Scottish Architecture

Mark Chalmers

The media – of which I grudgingly accept this weblog is a small part – thrives on contention, scare-mongering and bogeymen. Issues which excite public feeling are its currency, and campaigning journalism sometimes generates stories which run for months. All the better, since as my grandfather used to say, “they ay need to find something to fill up the papers wi.”

Missing children, dead pop stars and pollution are three habitual column-fillers; whilst the parameters of the first two are pretty obvious, the nature of pollution has changed over the years. No doubt early editions of Blackwood’s Magazine and its predecessors complained about the poor sanitation of the Old Town: the gutters were open sewers, and the Nor’Loch was a giant cess pool. This pollution made cholera and typhoid almost endemic, and it took the Age of Enlightenment to fix Edinburgh’s plumbing. In Victorian Glasgow, the air was a choking soup of pollutants – sulphurous vapours from works like Parkhead Forge, Dixon’s Blazes and many other giant foundries; also chemical fumes from Charles Tennant’s works, the alkali plant which built the world’s tallest chimney in an attempt to fix the problem – or at least throw it a few miles further downwind.

Dundee, at the height of its reign as Jute City, had some of Europe’s tallest chimneys too, yet the worst pollution hung around inside, rather than in the skies above the city. Jute workers suffered from respiratory complaints due to the jute dust, and byssinosis (presumed by Lancastrians to be a complaint of cotton mill workers) was rife. In parallel, every town and city sat under a smog of coal smoke – coal and coke were the universal fuels of factory, mill, forge, kirk and home. The smog which contributed to London’s “pea soupers” was an issue in Scotland, too, often mixing with the sea haar to create a colloidal fug which hung around for days. Another by-product of the carbon economy, the Exxon Valdez was someone else’s disaster, news from a faraway place which we sympathised with – but when the Braer ran aground in Shetland, environmental pollution became our problem, too.

SInce the 1960’s we have gradually cleaned up our world, although noticeably more slowly than we fouled it up. The Victorians built treatment works and labyrinthine sewerage systems; the textiles industry discovered dust extraction; the oil companies paid for detergents, booms, and wildlife rescue centres. Perhaps the biggest, almost universal, change is that you can’t burn coal any more in cities. Between the Clean Air Acts of the 1950’s and the death of deep mining in Scotland, most coal either goes to old-fashioned thermal power plants like Cockenzie and Longannet, or is converted into coke for the shrinking steel industry. In each case, we either look on these sunset industries sadly, regretting their decline – or express relief that they have been exported to India and China, who are just starting to understand why the West gave up this dirty work. Both power stations and coking plants in the West have sophisticated flue gas treatment machinery fitted, anyway.

Other potential bêtes noires (literally…) were the big dirty lorries which used to annoy environmentalists so much. Not any more: Euro4 and Euro5-compliant engines burn low sulphur diesel oil, and use either exhaust gas recirculation or urea injection (AdBlue) to make their exhausts almost as clean as catalysed petrol engines. Refridgerants in air conditioning plant and freezers have been changed, replacing the ozone-depleting halon gases with friendlier alternatives, including ammonia. So what’s left? Surely everything in the city is coming up roses? Well, we have made huge efforts to fight air and water pollution, but in return the media have found new forms of “pollution”. The campaigners always need a target, whether it’s Donald Trump or traffic congestion in real life; or representations such as the Caithness uranium prospectors in James Miller's novel “A Fine White Stoor”. As a result, the story of the New Pollution proceeds like a Wagner opera.

The new causes of pollution are the things which middlebrow journalists class as “visual pollution”. We have dog crap, litter, chewing gum and graffiti – the first three are an annoyance, rather than being life-threatening. Graffiti is different. Its abstract patterns, giant cartoon animals and wry observations make up part of the city’s visual richness, creating colourful murals on the dreichest walls and animating hoardings in dead parts of town. Campaigns against graffiti writers are symptomatic of two things – a fundamental insecurity about folks’ right to self-expression in their own city, and the fact that the poison of political correctness has spread to every part of human life in this country. The fading paintwork on factory gables, the shop signs advertising goods from another era, the palimpsest of tags on lamp standards, the stencils which Banksy popularised, the cryptic punchlines scribbled on bus shelters – all of these animate the city. They remind us that other people are here, not just us, and that they make their mark too.

Graffiti has its enemies. The corollary of style magazines, makeover shows on TV, carping columnists, and politicians seeking re-election, is that attempts are made to sanitise everyday life. Not only risk and danger, but happenstance, clutter, and serendipity are being minimised. It would be terribly good if they could be made to disappear completely. The Valkyries screech at us – urban regeneration, pedestrianisation, traffic calming, red routes, green zones, tolerance areas, Twenty’s Plenty, Take your litter with you, Pick up after your dog. Are we happy for our little lives to be bound up by so many rules? Codification is a means of control, after all. Soon all traces of humans will disappear … leaving only prohibitions.

