Day 83
Earth in Common
Formerly Leith Community Crops in Pots
Earth in Common (Formerly Leith Community Crops in Pots (LCCiP) is a totally community-led Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation, set up, to ‘encourage and support the people and organisations of Leith to grow food vegetables, and flowers for bees, in urban spaces, in order to improve health and wellbeing, community cohesion and environment’.
On this pioneering urban croft, we encourage ‘green’ food production, a sharing ethos, nature play and the provision of wildlife habitat.
A pioneering urban croft: Leith Community Croft
“Land is vital for healthy communities; growing food is a part of our cultural heritage. There is a very welcome resurgence of interest in this area within Scotland.”
Aware of all that is implied by this concept, and of the history and traditions of crofting in Scotland, from the time we identified the neglected two acres of common good land at the northern extremity of Leith Links (though open to the public, a discrete ‘enclosed plot’, surrounded by hedges and fences), we thought of it as potentially a new version of the croft: an urban croft, which would bring together the disparate and isolated members of the Leith community (technically all co-owners of the site) as a harmonious and co-operative family, working together to share their experience and skills, to address each other’s needs, and to raise children in a healthy and responsible way, in touch with nature and the land.
When the City of Edinburgh Council granted us permission to manage this land, with and for the local people, Leith Community Croft was born: a pioneering urban croft at the cutting edge of community-controlled land. (This has subsequently been officially recognised and endorsed by the Scottish Crofting Federation.)
Now we aim to bring even more of the community of Leith together around the two-acre Croft site, which hosts an old and dilapidated pavilion building which we intend to refurbish: the ‘house’ adjoining the farmed ‘plot’, as the definition of a croft would have it. (See Nourishing Leith for more on our plans for this building.) Most importantly, we wish to encourage and support others to form their own urban crofts throughout Scotland and beyond, and shall be offering a variety of services to do just this.
We emphasise that urban crofts are more than community gardens and very distinct from allotments. They foster a collective ‘family’ spirit, and can act as a powerful force for good in a world of growing inequality, loneliness and alienation, and environmental catastrophe.
“Crofting is a part of our cultural heritage in Scotland.”