POWF Newsletter – Mixed-use futures, continued ecclesiastical use, and place-based considerations

The following is the speakers presentations summarised for the summer edition of the POWF Newsletter. If you would like to subscribe to the newsletter you can do so here.

Mary Boullin: Mixed-use futures

Mary, who has worked in the charity sector around fundraising and operations for 18 years, joined Plunkett UK as Head of Community Business in early 2025. Plunkett UK is a UK-wide charity which supports people in rural areas to set up and run community-owned businesses, in alignment with Plunkett UK’s vision for resilient, thriving and inclusive rural communities.

Plunkett UK provides practical advice, business support, training and policy advocacy. The businesses created are diverse. They include shops, pubs, woodlands, farms and arts venues, all of which provide important and inclusive amenities for communities that generally lack options.

It is a growing sector, with 900 community-owned business created with Plunkett UK support to date. A further 1000 are in planning, 172 of which joined the pipeline in 2025. 98.5% of supported businesses have a survival rate of more than five years.

An estimated 2m people in the UK regularly use community-owned businesses. Not only do they provide vital goods and services to rural places and boost fragile local economies, but many function as multi-service hubs and provide additional social, employment, training and volunteering functions.

Amberley Shop and Café, in a church in a Gloucestershire village, is one example. The church still provides services, and the flexible layout also enables the provision of a community shop and café alongside a social programme including free weekly coffee mornings for elderly and isolated villagers. The Broad Chalke Valley Stores serves similar multi-functional needs in Wiltshire. It is an active church with a shop, post office and café. It serves as a weekly meeting place for multiple social groups including a Men’s Club.

One of the Scottish groups in the Plunkett UK support pipeline is Elie Kirk Community Enterprise Limited, which is also being helped by Development Trusts Association Scotland. The group plans to reopen Elie Kirk in Fife as a community hub with a heritage information space, art gallery and community café. It is currently fundraising towards a community purchase of the building. A video has been produced by the Community Enterprise to provide information on a community share offer.

Dr. DJ Johnston-Smith: Continued ecclesiastical use (Sacred Places, Shared Spaces – Where Faith Meets Community) 

A recent opinion column in the Herald by Katarzyna Kosmala argued that the demolition of churches like Glasgow’s Hillhead Baptist Church is about much more than the loss of stone and stained glass. These buildings are anchors of collective experience. A timeline infographic provides a ‘family tree’ history of the development of churches in Scotland up to the late 20^th century. But this doesn’t capture the full range of places of worship, or tell us about the difficult situation we have in 2026. Scotland is changing rapidly.

Scotland’s Churches Trust estimate that there are around 2800 places of worship in Scotland, at least on paper. Some may have quietly closed and we have yet to learn about them, while new ones may have opened and they can take time to appear on the national radar. The Church of Scotland have the most places of worship with 1189. There are also hundreds of Catholic, Scottish Episcopal, and Baptist churches. There are around 100 other Christian denominations/bodies with one or two buildings each. An estimated 110 places of worship in Scotland are owned by non-Christian groups.

Much was made of the 2022 Scotland’s Census outcome that 51% of the population have no religion. While it is true that this was the first time a majority of people said they had no religion in a national census, it underplays the reality that a very large minority do have a faith. The downward trend in religious affiliation, congregations and service attendance over previous decades has, however, been a root cause of closures of places of worship.

Church closures are not a new phenomenon. The first significant wave of closures took place in the 1970s, and the recession and stagnation at the time exacerbated the existing challenge of drops in congregation numbers and income levels. A national conversation emerged, which saw architects, town planners and conservationists share their concerns about loss of heritage. A 1976 newspaper article on ‘Edinburgh’s Endangered Spires’ profiled these anxieties and illustrated just one area of the internationally significant loss associated with the closures.

In 1978, Magnus Magnusson became the first chair of the Scottish Churches Architectural Heritage Trust (SCAHT), which sought to help minimise closures by assisting congregations with preserving their places of worship and advocating for wider action. In 2012, SCAHT merged with another body to form Scotland’s Churches Trust, which continues to preserve, promote and protect religious built heritage.

Closures continued into the 20^th century, as summarised by a 2019 BEFS report commissioned by the Church of Scotland. The report pointed to rising maintenance costs as another factor accompanying the continual dwindling of congregations and income. The Church of Scotland, and some other owners of multiple places of worship, started to reassess whether they need as many buildings. New models promoted by some theological figures argued that their mission doesn’t need a building, and that faith bodies are not societies for protecting built heritage.

A new period of church owners “releasing assets”, which includes places of worship alongside other buildings and landholdings, continued into the 2020s. Scotland’s Churches Trust estimates there have been 427 closures since 2020. It tracks and maps ongoing closures on its website. The current decade is a historic period of change. Local volunteers carry on as best they can in difficult circumstances and changing operational models, which might look to incorporate a social enterprise café, food bank or cultural event programme to supplement income.

