The £30k war over Cathkin Park

When the Friends of Cathkin Park group was founded in 2020 to protect public access to their local green space, members envisaged some standard community meetings and flyering. No one thought things would go this far. 

Yet four years later, the group were piling on an early Queen Street service to Edinburgh, on their way to support another Crosshill resident for his day in court. It was the latest escalation in a battle that started with some mild planning objections and has culminated with accusations of intimidation, negative PR blitzes, new legal frontiers broached and more than £30,000 of public money spent defending an influential footballing charity. And it all revolves around a fence. Well, three, really. 

Charitable behaviour?

Taking his seat in Edinburgh’s Court of Session — Scotland’s supreme court for civil cases — on a warm Thursday in July 2024, 35 year-old Greg Brown was anxious, but mostly excited. The nervous small talk of his Scotrail journey earlier that morning was behind him. Despite the risks, he had quiet confidence in the arguments his lawyers were gearing up to make. 

Greg was on the precipice of what he believed to be a legal first: he was about to use Scotland’s ‘right to roam’ law, to challenge Glasgow City Council over giving permission for a controversial temporary fence in his local park — Cathkin — to be made permanent. Such a move, Greg’s legal team was going to argue, would encroach upon the ‘right to roam’ for Crosshill locals. It was a novel argument with the potential to set a new legal precedent. 

“It was quite scary, because taking on a case like this and losing it could have been detrimental to public spaces across the whole of Scotland,” he reflects now. “But the support I had, not just from my own community but from across the country, showed me it wasn’t just about this park but about what could potentially happen in any park in Scotland.”

This was a potentiality Crosshill’s Simon Morris, was equally motivated to prevent. When Simon looks out of his back window, he sees the rugged expanse of Cathkin Park. Every morning before the school run, and each evening after work, he walks its familiar paths — more like country trails in parts — with his Welsh terrier, Cuilean. Within its boundaries, he’s hosted birthday celebrations and get-togethers, watched his children make friends and found his own personal respite there. 

“The park has been an important place for me and my family,” Simon says. “We’ve made great use of it over the years.”

But since 2020, as the co-founder and current chair of the Friends Of group, Simon has been fighting for Cathkin’s future. The group began life in response to a request for a community asset transfer — essentially a mechanism by which local communities take on ownership of public assets. An organisation wanted a piece of Cathkin Park. 

The request came from the Jimmy Johnstone Charitable Trust, the charitable arm of the Jimmy Johnstone Academy of Football (JJA), a youth football organisation. The JJA’s boys’ teams had used Cathkin Park’s football pitch as a home ground for more than a decade (the limited company JJA was dissolved in February 2024 and its activity appears to have been absorbed into JJCT). Jimmy Johnstone’s is a name that holds great sway in Glasgow; often considered to be Celtic’s greatest ever player and a working class hero, ‘Jinky’ died in 2006 and the celebrated JJA was set up three years later.

The part of the park the JJCT was seeking to seize control of was, unsurprisingly, its football pitch, once the centre of a 50,000-seater capacity stadium, known as “the second Hampden”. The pitch – original, paint chipped terraces still visible — is now the heart of Cathkin Park, with heritage so noteworthy that Historic Environment Scotland is currently considering designating it a ‘site of special interest’.  

Simon’s hackles were instantly raised. If the pitch was taken out of public ownership, he suspected access would be limited too. Why hadn’t local residents been consulted?

“[The transfer request] hadn’t gone through any formal, fair, open, transparent process,” he says. “We’re the locals and the ones getting impacted by these decisions. If there’s going to be a reduction in the availability of a local asset then that should be a conversation for the local community.”

Simon and other concerned neighbours put their heads together, started a Facebook page, and began researching the process for forming an official Friends Of group, a designation they hoped would ensure them a seat at the table in discussions about the park going forward. Some members even investigated the possibility of submitting an alternative transfer request, while Simon concentrated on spreading the word locally. 

