Apple of Our Eye: In conversation with Glasgow Apple Pressing

I am at Townhead Village Hall, where the community is celebrating its Apple Festival. The place is packed: children running around, a live band playing lively folk tunes, people sitting together enjoying apple cake and coffee. Apples are decorated like eggs, apples are painted on children’s faces, apples in all different shapes and colours line every surface of the room. Outside, a group of children and adults are gathered around two big machines. They turn the handles, and I watch as pulp falls into buckets. Someone hands me a cup and I drink – juice tart but smooth like syrup as it lingers on the tongue. "This batch is much sharper than the one before," they tell me.

In charge of the machinery is Glasgow Apple Pressing, a collective who put on free apple pressing events across Glasgow. Autumn is their season, with apples ripe to harvest in these orange months, and Rod Sànchez – humbly describing himself as ‘the equipment holder’ – works with 30 or so volunteers to press apples into juice for whoever would like it. 

The idea was born out of conversation. Sànchez, who is a regular volunteer with many other community growth collectives around the city, was hearing stories about how others had pressed apples from their allotments and sold them as juice for £5 a pop. It was October 2022, and he was surrounded by an abundance of apples waiting to fall from trees. "How do you use these apples when it’s not commercially viable to do so?" he tells me. "I was inspired by groups that I see, like the Glasgow Seed Library, that offer an alternative model of food and plant-based practices of eating, drinking, and production."

In the ongoing barrage of cuts to public services in Scotland, the collective is providing a service where there is none. "The goal was always about being a public service, free at the point of use for anyone to come and use it," Sànchez says. You bring the apples, and Glasgow Apple Pressing will do the rest. 

They pop up regularly over the autumn in community spaces all around the city, holding their apple pressing events. They’ve been frequent visitors of the Nan McKay Hall in Pollokshields and the Barmulloch Recreation Hall in the north of Glasgow, locations "independent of the council and being run by the community." They provide not only free produce, but a space to socialise and bring people together, fostering a sense of community in areas frequently less targeted than others. 

This year, the collective have also started running apple picking days, inviting folk to join them in gathering fruit from the numerous public apple trees around the city. "It’s about showing people that you don’t need to own land or have an orchard or a garden to make stuff, and make use of things," Sànchez tells me. In doing so, they’re exposing Glasgow as a living, breathing, community orchard, primed and ready for use. 

The collective sit alongside a vast network of community-run operations in the city that provide food and resources for people most affected by the cost-of-living crisis. "[We’re] not a West End or ‘Strathbungo’ endeavour," Sànchez says. "It’s in communities that need as many resources in them as they possibly can. That’s very clear to me."

In August they posted a photo to their Instagram, with an announcement that they had secured a two-year community interest lease with Glasgow City Council to open a multi-arts venue, apple tree nursery, and ‘ciderarium’ inside the disused People’s Palace. A staggeringly positive shift from the council, that was, in fact, just a wee joke. The comment section was filled with praise and joy for the little apple pressing collective that could. "Sorry about that," Sànchez says. "It was meant to be more obvious that it was a wish, or a dream, or a fantasy – even if it was sharply edged."

So, what then, of the future? "There is no funding for what we’re doing, I don’t think." But Sànchez remains positive. "We can build these castles in the sky," he says, "but we can also build them on the ground."

Perhaps the ‘ciderarium’ and orchard is just a fantasy, but the collective activism that Glasgow Apple Pressing are a part of has, in some sense, brought that dream into reality today, at Townhead Village Apple Festival. The aim of the collective is really "about people making and creating and producing," Sànchez says. "It’s about connecting people, bringing people together, and showing each other that these things are not beyond us... It’s about having people be part of a public realm that is growing stronger and can deal with whatever is thrown at it. That’s the long-term."

A group of children hand me another cup of apple juice, urging me to try their latest press. Behind us, people line up and make their way down to the little orchard, ready to harvest some more apples.

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