exploring creative mobilities
I have created a new blog at blogs.ed.ac.uk/lenziemoss
100 Circles is a new project for Lenzie Moss in Scotland. I am walking round the site 100 times, each time with a different person from the local community, or a visiting artist or researcher. As I share these encounters on this blog, I hope that a co-authored text will emerge, bringing a series of walked dialogues to a wider readership, and perhaps finding a way for the Moss to tell its stories.
This text was written as we attempted to follow Karen Barad (2007) in ‘diffracting’ the contemporary city for an academic article (Cullen et al. 2024). This fragmented narrative is comprised of diverse intra-actions that occurred in the process of learning and teaching on Creating Edinburgh: The interdisciplinary city – an undergraduate course at the University of Edinburgh – including creative responses written by students during the course, photographs of spaces in Edinburgh, which are the focus of course assignments, excerpts from the researchers’ reflections during the research process. Following Barad’s example, we have provided explanatory footnotes, which give context for each fragment.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely facing the screen
Or page
Head on [1]
But if you were standing
On Princes Street in Edinburgh
At the bottom of Lothian Road
Facing East
You’d find the high street on your left
And the gardens on your right
With Edinburgh Castle looming above
There are tourists taking photos
And a group of students exploring the grounds together
You emerge from the bowels
Of Waverley,
Adjusting to the brilliant blue,
The crisp autumnal air,
The majesty of Castle Rock,
The dynamism of Edinburgh
Laid out before you
In all her splendour.
On Waverley Bridge,
Behind you,
Laughter erupts sporadically,
Punctuating the comings and goings…
To your right,
A circle of students,
Bundled up against the October chill.
A researcher among them.
Beyond, the commercial aorta:
Princes Street abuzz, tram bells, busses, totes.
To your left,
A couple poses,
One click to capture,
To immortalise the moment.
One tap to transport,
To digitise a vista.
But for you,
Immersed as you are,
This is no two-dimensional plane.
This is your reality.
Stimulating activity in the same motor-neurological regions as physically enacted movements (Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005), reading is an embodied experience which invites not only visual representation, but a broad range of multimodal responses, including any, or a combination of, the five senses, interoceptive reactions, proprioceptive responses and kinaesthetic sensations (Rokotnitz, 2017). In reading the multimodal imagery contained in these fragments the past experiences of research participants, course tutors and researchers with(in) the city ‘flash up’, diffracting spacetimes and “de(con)struct[ing]… the continuum of history… [to bring] the energetics of the past into the present and vice versa” (Barad, 2017, p. 23). The reader is as phenomenologically immersed and materially connected — as entangled – as the participants and researchers.
You walk through the city, across Princes Street, to the New Town.
The infamous statue of Henry Dundas – 1st Viscount Melville – stands 150 feet above St Andrew Square. Between 1791 and 1805, Dundas was Home Secretary, Minister for War and Colonies and First Lord of the Admiralty. He is also argued to have significantly delayed the abolition of slavery.
To begin the Decolonising Edinburgh field week, students are invited to watch a film of Sir Geoff Palmer, interviewed for Edinburgh Futures Institute (2020). Palmer introduces this controversial figure and reflects on strategies of decolonising public monuments. Palmer is Scotland’s first Black professor. He is now Professor Emeritus in the School of Life Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
As a result of campaigning by Palmer and others, a new plaque has now been installed at the site. Students visit the monument together to read the new inscription and to critically reflect on the text.
Does the plaque go far enough? Do you feel that the statue should be removed? If so, should something else be put in its place?
The Researcher [2]
You arrive.
Waverly North Bridge.
Unable to discern the students
From other passers-by.
An approach:
Are you…?
Yes!
Smiles.
Introductions.
Research Ethics.
Expectations.
Invitations.
Phones out.
Recorders on.
You follow,
Neither a part
Nor apart.
Liminal.
Present.
You observe.
You reflect.
You diffract,
Becoming
Complicit
And in doing so
You are irrevocably
Entangled,
Altering the experience
Fundamentally.
What does it mean
To be here?
To inhabit,
To embody,
To be of
A city,
And for a city
To be of you?
