Since 2019, when we made a successful application to the Community Housing Fund in partnership with Oxford City Council and the Oxfordshire Community Land Trust, we’ve been working on a site in Littlemore in East Oxford as a prototype for how to create an approach to bringing thirty six garage sites into development as new social homes. We’ve been inspired by projects such as Archio & London CLT’s Brasted Close project in Sydenham, and United Communities’ Launchpad project in Bristol. Both projects are successfully using previously forgotten about sites to provide remarkable homes for social tenants.
The challenges are significant and our architects are sketching and modelling to find neat solutions to a seemingly endless supply of tricky problems.
Now we have successfully navigated a pre-application process we are having fun developing the design for a full planning application. The design aspires to provide beautiful homes that are of Passivhaus standard, with shared and private amenity space for all households.