The National Churches Trust House of Good research featured ground-breaking research on the social value of places of worship. It calculated that for every £1 invested in a church building, £16 is generated in social impact. This is unprecedented value for money from public investment. Massive benefits are also thought to derive from tourism to religious buildings, but more research is needed. There is also the incalculable spiritual support and wellbeing that places of worship provide, as evidenced by 15% of funerals in Scotland being held in a Church of Scotland property.

The elephant in the room is, the heritage sector doesn’t like to talk about religion. This can be seen in heritage conference topics, and in funding programmes and organisational constitutions that explicitly exclude religion. Local authorities are not granting civil marriage licenses to some places of worship because they contain religious iconography. Faith bodies have started describing their buildings as ‘networking spaces’ or similar for some audiences such as funding bodies. But these are places of worship, and the ‘worship’ part should not be hidden.

An apt description of the current context was articulated by the architect Sir James Dunbar-Naismith in a public meeting in Edinburgh in 1974: “It used to be the job of the churches to save people. Now it is the job of the people to save churches.”

Euan Leitch: Place-based considerations

SURF is a cross-sector membership network with an overall objective of addressing poverty in Scotland’s most deprived communities. It does not focus on heritage or religion, but its anti-poverty work programmes regularly come into contact with places of worship. This is particularly true of the annual SURF Awards for Best Practice in Community Regeneration, which provides an opportunity for regeneration projects of all sizes to demonstrate value and impact.

There are five SURF Awards categories: community led regeneration; creative regeneration; housing and regeneration; improving Scotland’s places; and removing barriers to employability. Each category has three shortlisted initiatives each year and one winner. Some winning and shortlisted projects that utilise places of worship include the following.

The Y Centre in Perth, profiled on p7 of the 2025 SURF Awards publication. This project transformed a church in central Perth that had lain vacant since 2010 into a youth employability service hub and supported accommodation centre for young people with support needs, including those with experience of the care system and the recently homeless.

POWF Members may not appreciate the scale of the interior refresh, but the building was in very poor condition when purchased by YMCA Tayside in the year 2000, and it has ultimately created a much-needed and highly successful service hub out of an abandoned conservation area building. The project took around 20 years from purchase to solution, which was required to deal with complications and raise funding. This may illustrate that quick turnarounds in reuse projects are not the be all and end all, as considerable time may be required to reach the best outcome.

Another places of worship initiative showcased in the SURF Awards is the conversion of Sanday Kirk on Orkney, profiled on p13 of the 2024 SURF Awards publication. The conversion used Scottish Land Fund support to remove pews and provide a flexible space for community events, markets, concerts and workshops. The building, now owned by Friends of Sanday Kirk, was saved by the project, but the public investment needed highlights the limitations of a commercially viable income-generating model in community hubs that serve a small, rural population.

Other SURF Awards example include Glengate Hall in Kirriemuir, Angus. This is a historic church building that was converted into nine affordable flats, one of which is currently on the market for £65k. St Luke’s in the east end of Glasgow is also a church conversion, into a music venue and gastropub. It has seen notable commercial success appealing to those who visit the nearby Barrowlands for concerts.

Perhaps most relevant to SURF’s deprivation focus is St Paul’s Youth Forum, which provides youth and community services in an area of extreme deprivation in north east Glasgow. The success of this project in changing local lives for the better cannot be understated. Its local services range from community food growing, skills training, active travel, addressing misogynistic and racist attitudes, and operating a busy programme of youth activities, sports sessions and social groups.

Interestingly, the project generates impressive income from selling high-end bicycles to private buyers and reinvesting profits in its local services, including providing free bikes to local young people. One of the main service bases is the main hall of St Paul’s Parish Church in Royston, which remains in Church of Scotland ownership with an active congregation and services.

Wider SURF activities have highlighted the social and economic regeneration value and potential in other places of worship, including Kenmore Kirk in Perthshire, the work of RIG Arts in the former West Kirk in Greenock, and the Glasgow Barons, which uses two historic churches in Govan, Glasgow, for community music programmes and performances.

SURF’s place-based Alliance for Action programme supported church restoration initiatives in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire and Girvan, Ayrshire. The vacant Muckle Kirk in Peterhead has been purchased by a businessman who is collaborating with local community groups to convert the building into a gym for the town centre. There is a community led plan in Girvan to use the town’s South Parish Church as a base for growing tourism, by converting it into a performance space and visitor centre with some tourist accommodation. Both of these initiative have strong potential but require hard work, long-term partnership support and significant funding.

These projects are diverse and may provoke mixed views on refurbishment and alternate use of church buildings, but they all show that vacant places of worship can be reused as hubs for social regeneration that deliver strong local impact. SURF Members do not generally care about religious buildings in themselves, but are very interested in how they can be used address social issues in deprived places. To paraphrase Sir James Dunbar-Naismith’s quote, SURF’s interest is in “saving people, not buildings.”

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This blog is part of the sixth edition of the Places of Worship Forum (POWF) Newsletter which was published on 10 August 2026. The newsletter aims to share the ongoing work of the group. Would you like to receive the next edition of the newsletter? Sign up here. 

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