Questions structure the discussion in the seminar room. Tutors facilitate the exchange of ideas between students, drawing out tensions and contradictions, prompting intra-action. The ‘tools’ that tutors use might be understood in Baradian terms, although they have yet to be framed explicitly in this way. Students share the documents and outputs of their field work, which are then explored by students in other groups. Questions are invited to turn experiences over and over, troubling binaries and opening up reflections into new, generative responses. This includes the creation of new field topics, which are submitted for assessment as digital portfolios comprising images, maps, tasks and questions. As Karen Spector argues, ‘If nothing new that matters is produced, then diffraction hasn’t occurred’ (2015, 449). With a topic as contested and emotive as decolonising monuments, diffraction might be utilised more explicitly as a way to read meanings through each other, without the pressure to move towards resolution. The ethics of diffractive pedagogy are informed by feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway, who argues that ‘it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’ (2016, 12). Creating Edinburgh emphasises the ways in which learning and teaching matters to the city and its continual creation through stories, journeys and intra-actions.
If you had been in this exact spot some years ago, a PPE (personal protective equipment) mask may have obstructed your peripheral view
Students on the inaugural version of Creating Edinburgh sat in cold seminar rooms (windows open for air circulation even in the winter). Pandemic Edinburgh has never been a popular field topic.[3]
‘I’ was teaching two seminars that year
Each week, I greeted students as they filtered in, sitting in their groups
“How was your fieldwork?”
“Where did you go?”
“What did you see?”[4]
Years later Creating Edinburgh found its way into my PhD Manuscript:
The figure of the witch has been a constant companion to my PhD process. In my final semester of teaching at the University of Edinburgh, I was working on a brand-new course called ‘Creating Edinburgh’.[5] The course design loosely mimics a ‘choose your own adventure’ novel, wherein the students opt for certain topics from a list of offerings at the beginning of the semester. The course is an interdisciplinary approach to the city of Edinburgh itself and engages with themes like, ‘Decolonising Edinburgh’, ‘Digital Edinburgh’, ‘Literary Edinburgh’, ‘Deep Time Edinburgh’ etc. The main assessment for the course is for students to create their own theme to be added to the cache for future cohorts. One of my groups chose to pursue Witchcraft Edinburgh, and it is to them I owe much of my knowledge about witch hunts in Scotland. Thank you, Eleanor, Aimee, Sadie, and Andrew. It is because of them that I learned that the Mercat Cross located in the market centre of Medieval Edinburgh served as an execution site for accused witches. According to a plaque at The Witches Well, a memorial to those accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563-1736, hundreds of witches were publicly executed during this time. The plaque was placed in 1912, and states,
This fountain, erected by John Duncan, R.S.A., is near the site on which many witches were burned at the stake. The wicked head and serene head signify that some used their exceptional knowledge for evil purposes while others were misunderstood and wished their kind nothing but good. The serpent has the dual significance of evil and wisdom.
Witches then, were condemned regardless of which direction they aimed their powers; ‘the “good witch”, who made sorcery her career, was also punished, often more severely’ (Federici, 2004, 200). This lack of discrimination concerning the morality of witches is perplexing; if witches were not hunted and killed for their wickedness, what were they persecuted for?
The situatedness of this knowledge struck me, as I had been working with the text, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation for years and had not investigated the history of witch trials in Edinburgh, the city in which I lived and studied in.
Witchcraft Edinburgh [6]
Artistic Edinburgh
Literary Edinburgh
Music Edinburgh
Deadinburgh
Eatinburgh
Haunted Edinburgh
Legendary Edinburgh
Queer Edinburgh
For their final assessment, students work in groups to create their own field topic. These are then made available as an open educational resource on the University’s website so that they can be accessed publicly and used by students on subsequent years of the course, as a re-turning of practice. The course avoids closing down the experience into interpretive or analytical assignments. Rather, new experiences are generated, new paths are followed, new questions are raised. The questions that students have asked through this assessment task exemplify the kind of diffractive approach that we are advocating in this article. Barad’s argument about the inseparability of entangled phenomena tells us that ‘separability is not taken for granted and this means that all phenomena—all the entanglements—are open to analysis and questioning’ (Barad & Gandorfer 2021, 51). Applying this principle to an educational experience in the city suggests that the questions that are asked (which includes the prior questions that structure the fieldwork on the course) matter to Edinburgh. This is because active questioning ensures that multiple components are kept open, malleable, subject to change. This is the meaning of the course subtitle, ‘the interdisciplinary city’.
Does the surrounding area reflect what we have learned about Edinburgh and its level of safety for the LQBTQ community?
How are educational institutions and their buildings important for a city other than just as classrooms?
How does food serve as a social tool in this community?
