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A walk with Elaine Rainey (Scottish Badgers), Glen Cousquer (University of Edinburgh) and others at Boghall Burn by the University’s Easter Bush Campus, by the Pentlands. We are working towards a paper on ‘Embracing the 30×30 biodiversity challenge on veterinary campuses’.
We encounter various barriers this morning.
The entrance to the Vet School is locked, so I wait for someone to access the building with their card and surreptitiously follow them inside. Already a trespasser.
A travelling community had moved their caravans into the overflow carpark and, as they had begun to enter the building, a heavy-handed lockdown was in place.
I thought about this policing of space as we walked towards the burn.
We pass a hedgerow and peer into its tangled branches to see the plastic guards and chicken wire. This hedge was not so hedgehog friendly, but Elaine suggested that badgers could probably pass over the metal barriers without much bother.
Glen asks us to pause before we cross the threshold into the site and reads ‘Walk Slowly’ by Danna Faulds:
The harsh voice
of judgment drops to a whisper and I
remember again that life isn’t a relay
race; that we will all cross the finish
line; that waking up to life is what we
were born for.
We follow the path through the mixed woodland and note how the new birch trees are still bound in plastic.
Other saplings are surviving the roe deer’s passage without the need for such protection.
The inaccessibility of this muddy, steep winding path, which crosses the burn over rickety bridges, means that we need to be mobile as we negotiate the shifting terrain.
Not everybody would be able to come with us.
The whole site is a lesson in inclusions and exclusions: we need to protect this place and prevent the new housing development from bringing too many people into a fragile ecology.
But welcoming in, rather than keeping out, sits better with our aspirations and ethos.
Can this site be an enclosure and an exclosure at the same time?
As the geographer Doreen Massey has suggested, ‘multiplicity, antagonisms and contrasting temporalities are the stuff of all places’ (2005, 159). There are therefore no hard and fast rules, and universal politics are not possible:
The issue is one of power and politics as refracted through, and often actively manipulating space and place, not one of general ‘rules’ of space and place. For there are no such rules, in the sense of a universal politics of abstract spatial forms; of topographic categories. Rather, there are spatialised social practices and relations, and social power. (…) It is a genuinely political position-taking not the application of a formula about space and place. (166)
Opening or closing space is not necessarily good and bad respectively, and the same arguments have been used by the Left for protecting the territories of small tribes (closing space) and accepting immigrants through a freer border control (opening space). Likewise, unequal power relations can result in both openness and closure of space by a complex interplay of ‘settledness and flow’ (174). So, ‘simply saying “no” to nation, home, boundaries and so forth is not in itself a political advance (it is spatial fetishism to think it will be)’ (174).
As we walk back through the wood and return to the campus, we have passed multiple barriers.
But we need to leave many in place, to maintain them, to create them.
After all, life is not a race. We can be slowed, prevented from progressing, stopped…
In the end, ‘we will all cross the finish line’
References:
Faulds, Danna, ‘Walk Slowly’, in Go In and In: Poems from the Heart of Yoga, Peaceable Kingdom Books, 2002.
Massey, Doreen, For Space, London: SAGE Publications, 2005
Figure 1: Publicity image for Merchant City Heritage Walk (Glasgow Women’s Library): façade of Glasgow Maternity Hospital at Rottenrow
It is a hot Saturday afternoon in early June when my mother-in-law, daughter and I make our way to the site of the former Royal Maternity Hospital in Rottenrow for a Women of the Merchant City Heritage Walk run by Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL). The library, based on Landressy Street close to Bridgeton Cross in the East End of Glasgow, is the only accredited museum dedicated to women’s history in the UK and has an impressive collection recognised as of national significance. Volunteers (or ‘history detectives’ as they call themselves), research and deliver a range of Women’s Heritage Walks in Glasgow. The most recent one in May 2023 was a new walk through the Gorbals and there are also a range of Suffrage Walks as part of the programme. The aim is to make Glasgow’s women’s history visible, and to tell the stories of women who have had an impact on the city and beyond.