But almost as quickly as they mobilised, this first iteration of Friends of Cathkin Park was able to stand down: the council rejected JJCT’s request on a technicality in August 2020. Group members breathed a sigh of relief. The problem had solved itself. Their attention turned to less dramatic issues: organising community sports days, wildlife surveys and biodiversity drives. Action slowed as members contended with Covid-19 lockdowns and the pandemic fallout. 

Two years later though, a contact at Mount Florida Community Council got in touch with Simon. Did he know that JJCT had now been approved for the lease? They had full control of the football pitch. And not just the pitch. The 20 year-lease that Glasgow City Council had waved through also included a pavilion abutting the pitch, and a smaller adjacent playing field called the Multi-Use Games Area (MUGA). 

Simon did not know. He hadn’t heard a whisper of it.

Reviewing the documents, it turned out the JJCT had gone a different route, applying for the lease via an initiative called People Make Glasgow Communities. The terms of their agreement included a promise they would “continue to allow use of the space by others in the community”. 

The idea behind the scene, explains Holly Bruce, Green councillor for the ward, is to enable local groups to run community assets in return for cheap rent (JJCT pays £750 per year for the pitch and adjacent areas). It’s a proposal Simon doesn’t object to on principle; in fact, he is on the board of South Seeds, who have successfully used the programme to take over the old changing rooms at the Queen’s Park recreation ground. “That’s the way it should be done, with the community involved every step of the way, making decisions and getting involved — not locked out behind a fence,” he says. 

“On the face of it, [People Make Glasgow Communities] is a great idea — it means we’re keeping hold of council-owned land and not selling it off for profit by companies; it’s going to be in productive use and the community can have some ownership,” Bruce tells The Bell. “There are good examples… But then there are also bad examples. I think there’s been an oversight with this particular lease and it needs to be looked at again.”

Simon tried to make peace with this state of affairs. The lease had been awarded. There wasn’t much he or his fellow residents could do about it after the fact, he reasoned. Their main priority was getting clarity on what kind of access they were entitled to. 

Then, one day in May 2023, he spotted a comment on a Facebook post in a community group that changed everything: JJCT wanted to erect a three-metre tall fence to prevent “unauthorised footfall” on the pitch, and there wasn’t long left to object.

And the charity had launched a PR drive to push plans forward. They had to fence off the pitch, a JJCT spokesman told the BBC at the time. Locals were running riot. 

“When we’ve got kids playing there’s dogs off the leash, people on bikes and various other things. When we’re not there, what we’ve found is people have set fires on the park, people will have barbecues on the park, they’ll drive cars onto the park and tear it up,” he said. 

“In the summertime, there’s frequently broken bottles in the park when people have come down at the night time or at the weekend to party. You’ll also get drug paraphernalia, needles, things like that at times.”

This was a characterisation residents objected to. “The rhetoric put forward by JJCT was that the park had been neglected, with the inference that was by locals — but maintenance of a park isn’t the responsibility of local residents and that was never challenged by the council. They allowed that narrative to permeate in the press,” Rachel Paisley, a co-founder of Friends of Cathkin Park says. “You can understand we don’t appreciate Cathkin Park being described as some kind of ghetto where there’s syringes lying around all over the place.”

Residents say their attempts to engage with the JJCT have been futile from the start; the JJCT doesn’t have a website or any public contact details, instead encouraging communication through social media. In the very early days, a few residents received holding-style replies saying their complaints would be looked into, but haven’t had further communication since. Efforts to engage through councillors and council staff haven’t gone anywhere either.

A JJCT spokesperson told The Bell: “I can confirm that we have been open to dialogue where possible, though as we are a volunteer-led organisation, scheduling and other commitments may have limited opportunities. We remain willing to engage constructively with the community to address concerns.”

Despite this assertion, some residents told me that face-to-face interactions with JJCT representatives in the park have been tense and, at times, aggressive, with even those on the periphery dragged in. 

One day, reports Simon, while the planning application was live, a representative of a cycle speedway team — who have used a track in Cathkin Park since the 1970s — approached the pavilion to organise toilet access during an upcoming national competition. This had never been a problem before — but suddenly, that was set to change.