Why are ghost stories ingrained in Edinburgh, and how might they add to the culture of the city?
Because diffraction is an ongoing process, these questions are not only about a specific encounter with the city of Edinburgh: they also have the potential to shape ways of being, thinking, relating in other contexts.
The majority of students on the course are exchange or international visiting students [7]
After weeks of oscillating between seminar room and fieldwork, they would return to their country of study or home
What did they bring with them? What did they leave behind?
Were they changed by Edinburgh? Is Edinburgh changed by them?
Perhaps they did not return. They re-turned.
There are things about which
We educators and researchers
Have no knowledge,
No control.
What was happening
In the ‘margins’ of the students’
Lives?
Living as they were
Beyond the parameters of
This ‘Creating Edinburgh’.
Learning as they were
Beyond the boundaries of
This ‘Education’.
How to divest oneself
Of the assumed responsibility
Of the learning and knowing
Of others?
Vital contemplation.
You peer down a nearby close (those narrow, steep alleyways branching off the Royal Mile)
And you feel the wind rush through it, over you
It’s particles and physics
[1] These fragments were co-created in the spring of 2024 by authors Clare Cullen and M Winter, each drawing on their own experiences with the city of Edinburgh and the course. The latter fragments specifically refer to Cullen’s walking intraview with students on their field work.
[2] This fragment, written by Clare Cullen, captures her experience accompanying students on their field work in the autumn of 2023. The researcher’s presence-participation in students’ fieldwork with(in) the city was an integral part of our methodology. Weaving an autoethnographic fragment of the researcher’s fieldwork experiences into the tapestry of this entanglement reveals the messy liveliness of diffractive research. It does not obscure the essential administrative, ethical and logistical elements that might bookend a data collection intervention — those research protocols that exist beyond the boundaries of the data and yet fundamentally influence the experiences captured within those recordings. It acknowledges what is gained through researcher presence-participation, and what is sacrificed: a firsthand, embodied understanding of the multisensory phenomena that coalesce to create a city at the cost of influencing the students’ experiences by introducing a factor that would otherwise not have been present.
[3] Barad follows Walter Benjamin in exploring the disruptive potential of ‘a superposition of times – moments from the past – existing in the thick-now of the present moment’ (2017, 33). For Barad, this is understood through the notion of temporal diffraction, noting how an electron can co-exist at different temporal, as well as spatial, locations. While the Pandemic Edinburgh topic is not a popular choice (perhaps because this is not a temporal location that students have any desire to re-turn to), Creating Edinburgh was designed and developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic time is therefore superimposed in the present moment through a troubling of digital/physical binaries and the traces of the disrupted learning experience that characterised the inaugural year of the course. Deeper time is also superimposed on the present, as students are invited to encounter the city at a geological scale. Searching for evidence of geological processes in the city, students are asked to identify traces in the materials and shapes of the urban landscape.
[4] This section, written by M Winter, describes their experience teaching on the inaugural version of Creating Edinburgh in 2021.
[5] This is an excerpt from M Winter’s PhD thesis.
[6] A list of topics added to the cache by students over the past few years.
[7] This section was co-created by Clare Cullen and M Winter, diffracting their varied experiences as researcher and teacher.
References
Barad, K (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, Durham.
Barad, K. (2017) What Flashes Up: Theological-Political-Scientific Fragments. In: Keller, C and Rubenstein M-J (eds) Entangled Worlds. Fordham University Press, New York pp. 21–88.
Barad K, Gandorfer D (2021) Political Desirings: Yearnings for mattering (,) differently. Theory & Event, 24(1), 14-66.
Barsalou LW, Wiemer-Hastings K (2005) “Situating Abstract Concepts.” In Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, edited by Diana Pecher D, Zwaan RA. 129 – 63 (New York: Cambridge University Press).
BBC (2024) Council installs new slavery plaque at Edinburgh’s Melville Monument, 18 March 2024. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-68597359. Accessed 28 Mar 2024.
Cullen, C., Jay, D., Overend, D. et al. (2024) Creating Edinburgh: diffracting interdisciplinary learning and teaching in the contemporary city. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11, 1151.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (2020) Shadow on the street: Edinburgh’s links with the slave trade. Film by McFall L and AWED (Goss S, McFall L, Umney D, Moats D). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrx5yQnx6QM. Accessed 28/03/24.
Federici S (2004) Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia, Brooklyn, NY
Haraway D (2016) Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham.
