We are Tir Pontypridd, a community led land rights initiative that is owned and run by its members for the benefit of the community, nature, and biodiversity. We are setting out to raise funds to purchase land in and around our community for our community.
We invite you to imagine a future where the land around where you live is owned by the people who live there. You might live in a hamlet, village, town or city. A rural or urban area, or somewhere in between. Somewhere with the potential to be very different.
Our small town, Pontypridd, is in the south Wales valleys. It is both urban and rural. For many of the people who live here, it is the place where we feel we belong. But most of us do not feel as though we own it, or that we much of say about how things are run.
Almost all of us live somewhere like this. And we all know how this affects our lives.
Inequality, the ever-rising costs of food, energy, housing and inappropriate developments that impact our local environment, affect our access to the green spaces we love, do not meet local needs and suck wealth out of our communities.
Very few of us feel a sense of ownership over the land beneath our feet, or the land that surrounds where we live. Or to decide who gets to access it, or what happens with it. This is one of the most critical issues of our times, but it hasn’t always been this way.
Our communities once had rights of access to land, land held in common, and obligations to look after and protect the land that provided for their needs. Over hundreds of years those rights and obligations have been taken away, often violently.
This involved the breaking of ancient customs and laws, if not through violence, then through cunning and guile, undermining the fabric of our society. Our ability to live sustainably in and from the landscape was literally taken from us.
If our communities are to play a key role in helping us all to live sustainably once again, then we need to re-imagine how we regain our lost rights of access to land for all communities today. A huge challenge that starts with re-imagining.
We invite you to imagine a future where land isn’t just another commodity to be traded on international markets, and from which most people are excluded, but a shared resource with open public access and shared decision making that benefits all of us.
A community that owns its own land holds the keys for determining its own future. Tir Pontypridd aims to be the first town in Cymru to own its own future. By securing land where we live, we can decide how we will meet the challenges of tomorrow, today.
This is the vision behind Tir Pontypridd.
We invite anyone who lives in our community to join us so that we can together imagine a future where the land around where we live is owned by the people who live here. Our small town, Pontypridd. Somewhere with the potential to be very different.
Tir Pontypridd started life as a community association in 2020 registering Tir Pontypridd Cymdeithas Cyfyngedig Ltd as an incorporated Community Benefit Society in February 2025. You can look up all of our details on the public mutuals register here.
A Community Benefit Society (CBS) is a type of incorporated limited liability organisation registered with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Membership is organised on the principle of one-member-one-vote and is a popular choice for community owned assets.
Our legal structure includes a statutory asset lock which means any land or other property we buy can only ever be used to meet the organisations objects. This helps us to ensuring that land will remain in community ownership into the future.
Membership of Tir Pontypridd is open to anyone who is supportive of our vision and because local decision making and democracy are important to us then only members who live in the local community will get to vote on how land we secure is used.
The environmental protection, improvement and conservation of land we secure is written into our founding objects so the first thing we will do with land we purchase is protect it from inappropriate developments helping to maintain community access.
We will then work with each community to explore how we can improve and maintain access for health and well-being and look at ways in which we can manage each site, through conservation, rewilding, sustainable development and regeneration.
We will look at how each piece of land sits within the wider landscape and what role it plays, or has played, within the wider ecosystem so that we can understand if the land needs to be grazed, cut, coppiced, or left to regenerate into woodland.
With the regeneration of property for the relief of poverty also written into our objects we will also engage with our community to explore the suitability for community gardening, allotments, orchards, woodlands, farming, renewable energy generation and housing.
We encourage everyone who lives in our community to join. Because we want membership to be affordable to as many people in our community as possible membership starts from just £3 a month.
In return members receive regular updates, discounts on events and voting rights.
Members will decide what each plot of land will become.
What we can achieve together will be up to you. Join today!