Elsewhere, the very “mixed uses” which the gurus of urbanism pretend to like are being wiped out by their very own urban villages. In Ediburgh, inner city breweries and whisky bonds have been replaced by flats, offices and supermarkets. The umbilical link to industrial processes which remind people where things come from, and which are our connection to the wider economy – the thing which built our cities in the first place – are being severed. In Kirkcaldy, linoleum plants and maltings are being replaced with flats. In Greenock, Scotland’s last marine engine builder has become waterside apartments. Scotland’s future is Glasgow Harbour (where the residents complain that the Govan shipyard on the opposite bank makes too much noise and is an eyesore); and the serried ranks of alien flats on Leith’s waterfront and Dundee’s docks.

The obliteration of graffiti is a step along the road towards a gated city, under 24-hour CCTV surveillance, with no litter, no graffiti, no smells or tastes on the air; no variety or grain. Nothing out of place. Only flats, and more identical flats. Mile after mile of tattie print flats. The only thing that will stop these flats is the Credit Crunch. I hate to raise the spectre of Wagner again, but in this context, it’s more appropriate to invoke him than Orwell. The Valkyries screamed down again and – puff – it was all over.

Neil Stephen

My friend is getting mangled by the credit crunch.

He’s built a couple of houses, can’t sell them, and the loan repayments are crippling. There is plaintive despair in his voice, and his weight loss suggests restless nights.

Meanwhile, the person largely responsible, a certain Gordon Brown, tucks in to eight-course dinners before telling us to be more careful when shopping. Tighten your belts, he preaches, as he slackens his and forces in the last wafer-thin mint.

You may think it unfair to blame our PM for an individual coming unstuck when taking a risk: no one said that the housing market was a sure thing. But the former chancellor, and his array of treasury experts, knew that the housing bubble was going to burst at some point – yet they encouraged everyone to borrow, borrow, borrow - to get on that housing ladder, no matter that you were living off credit, with nothing left to invest in a pension or put aside for a rainy day.

The big bad wolf of negative equity is about to blow away the dreams of thousands of people who borrowed when prices were high and interest was cheap. When front-loaded sweetener mortgage deals end, and jobs start getting lost, the prospect is grim.

Meanwhile, the mass house-builders who, like the wise piggy, thought they’d be safe with their Brookside-banal brick, tiles and bitmac – are facing the butcher’s machete. When houses are worth less than they cost to build, it’s no wonder that banks are now refusing to lend money and marking down assets.

The business model developers followed depended on increases in land value, not the bricks and mortar, with investors getting a quick return. So for the foreseeable future, as the market bumps along the trough of the 18-year housing cycle, this model is dead. Noddytown is finished.

It would be a bit unfair on the guys losing their jobs to call this a sparkling silver lining within the gloom – but it’s got to at least be seen as an opportunity to take stock. We do, after all, still have to deal with a housing shortage and a government target of building 35,000 houses a year.

So can we use this hiatus to find a means of not only building, but developing places and communities that are much better than we’ve been doing?

Public money is tight and banks have pulled down the shutters (and we can’t get the Highland Housing Fair off the drawing board), so how do we find the means to build the equivalent of a new Inverary or Edinburgh New Town, where value is built-in to the bricks and mortar?

A clue may be found in an unlikely place - the Ministry of Defence, usually noted for wasting vast amounts of taxpayers money on failed computer systems and unusable nuclear bombs. My pal Sandy’s practice was involved in designing housing for soldiers, to be done to a PFI model, funded by a high interest loan from the bank. After 25 years, the MoD would own the property, just when the buildings were coming to the end of their useful life and had to be replaced.

Then a bright chap in the ministry was struck by an idea. Rather than housing being built which decreases in value, why not design a high-quality community, so that in 25 years there is a huge uplift in property value, which both the bank and the taxpayer own? Why not follow the examples of market towns and planned villages, where good design results in high value?

So the bank is lending money cheaply, and the MoD is investing in quality, with the knowledge that their equity shares will yield a lucrative return. And, most importantly, the soldiers, and future generations, are getting a wonderful place to live.

But can this idea be transferred to Civvy Street ? People in the apparently sleepy Perthshire village of Comrie think so. After noticing that vital local services were being lost to high-end housing, the community realised that they would not have a future if things continued as they were – other than as a commuter belt village and lifeless holiday resort. So they set up a trust – an organisation that has dual limited company and charitable status.

Now they have a development plan which sets out ambitions for the next thirty years. The community has identified themes, then projects, then actions. And because, like the MoD model, there is a vision of a community improving and gaining value, they have found funding easy to access.

