Trevone Quarry

Not visited yet.

The place

Trevone Quarry has been worked for granite since the early 1800s. The quarry ceased trading in the mid-1980s. In 2009, Rob Higgs purchased the 22-acre site outside Penryn in Cornwall. The planning permission at the time was to extract the remaining granite or convert to industrial agriculture. He did neither. Over the following fifteen years, the site became a woodland, a nature reserve, and a community of around 19 people living in self-built structures and caravans on rewilded land.

The site tries to hold four things together at once: a residential community, a sustainable industrial estate, a rewilding and species reintroduction project, and a working farm. The hope is that the four benefit each other the way an ecosystem does.

How it works

There is no obligation to contribute labour. Residents who want to work on the community do so and are paid at living wage from the communal rent fund. Residents who can’t or don’t want to simply pay rent instead, which funds others to do the work. Or: five hours of community contribution per week in exchange for living here effectively cash-free.

No cars for new residents - not as a rule but as a condition of the offer. No pets beyond biodiversity-enriching ones. Whatever you build on your own pitch stays with Trevone when you leave, for whoever comes next.

What’s at stake

Nineteen eviction and enforcement notices over the years. Investigations citing slum landlord regulations, fire safety, child welfare. The claim that what they were doing was “visually objectionable, unsustainable, and doing significant harm to the delicate fabric of the local community.” Every investigating officer acknowledged that what was happening at Trevone was a good thing. The legislation simply wasn’t designed to accommodate it. The last planning battle took four years and cost £80,000 to fight and win.

A documentary film - Trevone - was made by 99p Films and released in 2024.

Why I’m going

Trevone doesn’t fit any of the typologies this project works with. It’s not a CLT, not a cohousing scheme, not a cooperative in any formal sense. A landowner who decided to do something else with his land, without permission and without certainty, and built it over seventeen years. The planning system spent years trying to close it down and couldn’t. I want to understand what that looks like now - and what winning looks like after it.