Rokotnitz N (2017) “Goosebumps, Shivers, Visualization, and Embodied Resonance in the Reading Experience: The God of Small Things”, Poetics Today 38:2. DOI 10.1215/03335372-3868603.
Spector K (2015) Meeting pedagogical encounters halfway. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 58(6): 447–450.
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
This text was performed in August and October 2023 at the Stand Comedy Club in Edinburgh as part of the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas. It is an argument for interdisciplinary collaboration, with some stories of Making Routes fieldwork at Knepp Castle Estate and Gully Cave.
Hi. I’d like to start with a joke. Seems appropriate…
A scientist, a geographer and an artist walk into a bar…
The barman asks them what they want and:
And the barman looks at them all blankly for a moment, then says ‘so that’ll be three pints of beer, then?’
Ok, so it wasn’t a funny joke. But if you’re here expecting an hour of comedy, you’ve maybe misread the blurb…
And something comedians never do is analyse their own jokes (unless you’re Stewart Lee). But my background is in theatre and performance studies, so I can’t help it.
I want to note that moment when the barman looks at these disciplinary characters ‘blankly’.
[Some of you are looking at me quite blankly right now]
That moment of blankness is what often happens when specialists forget that they spend most of their time up their own arses.
But I want to suggest that this space of not quite getting each other – of misunderstandings and miscommunications, between people who don’t usually talk to each other – holds tremendous potential for transformational change.
When we generate, organise, categorise, and share knowledge, so much of our efforts go into eliminating those spaces of perplexed bafflement from our work.
My suggestion is that we actually need to embrace them and cultivate them. This talk is going to tell you how to do that.
I’m standing in a field in West Sussex.
There is a gentle rain creating ripples in a dark pond. Oak trees shed their acorns. A herd of cows – long horned mega beasts – stare at us from afar. Purple emperor butterflies flit about the tangled wildflowers. A cacophony of birdsong – blue tits, robins, blackcaps. Rabbits bound through the hedgerow. Buzzards circle overhead.
And the reason I’m standing in this field is that I’ve invited a group of scientists, geographers, and artists to work together for a couple of days at an experimental rewilding site.
My idea is that if these people spend some time together, exploring their different takes on nature and conservation – then something else will emerge. Something that we don’t yet understand or recognise. Something that might change the way we think about the world and our place within it.
And one of the group – a Quaternary Scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London – looks at me blankly for a moment and says ‘What do you actually want us to do?’
Can I have a volunteer to play the part of this scientist?
You don’t have to do much – just join me up here and read aloud from this short script, so only come up if you’re comfortable doing that in front of all these people!
Scientist: What do you actually want us to do?
David: Um… well, I’m hoping that will emerge as we work together here.
Scientist: How are we going to do that, though?
David: Well, I thought we could use some of the methods from my training as a theatre director and collaborative performance-maker to – you know – explore the more-than-human world here and kind of… create an assemblage of ecological practice…
Scientist: Right.
David: So, maybe we could start by just finding a place to sit and writing a little response to the things you observe there – like, the sounds and the feeling of being here – that sort of thing.
Scientist: Ok. How many words?
David: Well, there’s no word limit as such.
Scientist: So we can just write whatever we want?
David: Yes. And then, if you’re comfortable to do so, we might read those to each other and then see if we can weave them together somehow – create a kind of multi-authored text from our time here? It could even include some movement if you wanted.
Scientist: Yep.
David: Does that sound ok?
Scientist: … I think I’m going to need an aqueous solution of ethanol, sugars, amino acids, minerals, flavonoids, and other organic compounds, resulting from the chemical reactions of mashing, boiling, and fermentation.
Rewilding requires a willingness to let go of some of the things that we think we know.
I was drawn to it because it offers a new way of working that moves us into a radical space of possibility, in which we don’t know how to behave, we have no language to explain what is happening, and we just have to trust in messy, unpredictable processes.
That is not how most of us currently work.
But I do think things are changing.
There’s a word that has surreptitiously infiltrated the modern university: sneaking its way along dusty, book-lined corridors; slipping into shiny new research laboratories; and even cementing itself into renovation and construction projects across campuses. It is a word that threatens the very foundations of higher education. It demands new ways of working and raises difficult questions about how we should work together, share ideas, and respond to the big challenges facing our world today.
That word is… [any guesses?]… ‘interdisciplinary’.
I want to take up the offer of interdisciplinarity and suggest that we all need to become less disciplined – that’s my dangerous idea.