In Where are the Women? (2021), Sara Sheridan claims that our sense of self and where we come from is not confined to history books (2021: 7) arguing that if women don’t see themselves represented in the world around them, the message that girls and women receive is that ‘their stories, and indeed achievements, don’t matter’ (ibid.). Sheridan notes that in her home city of Edinburgh there are more statues of animals than there are of women, and she embarks on an imagining of a Scotland that maps the achievements of women, celebrating their lives and making them visible. In The Feminist City (2021), Leslie Kern argues that ‘physical places like cities matter when we want to think about social change’ (2021: 14), but as Rebecca Solnit reminds us, walking the city streets is not equal: ‘Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk’ (Solnit, 2001: 234). These two elements; of accessing women’s invisible histories, and the act of taking a walk in the city which has for women often been constructed as ‘performance rather than transport’ (ibid.) come together in this women’s history heritage walk through Glasgow’s Merchant City.
Three generations of women in my family stand looking over the foliage of the Rottenrow gardens where the old hospital used to loom over the city. I point out to my daughter that the portico we are in was the entrance to the hospital. Huge green leaves fill the windows and she asks: ‘are they real?’ I assure her they are. While I am on a walk with my family, I am also undertaking what David Overend describes as ‘creative fieldwork’ (2023: 6), acknowledging the ways in which our presence and engagement with a site becomes part of it. Once everyone has gathered, we walk a short distance to find some shade and learn about the now demolished hospital, commemorated by a 7m high sculpture of a safety pin with a bird on top called Mhtpothta/Maternity created by George Wylie and installed on the site in 2004 by the University of Strathclyde. Our guides tell us that we are on the edge of the Merchant City, but that this area would have been populated by the poorer classes, who lived in the shadow of the smoking factories while the wealthy merchants lived further down the hill. Everyone laughs when the guide tells of the famous tobacco lord John Glassford (the namesake of Glassford Street) who had a portrait of his wife repainted with the face of his new spouse: ‘This piece of 18th century editing deems women to be replaceable, almost ghostly; there in spirit but not important to the story’ (GWL heritage walk).
Figure 2: Foliage through the windows of the portico on the site of the old maternity hospital
Figure 3: Rottenrow Gardens
The artist Joan Eardley painted the children in this area and was notorious for walking around with her paints and canvases in a pram. Her Three Children at a Tenement Window provides the cover of the map for the walk. Our tour guide tells a story about how Eardley painted her male friend nude, and after a Glasgow newspaper printed her address in the paper she was inundated with offers from men to take their clothes off for her. She was known to say that Glasgow has ‘a living thing. While Glasgow has this I’ll always want to paint.’ Joan died of breast cancer in 1963 aged 42 but her depictions of Glasgow children live on in galleries across Scotland and the world.
Our guide says, ‘If you hiked up the hill, imagine doing it whilst nearly 9 months pregnant; the incline was known by some as Induction Brae or Hill’ (GWL heritage walk). As well as a maternity hospital, it was also a midwifery training centre and pioneered ultrasound (used at Glasgow shipyards) and risky caesarean-sections. We learn from the tour guides that women who suffered from poor diet and no sunlight (referred to in the medical literature of the time as having ‘rickety dwarfism’) had deformed pelvises and became pioneers of the surgery. The first woman, a 27-year-old who had the operation in April 1888, called her son Caesar Cameron, after the procedure and Dr Cameron who delivered her baby.
Figure 4: Image of women who underwent caesarean sections at the hospital
Figure 5: Nurses at Rottenrow
My own daughter was born by emergency-c-section, and I think about the lineage of women who had this surgery in the 1880s, who would stay in bed for 18 days after the surgery (we were out the hospital less than 24hours later). Now aged four my daughter sits in her pram and draws while the women talk. I am not sure how much she is taking in but when I ask her what she is drawing she says it is the ‘green ladies’, the names given to the nurses due to their green uniforms and strong sense of sisterhood. The Lock Hospital for Unfortunate Females was also on this site, a treatment centre for women and children with venereal diseases which opened in 1805 and was based in Rottenrow in 1845-6, designed to look like the surrounding tenements, presumably to hide what were seen as morally objectionable diseases.
As we walk deeper into the Merchant City on to George Street, the tour guides battle against the traffic noise to be heard. We stand on the site of the home of the former Strickland Press, where The Word (a Socialist paper which ran from 1938-1962) was published. Ethel Macdonald and Jenny Patrick were two of the key figures in the paper ensuring issues such as family planning and equality for women were covered. They travelled to Spain during the civil war and Ethel earned the name ‘the Scots Scarlet Pimpernel’ due to her role at an anarchist radio station in Barcelona and supporting comrades in prison.
Figure 6: Ethel MacDonald
Figure 7: News article about The Scots Scarlet Pimpernel, Ethel MacDonald (taken outside the Press Bar).
