ARTS SPACE | GREEN SPACES

Sue Hoole of Fairfield Real Estate volunteered at the REH through the Arts and Green Space programme.

How do you like to spend your time outside of work?

I’ve got three kids, so life is quite busy, family life. I do try and exercise when I can, I do a lot of swimming, I do Master swimming actually. So, I quite often go very early in the morning to the Commonwealth Pool for a swim, usually around 5am!

During lockdown I did some loch and sea swimming, it was nice to do it in the summer, but I prefer indoor swimming, I much prefer seeing the tiles at the bottom of the pool! (laughs)

What kind of things energise you?

Gosh, good question! I like sports, I like exercise, I like getting involved in the community. I help my local swimming club on that front and that fits in quite nicely with the kids as two of them swim. And also, the local rugby club, my husband is the coach at Boroughmuir Rugby Club. Yeah, sport does tend to dominate the weekends.

Oh yeah, I also run the recorder club at the school! (laughs)

Are you learning anything new at the moment?

Learning new things is really within my work and professional environment. We are a very small company; there are 11 of us and we started just over 6 years ago. We are growing and developing and adding more people to the team, so I’m building my experience as we go.

If you were having a bad day, what would you do to try and turn the day around?

Going for a walk is quite a nice way to turn the day around. Stand up from the

Continues over desk, particularly in lockdown when you were in the house, was quite an important thing to do, go for a walk, change your environment, get some fresh air.

We are a lender, and we lend money to companies to buy and develop different types of real estate, across all the different sectors. So that could be something like an existing office block in the centre of Edinburgh, a building with financial services tenants and a café at the bottom. Or it could be we might fund the development of, say, the building of a hotel in Dublin, or the building of lots of residential homes in Cornwall. Half of our business tends to be in Ireland, mainly Dublin but we have things in Cork and are looking at things in Galway.

Gradually the team grew from 2 people to 11 today. 10 out of the 11 of us live in or around Edinburgh, but we are originally from quite far afield. There are a couple of us from Yorkshire, 1 from Manchester, Chris is from Northern Ireland, our Office Manager is from France and our CEO is from Connecticut in America. I think 3 or us are from the west. So yeah, it’s a good group.

The bigger picture I guess is that we are a small company, and we are really busy doing what we do, but we very much wanted to, at least once a year, help a local community. As most of us live in and around Edinburgh, and a couple of us live close by to the hospital, we put a few suggestions to the vote, and this particular option was really popular. We had a day to give our time and efforts and try and achieve something that was really worthwhile, and this seemed a great way to channel our energy.

We had a budget which bought some nice plants for the space, bark chippings for the ground, and weed-proof sheeting. The aim was just to try and turn a small area of the hospital - which is probably not used very much at the moment - into a nice little haven.

Becky has been able to get hold of a couple of benches so ultimately it will be a place where patients and staff can sit and have a moment, enjoying a different space and the fresh air during their busy and stressful day.

I think people underestimate the environment they are in, how that impacts on mood and mindset and sense of wellbeing.

What do you as a team get out of it and what impact do you think this will have?

I think the benefits go hand in hand.

Being here as a team, we all get on well, so having a day when you are doing something completely different where you can bond over what you are doing and just have a bit of fun with it is great.

The main benefits though are for people here at the REH - the patients, the people that work here, folk walking by - having an environment that is cared for, that feels looked after, is important. Hopefully it will feel calming, a nice place to be. I hope it makes a difference to people’s outlook.