On 26 January 1962 Michael Bailey placed an advertisement in the personal column of The Times:
anyone interested in cooperative venture to build group of imaginative homes for own occupation...please write...
The group that gathered were inspired by Scandinavian models of communal housing and modern housing design. Michael Bailey had a particulary interest in the potential of the "Adapatable House" shown at the 1962 Ideal Home Exhibition by architects Peter Randall and David Parkes and the group went on to commission them to design their homes, the first project for PRP Architects.
The site eventually secured on The Ryde in Hatfield was developed as a cooperative venture by the specially-formed Cockaigne Housing Group which was, and continues to be, made up of the home owners. One of the Group's major achievements was to negotiate 100% mortgages for its members secured by Hatfield Urban District Council on the purchase of 12 plots in the New Town, shunned because they backed on to a railway line.
All three architects had been immersed in R&D. So the scheme was to incorporate the new Parker-Morris space standards, only a talking point then until their introduction for local authority housing in 1967; government research on high density single-storey layouts; economic construction, concepts; pioneering work on sunlight/daylight standards, and the results of user studies which were to form the basis of the influential Space in the Home design bulletin.
Today, the Cockaigne Houses are formed of twenty-eight houses, a community house which includes a communal space and flat for friends and family to stay in. Each home has a private garden spaces but the communal garden spaces connect all the houses and lead to the Community House where the residents still regularly gather.