NEA Garden Redevelopment Tender - Now Open!

New chapter for our garden

North Edinburgh Arts is excited to announce the next chapter in our Garden Redevelopment Project! We’re now inviting tenders from contractors to bring our newly redesigned garden to life – a space that will once again support community growing, creativity, biodiversity, and wellbeing in Muirhouse.

Introduction to tender

The garden at North Edinburgh Arts has been open since 2014, offering opportunities for people to learn skills like food growing, gardening for wildlife and organic horticulture, as well as providing outdoor space for our creative programme and community to use for relaxation, socialising and play. Our garden is a much-needed quality greenspace in a community with historic and ongoing environmental neglect.

Our venue has been closed for 3 years as part of the MacMillan Hub project, a major project to refurbish and extend our building (part of a wider town centre redevelopment plan to create a community hub in Muirhouse, North Edinburgh). As part of this project, half of our garden has been absorbed by the construction site.

These circumstances have provided us with an opportunity to revitalise and redevelop our garden: the original garden design was created before our garden was being used in any meaningful way by local residents, and before we undertook any community work around gardening, nature, and the environment. The MacMillan Hub project has provided us with an opportunity to redesign the garden to make sense of our new building and the new hub, and to take into account our experiences of operating the garden in the years before we closed.

In autumn 2023, the NEA garden team undertook consultation work with our staff team, volunteers, freelancers and participants as to the garden redesign, as well as visiting other gardens for inspiration. We commissioned Urban Pioneers to create a new design for our garden, which was delivered in January 2024. We are now in the position to undertake this work due to receiving funding from the UK Government’s Community Ownership Fund.

Tender details

Design
In the Tender Application Pack (see the link below), you will find the design created by Urban Pioneers. We expect that there will be some fine tuning of final elements of this design and are open to discussion. In particular, we are interested in maximising features for biodiversity and habitat creation.

Finances
We have in the region £135,000 for the project (including VAT), with a deadline for the majority of the works billed to ourselves by the end of 2025 (although we will not require the work to be completely finished by this deadline).

Further information and submission details

You can download the full tender pack by clicking on the link below.

For further information, please contact Valla Moodie (Green Projects Manager):
garden@northedinburgharts.co.uk / 0131 315 2151

Bidders should submit their bid to Valla Moodie (Green Projects Manager):
garden@northedinburgharts.co.uk by 9am on Thursday 22 May 2025.