Fife arts group awarded almost £300k to buy historic house

Forgan Arts Centre has been awarded £292,800 from the Scottish Land Fund to acquire the Leng Home in Newport on Tay, as well as its garden and grounds.

Community ownership of the Leng Home will enable a range of social and economic activities to be run from the building and its grounds for the benefit of the local community.

A spokesperson from the Forgan Arts Centre Committee said: “Recent increased demand for our arts and crafts classes and workshops means that it has now outgrown the space available and this was stopping us expanding our programme.

“Before the pandemic, we operated at full capacity over 50 weeks each year with 30 classes each week plus 15 workshops each term. We also ran popular art clubs for children in the school holidays.

“Acquiring the Leng Home will allow us to expand our programme even further and we are keen to add in more activities for children and teenagers.

“Many of these ideas came from a series of meetings and consultations when we were putting our application together to take over the building, and this has given us a good basis to develop new activities for the local community.

“We are now excited to move forward with our plans to optimise the property for our popular arts and craft classes, create social spaces for centre users and develop lettable spaces for community groups and studio spaces for artists and makers.

“Moving to the Leng Home allows Forgan Arts Centre to remain at the heart of the community providing a programme of arts and crafts and developing new creative activities and new opportunities to bring the community together.”

“We are in no doubt that the tremendous support from the local community to buy the Leng Home, helped in this successful outcome to acquire the property and the Scottish Land Fund grant. Thanks are also due to local councillors and Fife Council who have supported the Community Asset Transfer.

“We have only just now been able to start opening up again with our Art Kids Club this summer. We are now putting together a programme of classes which will start up again in September.”