In the mid-90s, residents of Nubia Way defied racist attacks to become Europe’s largest black-led self-build scheme – but austerity has brought new danger

It is more than two decades since Tim Oshodi stood between a row of partly built houses in Downham, south-east London, and a gang of men who intended to burn them to the ground. Oshodi, now 53, has a calm and meditative presence. But alone, he was shaken. “I was absolutely terrified, he says. “But I was absolutely sure I wouldn’t let them burn the houses.”

That evening, in June 1996, Oshodi was packing up his tools. He had just finished fitting a skylight in his home-to-be in Nubia Way: a row of 13 timber frame chalets being gradually assembled by members of the city’s first black self-build housing co-operative.

Nubia Way was a utopian project intended to give social renters the kind of long-term security usually reserved for home-owners, by allowing working-class tenants to buy a stake in their housing using labour in place of cash. The brainchild of radical Colombian housing organiser José Ospina, the homes were to be self-built by a co-operative of African-Caribbean Londoners, called Fusions Jameen, but held in perpetuity by a housing association to rent securely to people in housing need – first, the self-builders themselves, and then to others when the builders moved on.

Everybody here got a new qualification or a new job. It boosts your confidence when you can do something like this Errol Hall

The self-build process was meant to demonstrate a viable alternative to the norms of owner-occupation or conventional social renting, and treated housing as a potentially transformative process for individuals and the community. As a result of self-building, “everybody here got a new qualification or a new job,” says Errol Hall, 53, who left the Home Office to become a community worker after meeting other members of the co-op. “It boosts your confidence when you can do something like this, and that’s part of the story here.”

The two developments built by Fusions – 21 houses over two sites at Nubia Way and Brockley, both in the borough of Lewisham – were Europe’s largest black-led self-build scheme, which today houses people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. “This is the beauty of what Jose did,” Oshodi says. “People who had bad credit records, people who were in greatest housing need, anybody could build and get excellent housing if you were prepared to give your labour.”

Play Video 2:16 Nubia way: the making of London's first black housing co-op – archive video

The skylight Oshodi was installing that evening was a small personal luxury, paid for out of his own pocket, to add to the half-built home he would live in: “a double-sized one above the bed so you could see the moon”. He laughs when remembering that his first thought, as he saw the men approach, carrying chains and a can of petrol, was to protect his new window: “I thought they were here to nick my Velux!”

But they were not there to steal. In the mid-90s, Downham was one of the most notorious centres for extreme-right activity in the country. The area borders Grove Park, notorious as the place where in 1993 Stephen Lawrence set off on the bus journey that ended with his racist murder. For months in the summer of 1996, a string of attacks, particularly focused on black bus drivers, meant that buses were diverted away from Downham after 6pm.

The area made news repeatedly for lawlessness: the Downham schoolteacher Alison Moore’s home was invaded by men in balaclavas who sprayed a swastika and “NF” (National Front) graffiti on the walls. Local youth worker Nick Jeffrey recalls youths hijacking a train. In a 2002 council by-election in Downham, one in five voters backed the far-right BNP.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An early advertisement seeking self-builders to join the scheme. Photograph: Fusions Jameen

Nubia Way resident Andre Howard, 65, remembers one extreme-right council candidate saying he was driven to stand for election by the black self-builders, who the local rumour mill claimed were foreign refugees. Over the two years of construction, residents faced racial harassment and three arson attacks, two of which damaged houses. One was hand-signed with an NF tag. Oshodi’s own confrontation with would-be arsonists ended with no damage thanks to a bluff – he shouted out as if for friends waiting nearby. Faced with Oshodi clasping a hammer and the prospect of backup, the attackers backed away.

To think of losing all this and living god knows where – I couldn't. I’d rather be bloody dead Andre Howard

Nubia Way survived the racist attacks, but now faces a new threat. Chisel, the housing association that owns the houses on Nubia Way along with more than 200 other self-build and conventional homes, is faced with a £4.2m funding shortfall. A proposed merger with another housing association failed in February.

In an effort to fill the funding gap, Chisel has already asked the self-builders of Nubia Way to give up their rent discounts. These discounts, that reduce weekly rents by up to 40% compared to rent paid by tenants in conventional housing or Nubia Way houses built by others, are a contractual benefit they receive in recognition of their labour in building the homes. For some residents – those who put in the greatest number of hours and therefore earned the largest discounts – this could increase rents by as much as £50 a week: “When you’re a person on fixed income, or benefits, which wouldn’t cover all of that increase, £50 is completely untenable,” says Hall.

“I built this house. We all built all of them, actually,” says Howard, standing in front of his porch. “To think of losing all this and living god knows where – I couldn’t. I’d rather be bloody dead, to be honest.”