They are well on their way to restating vital services in their village, giving opportunities for business to expand, and providing housing for old and young alike. Local landowners, whether private or public, are buying in to the masterplan. Strategic support is coming from the planning department and service providers. And capital is pouring in from housing providers and private investors.

But most of all, it has the backing of a community where long-term regeneration and sustainability have become core values.

All of us share this aspiration: these are the buzzwords of politicians and architects alike. But Comrie is actually delivering. If communities could decide how they should develop, they would all choose to be beautiful places, with good services and attractive housing.

We would not allow our councils to flog off land to developers, meaning that we lose control of our assets. We would not impose local plans which have no relevance or commitment to the community. We would not allow development to be dictated by the whims of developers or stuck within a reactive and conflict-rivven planning process.

And we would definitely not choose the results: the dreadful roundabout planning and Tescoland of Inverness, the stack-them-high condominiums of the Clyde and Leith, or the failed “regeneration” projects of urban Scotland, where well-meaning social housing providers have built boxes then ticked boxes, only for their public investments to end up failed communities within a decade.

Laudably, the Scottish Government says that they want us to start building high quality sustainable communities. But the Scottish Sustainable Communities Initiative fails to describe a vehicle for delivering its aims.

Strangely, it asks that developers should bring forward proposals of high quality, which can then access assistance for community consultation. Never has a cart been placed so firmly before a horse: as Comrie shows, the community must come first –then the development.

The government has to be the facilitator to allow our communities to grow. They should fund setting up urban and rural community trusts which can be used to provide a legal structure and an investment vehicle for communities to flourish. This is not a new idea – it has been done to great success throughout Dorset.

They should offer funding for master planning and community consultation and advice about where to seek professional help and what to look for (perhaps there’s a role for the Lighthouse staff here, where they could get in to communities and use their communication skills productively).

Once a long-term development plan is in place, local and central government should then help communities deliver their ambitions, by putting in infrastructure in advance, such as water and sewerage, local schools and roads. Service providers should plan for demand, rather than react to demand.

And the big bonus for the developers is that the unidentified risk in buying unserviced land is reduced – they can start competing on quality, building to the appropriate density and mix, as required by the masterplan.

None of this will help my friend who is still losing money and sleep. A consolation may be if his misery encourages the introduction of the Land Value Tax, which would flatten out the boom bust economic cycle, and stop the present angst happening to future generations.

Perhaps Gordon Brown will chew over this, as well as bio-fuels and eco-towns, and Alex Salmond will consider an alternative local tax, as he picks his way through the litter-strewn streets of Glasgow’s east end. Both would agree that they want to see sustainable, beautiful communities.

But sentiment is not enough – it is about delivery, and this is our opportunity. Wimpey and the like are down but not out, and when they awake, we have to put them to work – on our terms.

Mark Chalmers

Gordon Cullen was first and foremost a Scot, who worked all over the world as a designer and architectural writer, gaining a particular reputation for solving urban problems. By the time he returned to Scotland in the 1970’s to work in Aberdeen and Glasgow, he was an old man, afflicted with cataracts born of decades peering at his trademark pencil line drawings. Yet his plans were far-seeing, and he coined the term “townscape”. He originally came to Aberdeen in the early-1970’s to plan a new town outside Maryculter first for Salvesens, the whalers turned housebuilders; then for Stewart Milne, yet although years were spent developing the proposals and lobbying, neither scheme went ahead.

Cullen returned to Aberdeen in 1985, when the Scottish Development Agency invited his consultancy, Price & Cullen, to undertake a study of the city centre. The initial brief was to examine Union Terrace Gardens, with a view to roofing over the Inverness railway line, which would mask the noise and fumes of the railway plus the new Denburn Link road, as well as increasing the size of the city’s “green lung”, and remaking connections across the valley of the Denburn. The gardens were envisaged as an urban pastoral, with green terraces to host a Grand Jatte-style picnic: dejeuner sur l’herbe, or maybe pieces on the grass. As it happens, recent proposals to relocate the Peacock Arts Centre pick up on the same concept.

Cullen recognised the importance of the Gardens, but by the time the study was presented in 1986, he had extended its scope to encompass the whole city centre. He first mooted the development now known as Union Square, by flooding the area behind Market Street in order to extend the harbour and form an artificial lagoon around which housing could be built, along the same lines as St. Katherine’s Dock in London. Union Square, in a greatly diluted form, is currently under construction. Cullen also advocated turning Castlegate back into a transport hub, pedestrianising Union Street, and regenerating the waterfront, by sowing the seed of an Oil Experience Centre on Queen’s Links.

