THE ACTION PORTY STORY

Saving Bellfield:

Action Porty grew out of a campaign to save the former Portobello Old Parish Church buildings for community use. By chance, our first meeting on 16th April 2016 was held only a few days before the Community Empowerment Act (2015) extended the community right to buy to include urban areas. After an intense community consultation and mobilisation process, Action Porty's purchase of Bellfield for the community became the first successful urban community right to buy in the country. The Scottish Land fund agreed to cover 94% of the purchase price. Bellfield re-opened to the community with a day of celebrations on Saturday 23rd June 2018.

BROADER VISION:

However, from that first meeting in 2016, the vision of Action Porty has always been far broader. We have been asking not simply 'How do we save this building?' but 'How can Porty organise as a community to better recognise and meet our needs, our challenges and our opportunities?' To this end Action Porty became a Development Trust and our company articles include the advancement of: community development, urban regeneration, citizenship, environmental protection, recreational facilities, the arts, heritage and culture, and relief of those in hardship.

Core to Action Porty's activities is enabling a huge range of volunteers to offer their time and learn new skills as they contribute to the well-being of the community.

broader IMPACT:

Action Porty has undertaken broad community consultation and mobilisation, such as the Action Westbank subgroup's imaginative two-day community consultation where hundreds of folk joined us in taking over the Town Hall to collectively develop community-led designs for the Westbank site. By developing a community led vision for what had previously been a developer-led process (one that had been presented to the community by Edinburgh Council as an inevitability), we helped halt the selling off of the 5-a-side football pitches.

Action Porty board consulted a range of initiatives in Portobello. All agreed on the need for an anchor organisation for Portobello. We then fully consulted our members before taking on this wider role. As a result, we restructured to separate the running of Belfield from this wider community anchor organisation role which helps provide a point for strategic coordination, and for supporting the emergence of new initiatives in Porty.

In November 2021 - with facilitation from Grassroots to Global - we developed a distributed assembly of 14 conversations generated by local people: ‘Heart Talk Porty’. Some fantastic community initiatives emerged from this, including a community cinema, a focus on supporting people through the stages of grief, childcare initiatives, the extremely successful Porty Community Fridge (which formally became part of Action Porty in Autumn 2023, with representation on the Action Porty board), and engagement with the Seafield process.

In January, 2022, Action Porty became the only non-statutory organisation to be represented on the ‘Sounding Board’ established by Edinburgh Council to advise on the proposed development of Seafield. We worked alongside the local community councils to encourage the commissioning of a master plan to address the multi-ownership of the site and ensure a rounded development with sufficient infrastructure which addresses local housing and transport needs.

Branching out:

In 2022, Action Porty converted to a Community Benefit Society (from being a company limited by guarantee, with charitable status) to enable us to run a community share issue to part-fund the redevelopment of Bellfield. We retained our charitable objectives and preserved our charitable status. We remain a membership-led organisation, with our Board of trustees elected annually at our Annual General Meeting.

In 2024, Action Porty and Grassroots to Global collaborated with Porty Community Energy to run another 4 conversations as part of Heart-Talk Porty 2. This included a well-attended discussion of concerns about the future of the former Portobello Police Station, which Police Scotland had declared surplus and plan to place on the market. The outcome of this discussion was an agreement that the Police Station should be retained by the community.

Bellfield big build:

In April 2025 Action Porty ran a very successful community share issue that raised £190,000 from 1,064 shareholders, raising our membership from just over 400 to over 1,333, and enabling us to secure a further £748,000 in funding to help covert the Celebration Hall (the old church building) into a far more accessible and useable community space.

Portobello police station:

In March 2026 Action Porty hopes to bring the former Portobello Police Station into community ownership after a successful Community Asset Transfer request to Police Scotland, and after securing grants, including from the Scottish Land Fund (SLF), the Architectural Heritage Fund (AHF), and Foundation Scotland (FS).

This 1870s 27-room building was originally Portobello Town Hall, magistrates court, fire station and police station, and latterly was also the library before becoming only the Police Station. The building has been empty for years. We hope that it can once again become a lively presence on Portobello High Street in the heart of our community.