Meet the Welsh people with a plan to bring business back to the valleys

Lynne Colston is reading out a postcard from the future.

Her descendants in the village of Aberfan, in Merthyr Vale, south Wales, have written to tell her that climate change has resulted in food shortages. But thanks to Colston, who started localised growing programmes in 2018, her descendants have survived. Her great-great-great-great granddaughter is sitting at a table made from oak grown from an acorn Colston planted, and harvested at a a sawmill established under Colston’s watch, which has brought business back to the valley. “Thank you for making change happen and thank you for our future,” the descendant writes.

It’s Wednesday lunchtime in an empty shopping unit in the Capitol Centre, Cardiff, and Colston is one of of a handful of residents presenting their vision for the future of the Welsh valleys. Nearly 100 people are gathered, including Welsh assembly members, local councillors, forestry authorities and community groups. The Skyline Project has spent nine months engaging artists to unlock residents’ ideas about their natural environment. The resulting maps and quotations are pasted all over the gallery walls, including dreams of swimming pools, walking routes, honeybees and wild birds.

Colston’s postcard might be fantasy today, but Skyline sees this artistic reimagining as the first step to a community action plan for the land.

One man is here to show them what’s possible. Alastair McIntosh was one of four founders of the Isle of Eigg Trust in 1991, which in the space of six years wrested the island in the Scottish Hebrides from rich owners and put it in the hands of the community. “It’s not about sloganising politics, it’s about figuring out things that are going to work,” he says. “You have to start digging with a teaspoon, then a spade, then a digger, and then political confidence to flow into those channels.”

But Scotland has a very different tradition of land ownership. As well as positive examples of community ownership, Scotland has a history of crofting, or long term leases of private land to stewards, and momentum is growing for further reform. An investigation by the Scottish Land Commission found that concentrated land ownership in Scotland, where 1,125 people own 70 per cent of the land, has held back prospects for economic, housing and community development. The commission went so far as to describe the concentration of land ownership in Scotland as “socially corrosive”.

The situation in Wales is different. Wales has fewer private landowners. It also has much more public land. The question for the groups involved in Skyline is whether they can get public bodies to support their ideas. “Being able to get land is a political thing,” says Mark Walton, the co-director of Shared Assets. “In Scotland it required legislation. What’s exciting is that Skyline is looking at what is already publicly owned land. It is in the gift of authorities to transfer ownership to communities or give them leases to allow the to manage productively. That’s a massive opportunity because it overcomes the main barrier to entry, which is the cost of buying the land.”

Walton says that an ambitious programme of land transfer to communities in urban areas has the potential to revitalise areas still reeling from the death of traditional industry, particularly in Wales and the north of England. But he acknowledges that is it sometimes difficult for authorities to cede power: “Authorities are afraid because this fundamentally changes the relationship between the state and the people. It changes the way the civil servants behave. It changes the dynamic – and that is scary.”

Ian Thomas, runs Welcome to Our Woods, a community partnership in the upper Rhondda Fawr making local natural resources accessible to residents. In May, Welcome to Our Woods was awarded £90,000 in grants and loans from the Co-op Foundation, to put towards its project converting waste wood into furniture and biomass fuel, generating income. The money has been generated by the sale of 5p bags in the Co-op’s Welsh supermarkets.

open image in gallery

In October, Thomas, Colston and other volunteers from other valleys groups visited the Kilfinan Community Forest in Tighnabruaich, which manages ownership of 434 hectares of Acharossan Forest. Chris Blake, who started the Skyline Project, says that the trip proved the possibilities. “To see for yourselves what the forest crofts has achieved in eight years was quite staggering,” he says. “At the end of the day we sat down and suddenly we realised it can be done.”

Geraint Davies, the Plaid Cymru councillor for Treherbert ward, is among those at the event in the shopping centre. As visitors browse the exhibition, he remembers playing in the mountains as a child: “We used to be up there making dams, but you don’t see children up there now.”

Would he support community ownership of the land? “I think that would be wonderful,” he says. “It’s very important to get people committed to the area through ownership. In the past people have come in, done things, and gone again.”

Lee Waters, the deputy minister for economy and transport at the Welsh assembly, sees Skyline as part of a broader movement for the democratic ownership of land and the economy that is going on in places like Preston in Lancashire and Barcelona in Spain.

“There has been a profound change going on in the valleys in just two generations. There’s been considerable depopulation and some areas are returning to semi-rural, which creates a range of policy challenges but also opens up a new way of doing things,” Waters says. “Might the Welsh government give Skyline funding for land? There’s absolutely no reason why we wouldn’t. We’d have to see some detail but I think it’s got huge potential.”

Thomas says the seeds of change have already been planted. “When we looked at our land we found that 85 per cent is public estate,” he says. “So we’re not talking about ownership because as far as we’re concerned we already own the land. It’s about what level of stewardship we get. What we are looking at is a micro-hydro scheme, a sawmill, solar farms and forest crofts. This land is opportunity for us.”