The smart green tiles of The Press Bar are a legacy of the news heritage of these streets and on this sunny day, people enjoy a cold pint of lager on the outdoor tables, Glasgow passing for European in the sunshine. We stand outside the Herald building on Albion Street (1980-1995) as our guides focus on women in news, charting the histories of those writers and the occasional rare editor who ‘made it beyond the women’s pages’. They evoke the sounds and atmosphere of the street when at midnight the presses would be fired up and the sound of machinery would be followed by the noise of bundles of newspapers smacking on to the pavement. A picture is passed around of Dorothy Grace Elder, a features editor within the worker’s co-operative which created The Scottish Daily News.
As we enter the gates of the St David’s Ramshorn Church the street noise fades away and the stillness of the green leafy graveyard settles over the group. We are here to hear the story of the story of Pierre Emile L’Angelier who died in 1857 and rests in the Fleming family tomb. When his body was exhumed two days after his death, he was found to have enough arsenic to kill 20 men in his system. Miss Madeline Smith’s love letters were found at his home and her murder trial became one of the most famous Victorian cases. ‘Why is there only one boy?’ my daughter asks, nodding to the man who has accompanied his wife for the day (and who ends up playing the judge in the short re-enactment of Madeline Smith’s trial – the verdict of not proven saw her walking free). I explain to my daughter that we are on a women’s history walk so it is mainly women here, but that everyone is welcome. She nods, seemingly satisfied, and returns to doodling on the map with her favourite pink pen.
Figure 8: Images of Blythswood Square and rendering of Madeline Smith in Ramshorn churchyard
Figure 9: Exterior of the Ramshorn Church, Ingram Street
Returning to the bustling streets with people sitting outside enjoying beers and a late lunch, we hear about women’s involvement in the temperance movement, as 19th century Glasgow became a haven for tearooms to try to move away from the problems caused by the ‘demon drink’ (GWL heritage walk). Carrie A. Nation, known as the bar-room smasher came from Kentucky armed with a hatchet to smash bars in the city. Her newspaper The Hatchet was part of the highly active Glasgow temperance movement which aimed in politicising women and making visible the effects on families, such as domestic abuse, as one of the women detectives tells us ‘A nation never rises higher than its mothers’ (GWL heritage walk).
As the tour is running late, the route is diverted to a final stop, on Brunswick Street where we learn of Miss Catherine Cranston, one of the most important businesswomen of the Victorian era, famous for her tearooms. At a time when women stayed home, her father George Cranston was a supporter of women’s suffrage and wanted to educate his daughters. She cannily listed herself as C. Cranston in the phone book as women came after their husbands, and she also decided to keep her maiden name after she got married, something that was unheard of at the time. She walked up Sauchiehall street, named as the street ‘where the willows grow’ to make herself visible on the streets, a businesswoman amongst the flaneurs at a time when women’s place was in the home.
Figure 10: Detail of entrance, Brunswick Street, final stop on the tour
Figure 11: My daughter holding a cartoon image of Dorothy Grace Elder: Women Make History
I was inspired to come on this walk after reading Where are the Women?By Sara Sheridan which my mother-in-law gifted to me for Christmas last year and it felt fitting to come with her as she has a keen interest in history. My daughter also attended, and I was glad, as I want her to know of the women that shaped this city, invisible compared to the men who are monumentalised and celebrated through the statues, street names and buildings. There are some who should not be celebrated, Glasgow’s role in the history of slavery more evidently traced in the Merchant City than any other part of the city. Geographer Gillian Rose argues that one way in which identity is connected to a particular place is by a feeling that you belong to this place. Can you feel like you belong if you don’t see yourself represented or monumentalised or even acknowledged? Kern also writes about the ‘geography of fear’ (2021: 149) that many women experience (often more acutely for women of colour, transwomen and queer women) as they walk through the city streets, especially at night, the threat of sexual violence never far away. As Kathleen Jamie writes: ‘It doesn’t seem too much to ask, to be able to walk outdoors, even in daylight without fear’ (2021: 9).
Sheridan’s book opens with Solnit’s reflection that she couldn’t imagine how she might have conceived of herself and her possibilities if she had moved through a city where most things were named after women. Glasgow, like many other cities, was built and historicised by men, as the dominant gender. So where are the women? They live on in the stories that are told on the streets of the city, not often visibly monumentalised, but traced through the oral histories of those pioneers and rebels, mothers, wives, and daughters who made their mark on Glasgow. This is walking the feminist city.
