Buildings and property

Like many towns throughout Scotland, Dumfries town centre has its fair share of empty and poorly maintained buildings. But rather than simply accepting that as a given, the local community is doing something about it. They are buying up buildings and redeveloping them for new businesses and homes, to bring new life into the town centre. How did they going about it?

Midsteeple Quarter was a response to what emerged from community engagement led by The Stove Network, a community-led social enterprise in the town centre, which revealed a consensus amongst local people, businesses, groups and agencies for a more diverse town centre with more residents, a mix of new businesses/shops, and culture, leisure and services. The project focused on a section of the High Street, adjacent to the Midsteeple, where almost all the properties have been empty or disused for some time. Many are significantly decayed as a result of neglect by absentee owners: a familiar story for many towns across Scotland.

Between 2012 and 2018 The Stove Network led a diverse series of events, commissions, activities and workshops which started by asking the question ‘What is the future Dumfries you want?’ and gradually developed a community-led vision for the town which centred on community ownership, a diverse High Street and bringing people back to live in the town centre.

The project has been delivered by a community-led property development company (a community benefit society called Dumfries High Street Limited, trading as Midsteeple Quarter). Voting membership is open to everyone in Dumfries; its 400 members elect a board annually, who employ a project team for day-to-day delivery. The Blueprint for the Quarter contains the economic case for the project and a phased and costed masterplan for its delivery. It is intended to be a tool to bring in other stakeholders: the local community, local authority, housing organisations and other funders.

Midsteeple Quarter, the organisation, is wholly independent. It continues to work in partnership with The Stove Network and other organisations. Funding has been sourced from the local community, Dumfries and Galloway Council (Town Centre Living Fund), The Holywood Trust (which is focussed on young people in Dumfries and Galloway), Scottish Government (Regeneration Capital Grant Fund), South of Scotland Economic Partnership and Creative Scotland in order to help get the project up and running with solid foundations.

The vision for the redevelopment of the Midsteeple Quarter has emerged over a number of years – and it continues to evolve, along with the needs of the town’s residents.

The eight buildings in the project area are owned by a mixture of public and private investors. One of the most prominent buildings, 135-139 High Street, was owned by the local authority and transferred to the community development company through a Community Asset Transfer. Plans are at an advanced stage to completely redevelop this property by 2022 as a creative enterprise centre at street level and six new flats for rent on upper floors. The ground floor has operated as The Oven, a pop-up community and creative space, since late 2018. The Oven kept simmering even during the coronavirus lockdown in 2020 as an experimental and prototyping contemporary art space with online shows and events.

Check out the blueprint for Midsteeple Quarter for more details

Kilmarnock’s historic Opera House was a sorry sight: gutted by fire in 1989 leaving just a burnt-out facade, the once magnificent building sat derelict for over 20 years, just yards from the station on the town’s busy John Finnie Street. Multiple ownership of the property and financial constraints meant that various development proposals came to nothing.

But now the B-listed façade has been restored, and the building is home to modern offices providing accommodation for 250 council employees in the heart of the town centre.

What happened? Kilmarnock Townscape Heritage Initiative was developed by East Ayrshire Council and Historic Scotland with a budget of almost £5 million to be spent on conservation and re-use of buildings in the town centre over a 5 year period. The project evolved from an existing Conservation Area Regeneration Scheme already successfully under way in the town centre. Together, Townscape Heritage Initiatives and Conservation Area Regeneration Schemes have successfully invested millions of pounds in historic buildings in town centres throughout Scotland over the last decade and more.

The Opera House was one of the new Townscape Heritage Initiatives’ priority projects. To make the £7.5m project happen, the council took a lead role, entering into a develop-and-purchase agreement with local firm Klin Developments to give them the certainty of a guaranteed occupier for the building upon completion. This enabled full restoration of the façade with extensive stabilising works, structural repairs, repointing and indenting carried out to conserve its former glory. A new 5-storey office building was built behind the façade, occupied by the Council as part of its Town Centre First strategy of relocating staff into the town centre. The project has helped to revitalise this part of the town centre, with other subsequent projects building on its success, such as the Ingram Enterprise Centre which has conserved another splendid Victorian building on John Finnie Street.

For more information on the project, see the case study in this report (page 59) about vacant and derelict land produced for the Scottish Land Commission.

Conceived as a catalyst for the regeneration of Dumbarton town centre, the £15m new council building has retained the prominent A-listed façade of the former Burgh Hall and Dumbarton Academy (which had been derelict for many years) and developed a brand-new state of the art headquarters building for 500 staff. The building has improved access to staff and services for residents, boosted trade in nearby businesses, stimulated development of adjacent sites, and brought savings to the council in the region of £400,000 per year through energy efficiency.

Equally importantly, the project is putting the Scottish Government’s Town Centre First Principle into action and helping bring new spending, investment and confidence to the town centre. Moving public servants into the town centre has brought a vacant building back to life. In a conscious effort to simulate the adjacent High Street, no canteen was provided in the building: staff are encouraged to use local shops and cafes, and new businesses have set up in the surrounding streets to meet this demand.

Since the new headquarters opened in 2017, development of adjacent town centre sites has begun including 160 new homes and a new supermarket, to encourage even more footfall back into the town centre. The award-winning project has also brought back to life a prominent historical building in the town centre, with a major focus on heritage conservation and design excellence, thanks to support from Historic Environment Scotland with a £0.5m grant. For more information, check out this Historic Environment Scotland case study.

