Consultants Appointed to bring together ideas for Kilcreggan Village Centre

A procurement process has appointed Scott+Simmons (Jon Simmons and Laura Scott-Simmons)  to create spatial and functional diagrams for Kilcreggan Bay through a series of community events through July/August and September 2024.

Scott+Simmons, based in Helensburgh, have a thirty year experience of working as chartered landscape architects in Scotland. They have recently completed the Hermitage Park refurbishment - a £3.6m Heritage Lottery funded project for Argyll and Bute Council. They also coordinated the initial design work for a major civic space at the heart of Ravenscraig for North Lanarkshire council and the Central Scotland Green Network (CSGN). The design was developed after stakeholder and community workshops. They have undertaken extensive regeneration projects in Dumbarton and stakeholder-led consultative process to redesign spaces for community use in Greenock.

Their remit was, “…that this is an effort to focus people and guide them through the things that are important to think about, including constraints that residents experience and to produce some ideas based on the input from each of the meetings. This can then be discussed and commented on, each time, to improve the proposals. In essence, an iterative process to get to an agreed proposal and plan. This to ensure it is a process steered by someone independent of the village.”

A series of events, which will include group consultations and meetings, will identify the community’s ambitions, establish constraints and build a picture for the centre of the village.

The process will be participatory and consultative in nature and will place the residents of Cove & Kilcreggan at the heart of the process. This means that meetings and group consultations will evolve around participants and themes, working towards a proposal and plan arrived at through the ideas and discussions with the C&K community.

The time in between each session will be used to distil the community input which will then be reported and influence the discussion in the next meeting. Finally, the various discussions with the community will inform the preparation of the masterplan for our whole area.

The opening event, on Monday 29th July, gave residents an opportunity in small groups to point to specific issues affecting the village and to talk about opportunities for development that would support the financial stability and growth of the village centre, the businesses that operate from it, the residents and the village users. Scott + Simmons will be collating the responses of the attendees to present these initial ideas at the second community consultation meeting on August 12th.

There will be more meetings coming up over August and September to deepen the discussions and report back the results of the ideas generated by those who attend each of the meetings. The dates and venue of the meetings will be publicised on the Our Community facebook page, Our Community website (www.coveandkilcreggancommunity.com) and through the Cove & Kilcreggan villages.