Nubia Way today resembles a compact alpine resort, nestled among the surrounding 1920s stock brick estates. A lane of cheerful wooden homes built using a low-skill system devised by the modernist architect Walter Segal, it boasts environmental credentials that were groundbreaking in the 90s, such as recycled insulation and sedum grass roofs, and earned awards for its low-carbon design from the Royal Institute of British Architects and Lewisham council. A narrow park behind the houses, once a dumping ground for old sofas, nappies and needles, has been restored with the help of Nubia Way residents – part of the legacy of self-led local interventions that self-builders have contributed to the area’s regeneration.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Two self-builders assemble scaffolding at the front of the one of the Nubia Way houses. Photograph: Andre Howard

Most Segal-style self-builds, such as eco-developments at Allerton Park in Leeds and Ashley Vale in Bristol, were built by tradespeople with means or as the type of luxury projects featured on property programmes like Grand Designs. From the outset, Nubia Way was designed to be different.

Oshodi, who had graduated from the London School of Economics in 1987 and worked on housing projects for Croydon council, became inspired while working on a co-operative farm in Zimbabwe. Freedom fighters involved in the struggle to overthrow white minority rule had set up communally after independence: “I thought, if they could do that there, surely ordinary people can improve our lives here.”

Back in Britain, Oshodi joined Fusions Jameen in the mid-90s. Most British co-operatives, despite being outwardly bohemian, had long remained nepotistic havens that excluded working-class minorities, he says. Fusions, however, explicitly aimed to take African-Caribbean tenants off council waiting lists.

Ospina, who had first learned about co-operative housing in the 1970s as a student squatting in his native Colombia, founded Chisel in 1987 to provide management services to a group of independent housing co-ops like Fusions and connect them with mainstream grants.

Following his “Self-Build for Rent” model, Chisel would act as the development agent – working to secure land, funding and planning – and Fusions Jameen as the building contractor.

At the core of this agreement was the notion of “sweat equity”: self-builders’ investment, typically between 20 and 40 hours each week and totalling more than 1000 hours, is recognised with a secure equity share and rental discount. Today, many self-builders retain a “premium” linked to their discount: they will be paid out – to the tune of thousands of pounds – if they move house or decide to cash in the share, but lose their rental discount if they do so.

Old, colour-warped VHS footage shows Nubia Way taking shape. On the construction site, self-builders – some single parents holding kids – hammer and measure timber, wearing hard hats and loud, patterned 90s jumpers. A few tell the camera that self-building is their sole chance for a safe, clean house.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Two self-builders work on the roof of one of the houses in Nubia Way in 1995/1996. Photograph: Andre Howard

Errol Hall is seen in his 20s – visibly shyer than the bold speaker he is today – and calls it “a dream come true”. Hall’s son was born during construction. “I was getting laughed out of council offices and housing associations,” Hall says today. “As a single man who was responsible for a child, there was no chance.”

Navlette Guy, who works for the NHS in a local paediatrician’s office, also had a daughter in the first year here, while her older children tottered around the site in hard hats “helping” their father build. “It was absolutely brilliant,” says Guy, 58. “They’ve all done well, all been to university, come out, and that’s a testament to having the community we have. If they were to play out here, we knew that our neighbours would look out for them.”

After building, Hall started working in citizens’ advice, specialising in helping single fathers. He recognised the impact of self-building secure homes on his neighbours. “What I saw,” he says, “which was amazing to me, was men re-establishing contact with their children, families got back together, moved in.”

The street shows that housing development can happen in tune with residents’ beliefs, Oshodi says. He cites the pan-Africanist ideals popularised by Desmond Tutu, who lived and preached in Grove Park from 1972 until his return to South Africa in 1975: “Desmond Tutu says there’s a thing called ubuntu, where we are stronger through our community.”

Crucially, the fact that the tenants built their own homes meant that instead of paying contractors, they could channel government grants into infrastructure, such as water mains, to make the development of slim plots like Nubia Way economically viable.

These tradeoffs were not limited to construction: each night while Nubia Way was being built, one of the self-builders had the job of sleeping in a small caravan to guard the site and materials. “The bottom line is: the only way that it could become economical is if we provided our labour for free,” says Oshodi.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A self-builder works on the wiring of one of the Nubia Way houses in 1996/1997. Photograph: Lorraine Cameron

Chisel’s founder says there is no doubt that self-builders were supposed to keep discounts for the whole time they remained in homes. “Our intention was to create a bridge between social ownership and owner-occupation, to create a guarantee of shareholding by the occupants, that couldn’t be eroded and couldn’t be taken away,” says Ospina, who left London for Ireland in the late 90s and continues to advocate for alternative housing provision.

