Call for public access to Edinburgh’s private gardens - Scottish Green
On 8 June, Edinburgh City Council’s Culture and Communities Committee had the chance to open up some of the city’s largest private gardens to the public. Scottish Greens councillor Dan Heap brought a motion asking the council to explore a voluntary scheme — one where garden owners’ associations who wanted to open their gates would get council support with the practical stuff: maintenance and insurance. No compulsion. No confiscation. Just an offer of help to the associations willing to say yes.
Councillors voted it down.
The Scottish Greens called it a squandered opportunity to improve public access to some of the biggest private green spaces in the city centre — and they’re right. This wasn’t a proposal to force anyone’s hand. It was a low-cost way to start unlocking green space that sits empty behind locked gates while the rest of us make do with pavements.
Here’s why it matters: adults in Scotland’s most deprived communities are 13% less likely to have access to green or blue space, and 20% less likely to visit it, than those in the least deprived areas. Every hectare of garden that stays locked is a hectare that could have narrowed that gap.
Why this matters legally
Many of these spaces aren’t legally “parks” at all — they’re gardens, and that distinction matters. Section 6 of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 carves out a specific exemption for these communal residential gardens, which is exactly the loophole keeping them off-limits under Scotland’s otherwise expansive public access rights.
It’s a gap that persisted even through the most recent overhaul of land reform law. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2025, which received Royal Assent on 16 December 2025, focused on breaking up large rural landholdings — a genuinely significant reform, but one that left this urban loophole exactly where it was. The land reform that transformed the countryside forgot the city.
What’s next
This isn’t the end of the conversation — it’s the reason to make more noise, not less. Three things you can do this week:
Sign the petition if you haven’t already — it’s the clearest signal we can send that this matters to residents, not just campaigners.
Tell us what you think — write to us and we’ll fold your voice into what we bring back to the council.
Share this with a neighbour who walks the long way round Drummond Place or Charlotte Square every day.
We’ll keep pushing. The vote closed one door — it didn’t lock the debate.