If you have ever day dreamed about swapping your day job for a life of utopian idealism on a country commune – meet Chris who ran way from the circus to join a commune in post industrial Lancashire, and spent 25 years trying to work out how to ‘live the dream’.

A Life in Common is one person’s memories of a life lived with others in intentional community in Britain. From the London squatting scene; through twenty years at People in Common – a ‘living/working co-operative’ in East Lancashire that grew out of the 1970s counter-culture; to the building of a Centre for Celebration on the edge of Morecambe Bay at the turn of the millennium.

“…finished this inspiring book about a bunch of people in Burnley who set about creating an alternative everyday lifestyle in the 1970s, a lovely, lively history by Chris Coates of commune living in the heart of industrial Lancashire. I grew up there with little clue that all this beauty was happening practically next door.”