This is the continuing story of my efforts to help build my own Village In The City, in the West End area of Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital. You can catch up with parts one, two and three if you like. We join the story towards the end of summer 2021. You may recall in part 3 that we had our first community get-together at the new outdoor cafe outside St Mary’s Cathedral. This was only ever going to be a summer venture, and we decided to host another get-together on the final day of operation for this year. I contacted both the cafe people and the cathedral in advance. We were pleased to welcome Vice Provost Marian who had been instrumental in organising the cafe in the first place, along with Stathis and his brothers who had been actually running the place, organising Greek delights and delicious brownies with coffee and hot chocolate. Around thirty Westenders came out on a sunny if windy day to get together, and to give Marian, Stathis and co a big round fo applause for all their hard work. I spent some time chatting to Provost John, who basically runs the cathedral, about using their hall for community events. He was very keen to support us, so that’s something to follow up on.
As the autumn has set in we have moved attention to indoor events. These have of course been impossible during the COVID period but know that vaccination rates are high it seems like more of an active possibility. Anna from the Green Room, one of our bars in William Street, organised a businesses get-together and networking event which was a great success. Around 20 people came along, from both customer-facing businesses like shops and Wellbeing studios and also more back-office businesses including accounts and consultants, all from a couple of hundred metres around. Paul and I went along to wave the flag for our Facebook group, which is also very well supported by businesses. Anna plans to host both business and residents get-togethers in the coming months which is excellent news!
Last weekend we made quite a good step forward with our first street clean-up sessions. Paul obtained graffiti cleaning kits, litter pickers and bin bag holders
from the council, and we set to in two groups at opposite ends of the West End, with around half a dozen in each group. In a couple of hours we had litter-picked and graffiti cleaned along the whole of Atholl and Coates Crescents, which is a very public place with many bus stops, post boxes and telephone cabinets for local ‘artists’ to write on. We also, of course, enjoyed meeting our neighbours as part of the process (some for the first time), chatting about life in the West End and generally enjoying being out and about. Lots of passers-by gave us encouraging cheers too! All in all a very worthwhile morning.
I’ve been thinking about what has helped to make these events successful. Here are a few tips:
- Timing is important. There are times when it feels right to do something, and times when it seems like a rush. I generally favour waiting for the right moment – when people are keen, when the weather is good, when there seems to be a ‘following wind’ for what we’re doing.
- Welcome the people who DO show up! It may be frustrating that there aren’t more of them, but you really can’t blame the ones who do appear for the others who don’t. Be very appreciative, interested in them, take the chance to ask questions, and generally enjoy being with them for an hour or two.
- Make it social as well as ‘functional’. In all these events we made sure that there was a chance for a coffee and chat or a drink and a blether (as we say here in Scotland).
- Having a small first event is probably a good starting point for a bigger next event. After posting pictures of our cleaning on Facebook, quite a few people said they would come next time. “Why didn’t you ****ing come this time?” is one not-very-useful response to that. However, now they’ve seen that these things actually happen rather than just being a good idea, there is more momentum. Our first coffee gathering had about a dozen, the second had over thirty. Good progress.
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