Ospina says that taking away benefits earned in labour would leave tenants with no more than a conventional social tenancy and no stake in Nubia Way, “which is exactly what we were trying to move away from”.

“Sadly, the powers that be seem to be trying to move back in that direction,” he says. “It’s a very retrograde step. And I hope that it can be countered.”

In the decades since Nubia Way was completed, Chisel’s development from idealistic pioneer to formalised housing provider has been far from smooth. For years the Nubia Way homes were managed by another housing association as Chisel languished in government supervision for a catalogue of failings, says Jo Hillier, director of Chisel in the 2000s. Poor organisation meant some residents were simply never issued with contracts that correctly showed the discounts they had earned, leaving them more vulnerable, now, than they ought to be.

The principle of black people giving something, giving your labour, creating that social housing that’s there for ever, and them just saying ‘eff-off’ Tim Oshodi

But today most residents want Nubia Way to remain with Chisel. Tenants understand that difficulties arrived with the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, which required social landlords to reduce rents by 1% each year for a four-year period. These small reductions have cumulatively resulted in a 16% reduction to social landlords’ projected revenues, according to the industry magazine Inside Housing, and have kicked off a series of cuts and mergers between housing associations.

On 14 August, a group of Nubia Way residents, including both self-builders and newer arrivals, met Lewisham East MP Janet Daby to hand over a letter demanding that Chisel stop current plans and allow tenants to make alternative proposals for addressing the shortfall. These residents believe costs should continue to be borne collectively, albeit with the original self-builders retaining rent reductions.

Tenants have also cast doubt on projected costs for repairs, including £40,000 to replace each leaking grass roof. Chisel’s board have now promised to review the estimates, but warned that the much-loved eco-roofs may simply be too expensive to fix.

Louise Owen, the chair of Chisel’s board – who built her own home at a nearby Chisel self-build project – says spreading costs won’t be easy. “It is really, really hard to justify putting up everyone’s rents unless we have tried every other avenue,” says Owen. “And one of the avenues is increasing the discount rent.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A poster advertising the Nubia Way to potential self-builders that was posted around Lewisham in 1995/6 . Photograph: Created by Peter Coker

Eliminating discounts is “key”, confirms Chisel’s managing director, Pauline Goodfellow. She says Chisel plans to approach the social housing regulator for permission to eliminate reductions if residents do not agree voluntarily.

But raising the discounted rents would disproportionately affect black residents, who make up the majority of self-builders on Fusions Jameen’s two projects, points out Oshodi, who says he would invoke equality impact regulations in the event of such a move. He sees an echo of the Windrush scandal – of black Brits giving their lives to a community only to see their self-evident rights called into question.

He says: “The principle of black people giving something, giving your labour, creating that social housing that’s there for ever, and them just saying ‘eff-off’?”

Meanwhile, the self-build model has seen a resurgence in interest in recent years. Inspired by schemes such as Nubia Way, the Rural Urban Synthesis Society, a Lewisham-based community land trust, is developing 33 homes nearby after being awarded £1m by the mayor of London’s Innovation Fund. Since 2016, legislation has required all local authorities in England to host an open register allowing anyone to express interest in self-building.

That just makes the situation with Chisel more dispiriting, say residents, who warn that the feasibility of future schemes is threatened if promises made during construction can be rolled back. They are left questioning what happens if homes change hands. “All over London, what you see is lucrative sites like the site we’re on, they knock down social housing and they [build] expensive developments,” says Hall. “Our fear is that as soon as it gets into the hands of a big organisation, that they’ll be looking to go down that road, or we’ll completely lose control of our tenancies and our rents will go up a lot.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nubia Way as it is today. Photograph: Tim Oshodi

“Chisel used to be a really good, inclusive landlord,” he adds. Residents want it to rediscover its stated values of inclusivity and true tenant-led organisation: “Because that’s how we achieved all this in the first place.”

Goodfellow says Chisel will not itself consider demolishing or redeveloping Nubia Way. But the housing association says it will not risk financial insolvency, nor sell its traditionally built housing stock in order to maintain the self-build properties. Chisel says plans will not progress until it has conducted further consultation with residents, but tenants are upset that decisions over the community’s future might ultimately be taken out of the hands of those who built it.

The story of Lewisham’s radical self-builders Read more

Oshodi, though, is defiant: “No. We’re not going to lose this place.

“We had to fight the NF, we did improvement and regeneration across the area. We did that because we believe in community and we believe in ourselves,. Do you honestly expect that people who’ve risked their lives are just going to just give up what they’ve built?”

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