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Events

Find information about the project’s events by following the links below.

Forthcoming Events

‘Making Mountains and Gaining Ground: the archaeology of waste landscapes’

Archaeology Seminar series, University of Glasgow
12 February 2025, 4pm, 587 Adam Smith Building
Hybrid
Register/livestream link 

In this talk, I discuss ‘Reimagining Waste Landscapes’, a contemporary archaeology research project that I  recently completed at Edinburgh College of Art. I will discuss how mountains made from industrial waste and new land made with demolition rubble can take on unexpected uses and valuations and become spaces of creativity and heritage, and how such sites, as part of the archaeosphere, can tell us something about our uncertain future

 

‘The afterlives of London’s bomb rubble’

Military Surplus Seminar series (online), CRASSH, University of Cambridge
20 March 2025, 5pm

In this talk, I follow the diverse trajectories of rubble produced by the aerial bombing of London during the Second World War. While the bombs of the Luftwaffe and the missiles of the Vergeltungswaffen (Vengeance-weapons) initially created these millions of cubic metres of debris, it was the demolition of ruins and the transportation and repurposing of this rubble during and after the war that most dramatically reshaped the city. In moving back and forth between mass deposits and individual fragments, I examine how bomb rubble seems to both ‘remember’ and ‘forget’ this past, and how it both supports and undermines life in present-day London. I also discuss recent creative work I have undertaken to rematerialize the atomised remnants of a single house that was bombed-out in November 1941.

Register here.

Past Events

LIDAR DSM of BEckton Alp and 40 George Square tower as a size comaprions at the same scale

Recovering Wastelands : Discovering Community
Speakers: Les Back (University of Glasgow), Jonathan Gardner (University of Edinburgh), and Nicky Bird (Artist)

31 October 2024, 3- 5.30pm.

 

A composite image with thee photogrpahs. Top Left: A colour shot sof granite setts and bricks on the gound in a sun-dappled scene. There is a black and white 10 centimetre scale bar showing this rubble to be about 15- 20cm long. Right: A portrait view of an aerial photo in black and white. The photo seems to have been taken from several thousand feet up and shows streets of houses and roads at left. At right, a large oblong expanse that is light coloured is covered in a multitude of dark coloure, sloping mounds. These are bisected by roads and river channels and small ant-like trucks and machines are ont he ground. Lower left: a computer egnerate dimage of an old two strorey double-hipped roofed building. The image is greyscale and shows georgian-style sash ands case windows and glass shopfront with a corner doorway into the 2 storey property which has numerous chimneys emerging from the top of the roof. The building looks about 200 or 300 years old.

‘Gaining Ground: Bomb Rubble, Reclamation and Revenance’

School of Art Research Forum
29 January 2024, 4.15– 6pm (Hunter Lecture Theatre, ECA)

 

Rubble on Royston Beach, 4/9/2023. The image shows a blue engineering brick wall surviving jointed 6 courses high (lying on its side) against a field of concrete and brick rubble.

Talk for Edinburgh World Heritage: ‘The Spoils of Progress: Edinburgh’s peripheral waste landscapes’ [watch recording here]

12 October 2023
EWH website
More info

 

A view of several sets of football goal posts on the green fields of Hackney Marsh. The corner of the penalty box is seen painte dont he grass. The enarest goal mouth is muddy and worn and the sky is grey. A line of tres is in the background.

University of Sheffield invited talk: The Archaeology of Waste Landscapes

(23 March 2023, 4.20 pm)

 

 

 

SHA Albyn Bing, Broxburn, West Lothian is seen reflected in a long puddle in this portrait image, surrounded by bare silver birch trees. The lower slopes of the bing can be seen in the backgorund, but the puddle shows an inverted reflection of the peak of the bing in vivid orange-red and a bright blue sky.2023 (Lisbon) Presentation: ‘Reimagining the West Lothian oil shale industry’
(6 January 2023, 1.30pm)

 

 

 

 

Three piles of dumped car tyres in a green field with shrubs and trees behind. Several woodpigeons are grazing behind the tyres. The central pile is unstable looking and three tyres high. The scene is framed through a galvanised steel fence, limiting the field of view to a portrait [though the image is oriented landscape]TAG 43 (University of Edinburgh) Conference Session:
Absence: perspectives from archaeology and heritage
(15- 17 December 2022)

A map showing the burnt area of the fire of Chicago. The schematic grid map is tinged red with the burnt area shown and the centre point of the fire surrounded by regular concentric rings. The north of the map is to the right. The original printed caption reads: 'Map showing the burnt distric in Chicago, [beneath the map the caption then reads:] 'Published for the Relief Fund by The R.P. Studley Company, St. Louis. 3rd Edition.
Conference Session at Society for American Archaeology’ Meeting:  Making Ground: the Archaeology of Waste Landscapes
(31 March 2022)

Sanday bruck totem

 

Reimagining Waste Landscapes seminar series (February – March 2022)

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