In Real Life: Polmont Community Hub

Polmont is a small town with a long industrial history. Just five miles down the road is a small cottage where James Watt designed his first ever steam engine. The road into town from the train station offers open views of the towers of Grangemouth oil refinery to the North, and the town as it stands now is divided in two by another revolution of industrialisation; the M9.

In a way, this motorway led to the construction of the Polmont Community Hub: a selection of wooden huts which were built to provide school access for Polmont children who had previously gone to the primary school on the other side of the motorway. Decades later, the building was a community centre, threatened with closure because the council couldn’t afford to address the abysmal energy efficiency rating.

Kenny Alexander, a former oil and gas worker, and long-term Polmont resident, stepped in along with a small committee to save their community centre. The Polmont Community Hub SCIO secured a community asset transfer, and received the keys to the new community hub in October 2024.

Working with what we have:

Polmont Community Hub is certainly a challenging building to manage; half of the structure is still just a wooden hut with minimal insulation. The building is powered by a combination of a gas boiler and electric heaters. Many local residents said that the building should just be demolished and rebuilt- but Kenny and his team believe that the building can be retrofitted. They also know that rescuing the existing building is likely to be better for the environment than building a brand new net-zero building in its place.

The Polmont Community Hub is leaky, energy-hungry, and fossil-fuel dependent- the yearly greenhouse gas emissions of the building are high. But up to 70% of the carbon emissions of the building’s total life cycle have already been released- during the extraction, manufacture, transport and installation of the building’s materials. This embodied carbon is often forgotten about, but is in almost all of the objects around us. From electric vehicles to clothes to food, almost everything that we buy has some form of greenhouse gas emission embedded in it. And this is why Kenny doesn’t want to build a brand spanking new eco-friendly building; because it would be throwing away all the embodied carbon in the existing building, and building something else which will produce even more greenhouse gases during its construction.

Surviving long enough to retrofit:

In the long term, Kenny has plans for the Community Hub to be completely energy independent. This will involve improving insulation, installing solar panels, and finding a way to store energy. But the real challenge is keeping the doors open while he is applying for grant funding to start the renovations. The heating bill for the previous owners was over £30,000 per year- “you can’t get that back from the tea dance and the judo club,” says Kenny. Across Scotland, bills like this are forcing community organisations to shut their doors.

Worse still, the charity was put on an emergency energy tariff after the change in ownership. Kenny and his team fought the energy provider on this, and are very proud to say that they won. With a fair energy tariff, and careful energy management, they have been able to keep the building open without incurring any debt due to energy bills.

Engaging a community which relies on oil and gas:

In the early 2020s, Kenny left the oil and gas industry to become a climate campaigner. He says this was for two reasons; firstly, as a keen explorer of the Scottish Highlands, he could see Scottish winters disappearing. But secondly, from his town, which had been promised so much by the industrial revolution, motorways, and the oil and gas industry- he felt that fossil fuels had never delivered the riches that were promised to the Polmont and Grangemouth communities.

Understandably, though, many people in Kenny’s community have serious qualms about transitioning away from oil and gas, which has provided hundreds of jobs over the decades.

Kenny and his team hope that the community hub can demonstrate the benefits of a low-carbon life to the local community, as well as providing a vital source of support to a community which is struggling with deprivation.

“People are being falsely told that people who want to transition are a threat to their way of life. But we’re not, we’re trying to save our way of life,” he says.

For starters, the energy-independent building will be able to offer very cheap rental rates to community groups. During Storm Eowyn, Polmont experienced a 4-5 hour power cut; with an off-grid energy supply, PCH can be a community shelter and resource centre during future storms and power cuts.

Kenny is also starting a tool library from the hub to help people to save money and also reduce the waste of hundreds of tools sitting unused in people’s houses, while others can’t afford the tools they need. The tool library’s gardening tools are already being being put to use creating a vibrant community garden and orchard in the lawn behind the centre, to demonstrate the possibility of cheap, locally-grown, ecologically friendly food.

The vision of Polmont Community Hub is perhaps perfectly demonstrated by Monty the charity’s mascot; saved from landfill twice , this enormous teddy bear is not only an embodiment of waste reduction- he is a great source of joy to all the kids and adults who use the centre.

In a place like Grangemouth, it’s hard to convince people that decarbonisation is a good thing. Kenny’s approach is to try to draw the debate away from money, and towards the lifestyle that we pay for with our hard-earned cash.