Benny Corkill is four years old and loves his plastic binoculars. He uses them to hunt insects among the wood chips, vegetable beds and fruit trees crowding Granton community garden in north-west Edinburgh.
Under the shadow of nearby tenements, Benny is learning to prune, build fires and wrestle logs into forts, boosted by toasted marshmallows. “My boys love coming here,” said Reka, his mother. “They know they can ask questions; they can be silly here, as well. It’s a safe place for them and good for me too: here I can let them run loose.”
Wrapped in waterproofs, wellies, and winter hats to guard against the biting December air and intermittent drizzle, Benny and his brothers Joshua, two, and Ezra, four months, are representatives of a self-help revolution spreading through towns, cities and villages across Scotland.
Local communities, often in deprived neighbourhoods, are buying up derelict and unused property for village shops, play parks, community centres and, in one case, a film set for war movies, using buyout powers introduced by the Scottish parliament since its foundation in 1999.
The land reform debate is often overshadowed by the buyouts of islands or totemic Highland estates. Yet those sales have ground to halt, partly due to competition from private buyers pursuing speculative investments using woodland and peat restoration as carbon sinks, which has sharply driven up land prices.
Scottish government data shows that by the end of 2022 there were 754 places in community ownership in Scotland, up from 85 in 2000, run by more than 500 community groups, with many scattered across the Highlands and the Western Isles.
Large landholdings are in a minority: more than 500 of those properties are smaller than a hectare in size; hundreds of them are buildings. Only seven are larger than 10,000 hectares (24,700 acres). And 184 places changed hands for free. Only eight cost more than £1m; a large majority cost less than £100,000.
The latest grants, paid out from the Scottish government’s £10m a year Scottish Land Fund and administered by the national lottery’s community fund, included £142,600 to buy a community shop on North Yell in Shetland; £328,060 to buy and reopen a cinema in Prestwick, South Ayrshire; and £53,655 for townspeople in Portree, Skye, to revive local playing fields.
Granton Community Gardeners took ownership of their site, tucked in a grid of low-rise social housing tenements, through an asset transfer process with Edinburgh council which began in 2018 and, helped by £82,902 from the land fund, was concluded last month.
Spurred on by the land reform agenda driven by Holyrood, public authorities in Scotland are encouraged to transfer unused assets to local people. In Wester Hailes, another peripheral housing estate in Edinburgh, a community group has just been given £50,675 to buy land there for a community centre.
The Granton scheme came to life after local people began guerrilla gardening in unused fenced-off gardens on street corners in 2010.
Mary Mbae, a nurse, originally from Kenya, said there were now about 15 nationalities involved, including Nepalese, Pakistani, Polish and Irish migrants, and Kurdish and Syrian refugees, who plant crops such as chard, leeks, potatoes, tomatoes, buckwheat and a Kenyan variety of kale called sukuma.
They even grow wheat, grinding it for flour. “I think that’s how we ended up with a bakery,” she said.
Carey Doyle, of Community Land Scotland, said that Scotland’s community buyout laws take a “nuanced” approach to the public’s rights over private property which are unique in the UK.
The law gives communities first refusal on any land or building which comes up for sale, with some rights to force a sale, but there are strong legal tests. In all cases the community buy-out must be in the public interest and command significant local support.
The Scottish Land Commission, a government body, recommended the introduction of a compulsory sales order to force derelict land into active use. Activists had hoped that would be included in a new land reform bill due next year but they now fear ministers have dropped those measures.
A pledge by ministers to double the land fund pot to £20m a year remain unrealised but even so, Doyle said, CLS has been “inundated” with inquiries since the start of the Covid crisis, particularly in deprived urban areas. “People are trying to make things happen in their communities because it seems like no one else is,” she said. “It’s a very exciting time.”
Some of Scotland’s best buyouts
The Pyramid at Anderston, Glasgow
Built in 1968 as a church near the M8 in central Glasgow, the Pyramid was bought by local people in 2019 with land fund and lottery support, and converted into a community centre, hosting knitting groups, yoga classes, a youth theatre, choral singing and film screenings.
Machrihanish airbase
In 2012, locals on the Kintyre peninsula bought the cold war-era airbase at Machrihanish for £1 from the Ministry of Defence. Its 10,000ft runway is leased for short-haul air services and car rallies. It includes a US special forces base, now rented out to film-makers, hangars and self-storage in old munitions bunkers.
Cardowan park, North Lanarkshire
In 2023, locals in Cardowan near Stepps in North Lanarkshire blocked the auction of a playpark built on an old colliery pithead. Cardowan Community Meadow will take ownership of it in February 2024 to create a wildlife friendly park with land fund and Co-op financing.
The Old Police Station, Langholm
Villagers in Langholm bought a former police station, complete with holding cells, in 2021 and converted it into four affordable and energy efficient homes for rent. Dumfries and Galloway council made an asset transfer to a community trust, part-funded by a tax on second homes.