One Linlithgow BID and West Lothian Council work together to ensure that business premises are in the best condition they can be: the BID offers grants for the insides of commercial units, and the Council runs a shopfront grant for exteriors. Usually one complements the other – both the BID and the council let applicants know about the other grant.

The BID’s Premises Improvement Grants scheme saw about £30,000 of BID subsidy matched by town centre businesses between 2015 and 2020. That covered visible improvements to about 40 businesses, from signage to security. The grants were for 75% of costs up to £1,000. An important role of the BID is to attract external funding to enhance BID levy contributions.

Some of the useful lessons that the BID learned were:

• Clear terms and conditions on the grant application form, including use of local tradespeople where possible and quotes to be submitted on formal company headed paper.
• No obligation to go for cheapest quote.
• Be clear on what constitutes a “property improvement”: for example, does it include security, repairs, training or portable items like laptops?
• Once a precedent has been set, it’s difficult to go back on it if the businesses talk to each other, so best to get it right from the start. The scheme can be very popular, so let businesses know that the funding is finite,

The Council’s complementary Shop Front Improvement Scheme covers exteriors. Like the BID scheme, grants an be awarded for 75% of costs up to £1,000. The scheme is run by the council’s Town Centre Officers, who report that the benefits of the scheme include:

It’s vital to work with businesses on the application process, keeping it simple and taking them through each step.

It helps to ensure that businesses get the appropriate permissions from the council, leading to less need for enforcement action against poorly executed or unapproved projects.

It creates a ‘virtuous circle’ in which the quality of shop fronts improve, as nearby businesses see the improvements and it prompts them to follow suit.

Other towns have used the scheme to solve particular issues, for example Broxburn and Uphall operate a ‘shutter removal grant’.

Buying vacant buildings or land is an expensive and complicated business; temporary projects can be transformational too, in a smaller way but at a fraction of the cost. That’s why so many communities up and down the country are doing “Stalled Space” projects, where community groups take over vacant land or buildings for a limited period of time to create anything from food-growing projects or community gardens to events or arts spaces.

One unusual site which has been transformed using the Stalled Spaces approach is in Renfrew: a disused public toilet block in the town centre, next to a bus stop at the entrance to Robertson Park. Renfrew Development Trust came up with an innovative proposal to build bridges across the generations: young people from Renfrew YMCA interviewed elderly people in local sheltered housing complexes to collect memories of the town, then partnered with students from West College Scotland to create storyboards for the walls of the disused building – turning an eyesore into an outdoor exhibition. 40 local people were involved in creating the exhibition. The project cost £5,000 and was supported by Renfrewshire Council and Engage Renfrewshire.

“It was meant to be there for three months, and it’s still there”, Iain Cunningham, third sector development officer at Engage Renfrewshire, told the news website Sceptical Scot. “People are proud of it, it’s a really good piece of work. But it’s about more than just the building: the young people were fascinated by the stories the old people told, and they have links with the college now, so they feel more confident about applying for courses there.”

There’s more information about the project here. Other community-led Stalled Spaces projects in town centres include:

• Flower garden in Forfar
• Community garden in Oban
• Woodland playspace in Milngavie

Architecture and Design Scotland’s Stalled Spaces Toolkit has lots of inspiration and helpful advice about how communities can make vacant and derelict land come alive in town centres, covering how to find out who owns land, how to get funding, how to organise yourselves, and how to manage a project. Contact details: info@ads.org.uk.

The closure of major industrial employers in Barrhead in the 1980s and 90s left a legacy of poverty, unemployment and town centre deterioration. In 2002, East Renfrewshire Council launched Barrhead Regeneration Initiative: a long‐term growth strategy which prioritised town centre regeneration, economic activity, and improved health and housing.

Over a number of years, the local authority and its public sector partners took a number of capital investment decisions to rejuvenate the town centre, including locating an £18m health centre, a new leisure centre, library, business centre and council offices in the town centre – all of which are major new public facilities right on the Main Street.

The leisure, learning and business elements are in Barrhead Foundry, a £5m multi-purpose building that is home to a leisure centre and swimming pool, as well as an evolving mix of learning/skills training and business space. The Foundry attracts 400,000 people a year.

The Health and Care Centre provides a range of integrated primary health and social care facilities under one roof – including three GP practices, two dental surgeries, a day care centre for elderly people, adult mental health services, children’s services, podiatry, physiotherapy and sexual health.

Other investments in the town centre included a new ASDA supermarket, new housing and public realm improvements along the main shopping street. The council’s role includes buying land to instigate development from both public and private sectors, as well as co-ordinating major housing developments, transport and greenspace investments out with the town centre.

Barrhead won a SURF Award for Scotland’s Most Improved Town: Small and Medium not least because of the Council’s leadership and commitment to the town centre, with the relocation of key services to the main street clearly helping to sustain businesses and create new employment opportunities, underpinning a strong economic core for the rest of the town.

Since winning the award, Barrhead has benefitted from an increased confidence in the town, and also from further investment. In summer 2016, Barrhead town centre retailers voted to establish a new Business Improvement District – called All About Barrhead – to lead an exciting programme of social events to bring more people to the town centre. This was since renewed in 2021 and the All About Barrhead BID seek to reestablish the mandate again in July 2026. 

As well as over 1,000 new homes, Barrhead South will deliver a new railway station, access improvements and high quality greenspace. The station will have a car park, bus stop and active travel links, and will provide rail connections to Glasgow for several new housing developments in the area and the existing Barrhead community.