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Around Town
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The crawling metropolis Kirstin Innes finds out about a new event aimed at making Glaswegians think about their city politically
T he skyscraper-crammed stretch of city centre known as Glasgow’s International Financial Services District is a strange place. During the day, the tower blocks are full of call-centre workers; at night the street corners shelter sex workers, but very few city residents actually live there. To tie in with Simon Yuill’s current CCA exhibition, the excellent Fields, Factories and Workshops, which looks at the way the city’s communities organise themselves, the artist collective Strickland Distribution, of which Yuill is a member, are organising a ‘critical walk’ through the area this weekend.
‘It’s not just going to be a lecture, with me walking about and telling people what I think,’ explains Neil Gray, the filmmaker and writer who will be leading Reading Landscape Politically, and who recently created a similar event in and around the Merchant City, looking at that area’s historic links with the slave trade. ‘We want people to get involved and collaborate on the discussion, as well as expand some of the ideas in Simon’s exhibition out into a practical domain. The International Financial Services District, which runs from the Clyde to the M8, has had enormous amounts of money from the public realm pumped into it, and yet the public themselves get very little value, use, or even aesthetic interest out of it. Public subsidy is being pumped into an area that’s only used 9–5: there really isn’t anybody there. We want to question that privatisation of public space; the financialisation of the
urban realm that seems to have occurred.’
The walk is not a protest, more a first attempt to engage critically with the area; a variety of artists, academics and psychogeographers will be on hand to stimulate discussion as the walk wends south, past the old Victorian tobacco factory fronts still standing in the area, to the Clyde.
‘We’ll be crossing the river at one point,’ says Gray, ‘because the new bridge there is a really deliberate attempt to bridge between the investment on one side and the other. We hear this rhetoric in Glasgow’s civic life just now, people talking about “a return to the river”, but you still have that feeling when you walk along the Clyde that it’s almost a no-go zone in the evenings . . . There are places on the south bank where you can’t actually walk along the river because it’s gated, private land: all urban space that’s been negated after the decline of the shipyards.’ Gray, Yuill and Strickland Distribution hope to create regular events like this, getting Glaswegians to start feeling ownership over their urban landscape again.
‘We want to make sure that the political ramifications of how we explore the city are very much up front,’ Gray says. ‘We want to concentrate on that.’
Sat 21 Aug, 12.30–5pm. Meet outside the Radisson Hotel (corner of Argyle and Hope Streets). Free. For further information on The Strickland Distribution, see www.strickdistro.org
✽✽ Made in the Shade Summertime Hop Top-notch fair of local indie crafters and designers, with a retro feel and vintage rock’n’roll soundtrack, hands-on workshops and Benefit Cosmetics makeover corner. Glasgow, The Lighthouse, Sat 21 Aug, 10.30am–5pm. ✽✽ Sonic Soak A unique event in the disused Govanhill Baths combining music, art and swimming organised by sound and art collective 85A. See picture, page 98. Glasgow, Govanhill Baths, Calder Street, Sat 21 & Sun 22 Aug. ✽✽ Titan Abseil Kind-hearted daredevils throw themselves off the mighty Titan crane (with a rope, thankfully) for learning disability charity ENABLE Scotland. Registration £20. Glasgow, Titan, Clydebank, Sat 21 & Sun 22 Aug, 10am. ✽✽ Reading Landscape Politically Subtitled ‘A Critical Walk in Glasgow’s International Financial Services District’, this is a guided walk and talk with writer and filmmaker Neil Gray, looking at the politics of space, including gentrification, dispossession and the rent gap. See preview, left. Glasgow, City Centre, Sat 21 Aug, 12.30–5pm. ✽✽ Arbroath Seafest The Arbroath smokie is the rightful star of this seaside festival, which, celebrating the area’s rich maritime history, features boat trips, raft racing, exhibitions, cookery demonstrations and tons of harbourside stalls laden with fine Scottish produce. Arbroath, Arbroath Harbour, Sat 21–Sun 22 Aug. 19–26 Aug 2010 THE LIST 97