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…
Two weeks after the murder of Moira Jones and the subsequent high-profile police investigation, Queen’s Park is reopened to the public. At first the locals, maybe hesitant, choose to circle the park perimeter while keeping a watchful eye on what’s happening behind the railings. What’s happening is TV news crews are out to solicit pedestrians in the optimism that with the right leading questions they’ll stir up soundbites about how the community – women especially – are now too…
Lately I’ve been obsessed with numbers. Not the Lottery kind, but the numbers attached to magic and superstition. After my last trip to Camphill Earthwork and recalling the three rings drawn by Marsha, the American psychic who visited the site with Harry Bell, it occurs to me that I’m developing a small fixation. But then, who doesn’t place faith in numbers? It might be phone numbers, PIN numbers, birthdays, bus numbers, even bingo – we each have our preferences…
It’s July and the rain – alien, sub-tropical rain, not normal Glasgow rain – is so torrential and persistent it takes over a week after my walk with Ronnie Scott to return to the Necropolis to shoot material for this project. A worn-out film adage – ‘you can’t buy the weather’ – never rang truer than during a Glasgow summer. But I’m not in the market for artificial continuity, so I have to go with what I’m given. Actuality…
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…
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…
During the 1970s, one day I strayed from the post-war sprawl of Linthaugh Road in Pollok to an enclave known as Corkerhill, passing the railway workers’ cottages and trespassing on impossibly rural farmland. By pure chance I had arrived at a strange and magical place. Pollok Estate wasn’t so much a park as an exotic parallel universe. Here was an old and venerable mansion, Pollok House, with its artefacts and formal gardens and ancient gnarled beech, the White Cart…
I try not to look at the man sitting in a mink-coloured Jaguar. Dark suit, tan, late middle-aged, he has the air of the self-made, too classy for a local politician. He looks like he’s talking to himself until I realise by his body language he’s talking on a hands-free mobile.
The sun beats down on the car park of Ross Hall Hospital, one of 60 such facilities operated by private healthcare provider, BMI. Already I feel I’m intruding but…
X marks the spot. The phrase originates from the early days of press photography where the scene of a crime was marked with the letter X. So when I look up Cathkin Braes on Harry Bell’s Glasgow Network of Aligned Sites, I’m intrigued to find a large X crossing the site, situated – it’s claimed – on the thirteenth hole of the Cathkin Braes golf course.
One line of the X passes through the Camphill Earthwork from Mains Castle…
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…