Shaking off the mantle of traditional, discipline-bound knowledge, I want to suggest that the only way to respond to an increasingly complex and challenging world is to stop playing by the rules. We need creative, experimental, and messy spaces where new approaches can be developed.
I’m going to take you into another of these messy spaces now.
You’re in a cave in the Mendips in Somerset. The cave mouth faces west with far-reaching views over a gorge and westwards across the flat floodplain of a river. The ground is covered in bright blue tarpaulin. You are at an excavation site, where the scientists have discovered bones, teeth, and fragments from tens of thousands of mammals and birds. It is raining. Wild pony, auroch, arctic fox, wolf, and hyena all lived here once. Your encounter with deep time makes you feel sick.
When I visited this place in November 2021, I brought some of the same collaborators with me, who worked together in the field in West Sussex.
It was encouraging that they had come back.
What made this place quite different from the rewilding site was absence.
In the field, we had seen the pigs, cows, butterflies, and oaks.
Here we encountered an unassuming opening in a cliff face that had been hollowed out over a decade of careful excavation work.
I really needed to understand more about what I was seeing.
Ok, now I need another volunteer – same deal, you’re playing the part of a geographer.
Geographer: The cave was filled with a red, limestone-rich deposit, which accumulated through the inwashing of material down the gully above and through a large fissure feature within the cave roof. This was then capped by a densely-cemented carbonate flowstone, sealing the deposits below. That essentially created a deep time memory box for us to discover…
David: … Wow!
Geographer: The breccia has proved to be richer with fossils than we ever could have imagined. So much evidence of past inhabitation and clues to their behaviours, which can inform our understanding of future conservation possibilities.
David: Amazing!
Geographer: What we’re seeing here is a window into the Quaternary. I’m sure you’ll have loads of thoughts about how we can work together to understand all this.
David: Just… Wow. It’s er… vast, isn’t it?
Geographer: What’s your initial response? To what you’re seeing here?
David: … er… Wow. It makes me think… um… It’s amazing.
Geographer: … I’m going to need the product of the skilled labour of farmers and artisan brewers, who cultivate local and global ingredients deriving from diverse environmental factors.
Thank you to our geographer. Thank you to our scientist.
And that leaves me, I suppose. The artist.
On the walk back from this cave through the gorge, I shared my worries with one of the participants, Helen.
I said that I felt a bit overwhelmed by the scale of what we had just encountered.
I said that this didn’t feel like the right time for our usual methods and experiments.
And Helen replied: ‘You have to breathe in to breathe out’.
I think that’s the most difficult part of all this: spending time together, sharing ideas and experiences, learning from each other, and then very slowly starting to find ways to collaborate.
We need to resist the urge to know everything and control everything.
We need to let a little more wildness into the process.
And that’s where I think art and creativity have a lot to offer.
Entering into these unknown and perhaps unknowable spaces, I have felt challenged, bewildered, moved, and inspired.
What I was able to do was then channel those experiences into very small scale, tentative responses…
Creative writing, performed actions, makeshift films, and installations – these offered me ways to bring together the disparate perspectives and responses of the participants.
Art became a glue holding it all together. Or rather, a thread, weaving things together.
For me, it unlocked something quite profound – an insight into a wilder, messier, unpredictable world that exists outside the academy, and of which we are all a part.
That doesn’t need discipline.
Perhaps we can talk about that for a bit.
Then you can join me for a liquid celebration, a symphony of flavours that dance upon the tongue, a frothy masterpiece that delights the senses and elevates the spirit.
Thank you.
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.
Glasgow Women’s Library Heritage Walk 3rd June at 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm Women of the Merchant City Heritage Walk
Holme, Chris. 2015. https://historycompany.co.uk/2015/11/16/the-wee-glasgow-women-and-the-birth-of-caesarian/ accessed 0/06/23.
Jamie, Kathleen. 2021. Foreword to Andrews, Kerri. 2021. Wanderers: A History of Women Walking. London: Reaktion Books.
Kern, Leslie. 2020. The Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. London: Verso.
Massey, Doreen and Pat Jess. 1995. A Place in the World? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Overend, David. 2023. Performance in the Field: Interdisciplinary Practice-as-Research. Palgrave Macmillan.
Sheridan, Sara. 2021. Where are the Women?: A Guide to an Imagined Scotland. Edinburgh: Historic Environment Scotland.
Solnit, Rebecca. 2001. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso.
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.
We are here now.
We are here. Now.
