply for a home at Church Grove, please click here
