After a long cold winter, I return to my shedquarters. On the desk sits a forlorn catalogue – Witness to Mortality, published in 1997 to coincide with an exhibition by Joseph McKenzie, a photographer famed for his iconic Gorbals Children. On the cover is a bleak landscape titled The New Lifestyle 2 (Red Road Flats Newly Opened). Shot in 1968, the black and white image shows a long, empty road, slick with rain, where a solitary vehicle drives towards the vanishing point. Centre frame, a black telegraph pole divides the image, beneath which a woman in a winter coat faces the camera. On the right, startling and mysterious in the fog are two tower blocks. For me, this one picture sums up Glasgow, a heartrending sign of things to come, but somehow not the future.
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My thanks to everyone who has visited The Devil’s Plantation so far, especially those who took the time to comment. I’m heartened by your positive response. The website is live and visitors now have the choice of visiting this blog or the main site. With any luck my efforts won’t dissuade anybody googling ghosts on the M8 motorway or dogging at Carron although they might be disappointed - or downright perplexed - to land on my tiny patch of cyberspace. Not that I should presume anything about who arrives here because the joy of the online experience is often found in random corners and the places chanced upon. Besides, surely the desire to get jiggy in a remote car park is not incompatible with lesser exploratory urges.  [read more]

My trip to Castlemilk feels like visiting a distant relative: familiar, friendly but not something you choose to do often. Several of my relatives live – or used to live in the scheme, one of Glasgow’s four major peripheral post-WW2 sprawls designed for the fleeing slum-dwellers of the 1950s and 60s, built on the city’s greenbelt in response to a desperate need for housing. The word adequate comes to mind - if having a flush toilet in your house can be called adequate.

Beyond suburbia, the schemes bypassed the sandstone villas, semis, bungalows and ‘four in a block’ cottages closer to the city centre. These were the ‘bought’ houses, unobtainable to the majority of Glasgow’s citizens, more used to hiding from the rent man chapping the doors of privately-owned hovels than applying for mortgages. Somehow Rent Man, like Insurance Man and Provicheck-Woman always arrived at night, usually Friday night, the universal payday, when women redeemed their pledges in the pawn shop while their men escaped to the pub or the (then) illegal bookies.
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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 Old Castle Road from Linn Park. The road, said to have been the original castle moat, gives some indication of its scale. In the end though, do I really care about buildings I can’t see? What am I supposed to conclude from these so-called ancient sites anyway?
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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 it sounds, since most of them qualify.

While tower blocks here crash down in the space of seconds, I’m intrigued by this plague, or rather, pandemic, of signs, like weeds on wasteground, cropping up all over the city. Known in the trade as ‘temporary directional signs’ or ‘AA signs’ they’re designed, as one leading manufacturer, Bristol-based TGS promises – ‘to provide a means for potential visitors to be directed straight to your development‘. Liasing with local road authorities, TGS, working with the AA and RAC, erects these plates, made of reflective-coated 3mm aluminium, in locations the length and breadth of the country. In other words, a place near you.
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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 weeks, I’m moved by their stories, their forlorn pleas to preserve these buildings, repositories of their fondest memories. Or as one former resident put it, the monument of my youth.
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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 scale of this sight, but it’s one being repeated all over the city as the tower blocks of the 60s and 70s come down. In Sighthill, Red Road and Shawlands, similar blocks are due for demolition, some more controversially than others. Glasgow Housing Association, the largest private landlord in Western Europe since the transfer of the city’s housing stock in 2003, is accused of ghettoisation by running down the city’s 24 hour concierge service and deliberately allowing viable housing to fall into disrepair.
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With Mercury in retrograde all communication is in a state of confusion. Since the house move in late April I’ve waited in vain for our new broadband connection and grown frustrated at my inability to make contact with the world. Then again, I tell myself, what’s the point of all this communication unless you have something to say?

Several years ago on a rare trip to London, I struggled to tell an acquaintance about an idea I had for a project based in Glasgow. I had only a loose notion – possibly some kind of film, possibly a piece of writing - about my love/hate relationship with my home city. At that time my Garnethill flat overlooked the middens behind a Hill Street tenement and my thoughts towards the city were dark. It’s about murder and architecture, I told my friend, unaware of my choice of words. Not death, but murder.
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