Bibliography
Andrews, Kerri. 2021. Wanderers: A History of Women Walking. London: Reaktion Books.
RCS: Climate Portals Festival: Hope Street Walk Photos by Ingrid Mur
A walk for Hope Street in Glasgow. Available as an audio walk here. Full text below.
1. Please use your own mobile device with headphones to experience this walk.
2. The audio track is available on Soundcloud. The app can be downloaded in advance and the track is available at the link above.
3. The starting point is on the steps outside the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on Renfrew Street. The route heads down through the city and follows the length of Hope Street arriving under the bridge on Argyle Street.
4. The track can also be listened to elsewhere at other times.
5. Nobody will be left behind.
Hope Street Walk
1.
A walk down Hope Street.
In a moment, we invite you to walk down Hope Street towards Glasgow’s Central Station, then underneath the railway bridge to the Argyle Street Arches.
If you are walking this route elsewhere, find a place you would like to go – a street, or a track, a desire path maybe, and, when prompted, we invite you to begin.
The walk will take around fifteen minutes, depending on your pace.
Wherever you are, make sure you are safe, and that you take care underfoot.
We are going on a journey now, for this place, but also for other places.
On this walk, you are invited to look, to listen, and to pause.
You are invited to reflect on the precarity of this place, of everywhere right now.
You are invited to hope.
2.
Stand on Renfrew Street, in front of the Conservatoire, and face the city.
On the corner to the left, a bike shelter. A node between vectors. Busses, taxis, cars…
And for those cyclists whose vehicles are left in one piece, a lighter and more sustainable way of moving at pace through the city. But we make our journey on foot.
If you look past the bikes and up towards the end of Hope Street, you will see the Theatre Royal. Nearby is the New Atheneum and the Chandler Theatre. Peeking up over the buildings along Renfrew Street is Cineworld. You are surrounded by theatre spaces, by stages, by screens.
But the streets of this city can also be experienced as a site for performance. The pavements of Hope Street can be a place to witness, to connect, to notice, to care.
Here you can see the performances of the everyday: the stories, the people, the lives – human and more-than-human – that inhabit this place.
Set off down hill at your own pace.
3.
Hope Street has been at the top of the list of Scotland’s most polluted streets for many years. It has the highest levels of nitrogen dioxide – a pollutant from diesel vehicles – to be found anywhere in the country.
In Islands of Abandonment, Cal Flyn rejects the doomsday scenarios for our planet:
“I cannot accept their conclusions. To do so is to abandon hope, to accept the inevitability of a fallen world, a ruinous future. And yet everywhere I have looked, everywhere I have been – places bent and broken, despoiled and desolate, polluted and poisoned – I have found new life springing from the wreckage of the old, life all the stronger and more valuable for its resilience”
4.
We are walking against the flow of traffic.
Intersecting this route at right angles are Sauchiehall Street, Bath Street, West Regent Street, West George Street, St Vincent Street.
Glasgow city centre is laid out in a grid pattern.
One of the things that people say, so it might be true, is that New York’s grid was modelled on Glasgow.
So let’s walk down a street in New York.
Past Candy Corner and USA Beauty and further into the grid.
5.
We are moving now. Head past the recently defunct Watt Brothers department store, the place where Glasgow aunties would get their crystal and dinner sets…
A casualty of the pandemic closures on the high street.
6.
The restaurants and food outlets on this street tell the stories of migration, of globalisation, of fast food and convenience food and lunchbreaks and unrecyclable coffee cups that will end up in landfill.
Take a peek down the lanes you pass as you walk. These are the spaces in between, the city’s crevices, its wrinkles.
7.
Walk down Hope Street
8.
Walk down Hope Street
9.
On your left you will soon see the Lion Chambers, one of the many buildings in the city centre which is derelict, no longer used, no longer functioning, eroding and abandoned, unviable and perhaps unfixable, but still standing.
As “Glasgow’s Forgotten Skyscraper” this building has many common local features:
Corner turrets and a pair of steep gables on the roof.
Romanesque arches and gothic style pointed windows.
Today, the building waits for either renovation or demolition. These chambers were constructed using a system designed by French Engineer, François Hennebique:
Reinforced concrete: an alternative to steel frames, making the building fireproof.
Before steel frames there were wooden frames, even more of a fire risk.
Glasgow: Tinderbox city, city of fires.
