How a garden and an artist changed an organisation.
In this 1000 Better Stories blog, SCCAN Story Weaver Lesley Anne Rose visits North Edinburgh Arts as they prepare to move into a refurbished and extended building. She discovers the impact of an outdoor space in planning for this move and the new business plan that will support it.
North Edinburgh Arts (NEA) is a community led cultural organisation based in the Pennywell and Muirhouse area of Edinburgh – a regeneration area and part of the City of Edinburgh Council’s 20-minute neighbourhood strategy. An initiative which aims to ensure that residents’ needs are met within easy reach of their homes. NEA has been resident within this community for a number of years providing residents and visitors with opportunities to connect with culture and creativity.
In a city where many cultural organisations and activities are focused on the city centre, NEA provides essential access to a programme of live theatre, film nights, art, dance and music workshops, photography groups, recording studios and much more to residents of one of Edinburgh’s most deprived wards, according to the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. The organisation is poised to move into their refurbished and extended building at the end of 2024, in which its programme will be integrated with other community services including a library, early years centre and social housing.
Bringing front line services into a space where cultural provision is integrated into a building offers an opportunity for people to engage with the softer aspects of community empowerment that are key to building resilience and is an important step for NEA. However, a capital project has the potential to change an organisation far beyond the bricks and mortar of the building it’s housed in. As Kate Wimpress, Director of North Edinburgh Arts explained, the change of thinking which influenced their redevelopment plans began with transforming a garden attached to their old building, or half an acre of wasteland as it used to be.
“Our initial idea was to sell it off and use the funds to financially shore up the building and organisation,” explained Kate. “However, Denna Jones, the Artist we were working with at the time said this was short-sighted and that the outdoor space had more potential than we realised.”
This led NEA to keep the land and collaborate with Ben Twist, who went on the establish Creative Carbon Scotland – an organisation that “believes in the essential role of the arts, screen, cultural and creative industries in contributing to the transformational change to a more environmentally sustainable Scotland”. Between them, and with assistance from the Edinburgh & Lothian Green Space Trust, they raised the funds to bring an Embedded Artist into NEA who was tasked with creatively exploring the potential of their outdoor space.
This was the first Embedded Artist post NEA had supported and Natalie Taylor worked with NEA for two years. In that time they changed both the outdoor area, and the perspective of the organisation. The transformation of the outdoor space into a green space was enabled by the support of a grant from the National Lottery for Communities, and local residents loved it. The garden became a place where play, growing and art became interwoven and it worked in ways they were not expecting, offering opportunities for people to curate their own journey into the arts centre in a way that the building alone could never offer. In doing so the garden opened up the building in new ways to new people, as well as NEA’s thinking on what the organisation is and where it delivers its programme of activity– moving beyond bricks and mortar and into the outdoor spaces and places that surround the building they are housed in.
“Gradually we realised we needed a programme for our outdoor space as much as we did for our indoor spaces.”
“Gradually we realised we needed a programme for our outdoor space as much as we did for our indoor spaces.” Kate detailed. Also, people were talking more and more about climate change and NEA realised they needed to do something proactive. However, as Kate explained “it is important for us to recognise this community is not made up of big emitters and many are being hit hard by things like rising energy prices.”
One of the things NEA did was to set up a community shed where residents could repair stuff and be creative, as well as learn from each other. “We also realised that about 50 young people were accessing the garden after hours when we weren’t there,’ Kate recalls. Gradually thinking shifted from NEA being a building with a piece of land attached, to a garden with an arts centre attached. This shift in thinking has been instrumental in planning for their updated home.
Fast forward to an organisation preparing to move into a ‘new’ building at the end of 2024, underpinned by a strategic plan for the next five years built around four pillars: creativity, sustainability, wellbeing and community owned.
The driver for the pillar of sustainability was inspired by the transformation of the outdoor space, and that now influences thinking for the new build with a focus on making it as sustainable as possible. This includes energy efficiency, upgraded fixtures, using local suppliers, stopping the use of disposable cups, and making the café fully vegetarian one day a week. Beyond the building, sustainability now forms part of the DNA of NEA and everything responds to the organisation’s environmental policy. The way the building and the outdoor space will be managed and programmed also opens up the potential for conversations around topics such as district energy and community ownership all of which contributes to building resilient communities.
Like many local authorities Edinburgh City Council champions 20 minute neighbourhoods. The journey of NEA over the past few years illustrates the importance and potential of outdoor spaces for both neighbourhood and organisational planning. Their journey took NEA from considering their outdoor space as a ‘wasteland’ with a commercial value to be sold for the benefit of a building, to a thriving green space with a social value that enriches the whole programme of the organisation as well as the surrounding neighbourhood.
This shift in thinking around value and the importance of outdoor spaces is possible not only for cultural organisations like NEA, but also local authorities, the front line services they provide, and resilient communities they are aiming to build. And teaches us that the voice, presence and future potential of the natural world is an equal and important member of any community.
For an example of an organisation undertaking similar work see the Bromley by Bow Centre in Stratford, London.