This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter

That police station that got sold off, the local church, the toilets, all gone.... Most of us are aware of public spaces that have disappeared in our neighbourhoods over recent years and even decades: the buildings, once owned by the council, a church or some other organisation that served the community, up for sale, and too often going to private developers. You could call it, as some campaigners do, a kind of theft.

But a bid in Portobello, Edinburgh’s seaside suburb, is showing a potential route for many communities across Scotland to hold onto their spaces. Action Porty has been a trailblazer since 2017 when it became the first to have used the urban community ‘right to buy’ legislation in pushing to purchase Bellfield parish church from the Church of Scotland.

Though communities have been using 'right to buy' since the legislation was created for rural areas in 2003, urban rights were only introduced in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015.

The Bellfield project is also a reminder of the challenges of community ownership of large, old and sometimes unwieldy, leaky buildings. What do you do when you have, through right to buy, saved an asset for continued local use, but don’t quite have the money to upgrade it to make it the space that will really benefit the community?

In this case, that of Action Porty, the community benefit society behind Bellfield, you issue shares and put them up for sale. It recently launched a £200,000 community share offer, which if it is successful will also unlock a further £450,000 from the UK government Community Ownership Fund. The shares offer is open till the end of this month, April 30.

If the target is not raised, the community stands to lose the £450,000.

“We are looking,” says Action Porty chair, Justin........

© Herald Scotland