Someone once said of this city, “look up”. When you are walking through the grid of streets, cast your eyes upwards. Raise your chin and gaze skyward. Glasgow at eye level, at street level, is retail, offices, bus stops, bins. It is any high street anywhere. If you set your sights higher, if you look up beyond the ground level shop fronts, another Glasgow is revealed.
10.
There are more stories in the upper storeys. Travelling through these streets on the top deck of a bus reveals more intricately adorned facades – architectural styles jostling together and a cast of stoney characters reaching out from their stages to draw you into their worlds of pigeons and buddleia.
At the bottom of Hope Street, on the right, is Atlantic Chambers, the earliest example of several New York-style elevator buildings. The height of the buildings here, along with the perpendicular streets, makes this part of town a favoured film location for recreating American cities.
11.
Walk down Hope Street.
Our journeys have been curtailed, prohibited, realigned with a global pandemic. There is now a precedent for staying at home, which is something we should probably have been doing more often regardless. Travelling like we have done at times over the last ten years has been reckless and destructive. The planet burns and we fly round the world to make art.
Walking down Hope Street takes us further than might be assumed.
They filmed Indiana Jones here in the summer of 2021. Just as the post lockdown streets reopened and pedestrians retuned. They closed a large section of Hope Street to film car chases and a garish float parade. A giant moon on the back of a lorry. Harrison Ford, presumably. The whole area was full of stars and stripes and yellow taxis.
Place performing place.
Glasgow connecting to the world.
12.
Alternate architectures ancient and modern, juxtaposed and jumbled up, contemporary glass next to Edwardian red sandstone next to brutalist building next to boarded up mansion. Glasgow’s revisions and renovations and regenerations, successful and failed, all stark against the skyline.
The city’s history is written on the buildings, these street names, these architectures. Coal, colonialism, climate change. All part of the same story.
13.
Keep walking. You may be able to see Central Station now, the sweeping curves of the Grand Central Hotel. The world’s first long-distance television pictures were transmitted here on 24 May 1927 by John Logie Baird. Glasgow connecting to the world.
Not too far away from here, the famous Glasgow School of Art designed by Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh has suffered not one, but two recent fires.
The ABC on Sauchiehall Street was also destroyed, and in May 2021, the Old College Bar, one of the oldest pubs in Glasgow was ravished by fire and has been demolished.
Tinderbox city.
14.
The village of Grahamston once stood in the place now occupied by Central Station. The Duncan’s Hotel building on the west side of Union Street, and the Grant Arms pub on Argyle Street are all that remain, but Alston Street – once running parallel to Union Street and Hope Street – was demolished along with the rest of the village to make way for the station. Bear that in mind as we move through this place. We’re walking through Grahamston as well, as we walk down Hope Street.
15.
As you approach Central Station, there is a statue, a sculpture called Citizen Firefighter, a figure made of bronze, wearing firefighting gear and breathing apparatus.
Less than three months after it was unveiled, Citizen Firefighter became a focal point for the people of Glasgow after the events of September 11th in New York. The statue seemed to many to be the right place to leave flowers and tributes to the firefighters who died in those events.
At this moment, wild fires rage around the world.
“Our house is still on fire.”
16.
One of the station’s most famous architectural features is the large glass-walled bridge that extends the station building over Argyle Street, nicknamed the ‘Hielanman’s Umbrella’ because it was used as a meeting place for those from the highlands of Scotland to gather in the city
17.
Walk down Hope Street
And perhaps Hope Street can take us elsewhere.
Past the cafes, takeaways and bars.- Japanese, Lebanese, Indian and Irish.
Past the ensemble of buildings
And through the various time periods they nod to, or capture.
Past the intersecting and converging routes of private and public transport:
Mobility scooters and wheelchairs, cyclists, walkers and joggers.
Past Sunset Beach, which you will see on the corner as you come to the end of the road.
Head under the ‘umbrella’ and find the entrance to the Argyle Street Arches,
where we will reconvene.
The arches have been here for over a century now.
There used to be a theatre here.
18.
We are close now, under the bridge, underneath the arches.
Pause before you cross Argyle Street. Look back up Hope Street, the path you have just walked.
Hope Street is a microcosm: Pollution, abandonment, climate change, precarity.
‘And yet, everywhere I have looked…’
19.
The buddleia, the butterfly bush, growing out of windows and along ledges, silhouetted on the skyline, whisper of hope.
The pigeons nestled in loft spaces, biding their time, murmur of hope.
The grasses poking through pavements, seeking the sunlight, hum of hope.
The seabirds hovering high above the urban landscape, shriek of hope.
