Living Hubs - Greener Peebles

SBCAN has been working with Bright Green Nature, an environmental charity based near Galashiels, on Living Hubs: Community Nature Recovery. The Living Hubs project explores how local spaces, such as gardens, parks and schools, can serve as community-led hubs for climate action, learning, and wellbeing.

One of the pilot sites chosen for inclusive workshops was Greener Peebles Community Garden, a community growing initiative which provides opportunities for around 300 volunteers each year, alongside offering 40 small plots to local residents. On a snowy Friday 13th, SBCAN and volunteers from Greener Peebles welcomed a group of 24 Primary 6 pupils from Priorsford Primary School to the Garden. The group walked to the garden via Kingsmeadows woodland where representatives from Kingsmeadows CIC and the Peebles Place Team helped them to explore and see some of the amazing and venerable trees on the site. Kingsmeadows CIC hope to bring the woodlands into community ownership.

Just across the road from the woodlands, the P6 pupils crossed into the gardens and were split into groups of eight to rotate through three work-stations. The first group were invited to help contribute to a large-scale creative vision of what an ideal community green-space might look like. Using Lego, writing and drawing the children summoned up a vision of towering trees with nesting birds. A network of flower lined footpaths wound beneath the trees…all accessible by a network of zip lines!

Group two brainstormed the things that would make them more likely to use green spaces such as a garden, sports field, park or woodland, alongside the things which might deter them from doing so. Group three had the most popular station by far - traybakes and hot chocolate in front of the wood-burning stove in Greener Peebles’ yurt!

Thanks to everyone at Greener Peebles for helping to facilitate the session and for all the volunteers and school children who provided feedback and answered questionnaires about green-spaces and how they use them. We have one final session to run, as part of the Living Hubs pilot project, at Traquair Forest Garden on Saturday 21 February.