trip seven: pottersville
I didn’t know it at the time but in November 2004 I left Glasgow to live in Edinburgh. This came about after a trio of deaths in the family. That, and a creeping disaffection with my home city. Glasgow looked like it was sleeping rough, with Sauchiehall Street standing in for Pottersville, George Bailey’s hallucinatory hellhole in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Thanks to the city’s planning and licensing laws, the strip between Charing Cross and Rose Street…
trip eight: the iron age
The days are longer if not always lighter.
After months of domestic upheaval, in late April I return to live in Glasgow after four years in Edinburgh. If nothing else the move makes gathering material for this project less arduous.
Now based in the city’s southside, I’m close to several of the places I’m recording for the Devil’s Plantation website, the closest being the Camphill Earthworks, claimed to be an Iron-Age site and a major hub in Harry Bell’s Secret Geometry…
trip ten: magpie
With Mercury in retrograde all communication is in a state of confusion. Since the house move in late April I’ve waited in vain for our new broadband connection and grown frustrated at my inability to make contact with the world. Then again, I tell myself, what’s the point of all this communication unless you have something to say?
Several years ago on a rare trip to London, I struggled to tell an acquaintance about an idea I had for a…
trip eleven: twin towers
Having missed the actual explosion on the morning of Sunday, June 1st, on my way to the Glasgow Necropolis I stop to pay my respects to the demolished twin towers at Stirlingfauld Place. Between Cumberland and Gorbals Streets lies 50,000 tonnes of post-apocalyptic concrete where only a week or so ago there were two high-rises, equating to 552 homes and who knows how many inhabitants.
The pictures can’t convey the startling…
trip fifteen: dreadful night
In the early hours of Sunday morning, I make the journey to Sighthill to witness the demolition of two Fountainwell towerblocks. The decision to raze these flats met with opposition and controversy – glasgowresidents – and while Glasgow Housing Association’s motives for these recent mass demolitions remain suspect, the local media speaks of ‘killing off’ whole communities. Feelings run high. As someone who grew up in a place where entire streets vanished in the space of days and…
detour 1: xanadu
Recently I invented a new game. It’s called Xanadu, after Kubla Khan’s legendary summer palace and of course, the film Citizen Kane. The rules are simple. You walk, cycle or drive in your local area, bagging as many black-on-yellow signs – the ones pointing to new housing developments – as possible. There are two prizes – the one who gets the most signs and can remember their names and one for the most ridiculous – not as easy as…
trip nineteen: mary, mary
Eight minutes, Google Earth tells me it would take from my house. To my shame it takes me two days to reach Linn Park to locate another of Harry Bell’s PSAs, the site of the old Cathcart Castle. On day one I get lost – ironic since this project relies heavily on map reading and one’s ability to find places. Happily there’s an upside to this since I stumbled on the Court Knowe, situated on the opposite side of…
trip twenty two: bought houses
My trip to Castlemilk feels like visiting a distant relative: familiar, friendly but not something you choose to do often. Several of my relatives live – or used to live in the scheme, one of Glasgow’s four major peripheral post-WW2 sprawls designed for the fleeing slum-dwellers of the 1950s and 60s, built on the city’s greenbelt in response to a desperate need for housing. The word adequate comes to mind – if having a flush toilet in your house…
update 4: getting jiggy
My thanks to everyone who has visited The Devil’s Plantation so far, especially those who took the time to comment. I’m heartened by your positive response. The website is live and visitors now have the choice of visiting this blog or the main site. With any luck my efforts won’t dissuade anybody googling ghosts on the M8 motorway or dogging at Carron although they might be disappointed – or downright perplexed – to land on my tiny patch of…
drift one: red road
After a long cold winter, I return to my shedquarters. On the desk sits a forlorn catalogue – Witness to Mortality, published in 1997 to coincide with an exhibition by Joseph McKenzie, a photographer famed for his iconic Gorbals Children. On the cover is a bleak landscape titled The New Lifestyle 2 (Red Road Flats Newly Opened). Shot in 1968, the black and white image shows a long, empty road, slick with rain, where a solitary vehicle drives towards…