His bravest proposal, however, was to create a tramway circuit in the city centre– and that struck a raw nerve. Gordon Cullen recognised that the considerable traffic congestion of the 1980’s could only increase– but he also saw that trams were a solution. At least two factors stymied his plan, though: the first was that the study proposed that a “major, but architecturally undistinguished department store should be relocated for aesthetic reasons”. As reported in Cullen’s biography, the chairman of the Planning Steering Group was a regional director of the aforementioned store, and resistance was felt almost immediately. One of the most important factors in Gordon Cullen’s thinking was that whatever we build should tread lightly, yet the eastern end of George Street still suffers from the presence of the former Norco Hoose, “the most architecturally challenged building in Aberdeen”.

Cullen should perhaps have disentangled the Norco idea from the tram idea, rather than letting both die together, but the second obstacle was even more intractable: the shadow of past Council policy.   We know that trams work efficiently in Aberdeen as people-movers– after all, they ran for almost a century, co-existing with people, horses, steam lorries and motor cars, then finally the bus. In fact, trams are unique, since they are a tested solution rather than an untried notion. The system carried up to 17 million people a year, but in 1958, the Corporation melted down the family silver by driving all the cars out to the Sea Beach and setting them alight in a giant pyre. Aberdeen still lives with the civic shame of having destroyed dozens of sophisticated modern tramcars– many less than ten years old– which were acknowledged as being the best in Britain. You can perhaps understand why the reversal which Cullen proposed, only a generation later, would be difficult to accept.

The truth is that Aberdeen Corporation lost its nerve in the 1950’s. In 1940, Provost Mitchell expressed the conviction that although tramcars may “go by the board” some day, “that would not happen for a very long time in Aberdeen”. New tram cars were ordered from English Electric in the late 1940’s, the “Streamliners”, which attracted favourable reviews and were envied by other cities. Aberdeen had the youngest fleet in Scotland. Fashion, however, turned against the tram.   English cities were giving up tramcars in favour of buses. Statistics were used to bolster the case for closure– in 1955 it was noted that 38 new trams would have been needed in Aberdeen during the following seven years, at a cost of £10000 each– yet in 1953, the tramways made a profit of £8667, whereas the Corporation buses lost £43539. That was despite bearing the costs of the new Streamliner cars which entered service in 1950. Lies, damned lies and …

The tram is clean and efficient, since it uses electricity generated in the north of Scotland by hydro-power; it can typically carry more passengers than the bus, it offers a smoother ride, and despite bus lanes, trams can sustain a greater passenger density since they accelerate faster than buses.   Dundee had plans to introduce modern Continental-style articulated trams in the early 1950’s, yet by 1956 the tracks had been ripped up. Only Leeds, Sheffield, Glasgow and Blackpool were left with trams after Aberdeen’s system closed; Blackpool clung onto its trams, and tellingly, Sheffield began to consider their re-introduction in the early 1970’s– little more than ten years after they had been scrapped.   If the trams had only managed to hang in for another few years, fashion would have turned again in their favour.

As with so many Scottish Development Agency masterplans, Cullen’s proposals were presented, then quietly placed in a drawer and forgotten about. Yet in those same few years following the death of the tram in the late 1950’s, also went the many details which provide colour and grain and interest, the facets of Gordon Cullen’s notion of “townscape”. In George Street there was the famous oversize watch outside Kemp the jewellers– stuck eternally at 7.21– along with old-fashioned swan-necked streetlamps; a catenary of tram wires overhead; sunshades used to protect shopfronts along the south-facing side of the street; and the roadway’s patterning of granite setts, with Adamant slabs on the pavements. The matters of scale, detail, texture are what separates conducive city centres from monotonous shopping malls.

Townscape, even when it is merely a background to everyday life, is conscious that when we build for one purpose, we also build for the eyes of others. We create the fabric of the city. Cullen’s proposal would have turned the Castlegate back from a windblown desert into the transport hub which it originally was, a great urban hinge on the Bridges route. Vehicles are of course part of that backdrop– but when you think of European cities, you invariably see trams. Aberdeen, on the other hand, now suffers daily gridlock at Haudagain, the Bridge of Don, and the mediaeval Brig o’ Dee. Building more roads will only move the gridlock somewhere else for a while, it cannot reduce or remove, since more and more cars and lorries are coming in to the city.   We ignored Gordon Cullen’s prophetic report, but the tram may yet have its day – although that day might well dawn in Edinburgh …

Mark Chalmers

Somewhere in our past, a lone kilted figure looks out over a herd of Highland cattle, knee deep in heather and thistles.   Through the mist, the pipes skirl, a towerhouse glowers and a burn tumbles, brown with peaty water running off the moors.   It’s a scene from a shortbread tin: this is the heritage which Walter Scott invented for us in the 1820’s, and which the Victorians assidiously set to work, marketing their engineering might by pretending that its forges and steel mills were Brigadoon, not Bridgeton.   Which, I guess, is why the spring clips we still use to clamp paper to a board are stamped “WAVERLEY”.

The bulldog clip is a seemingly simple wee gadget of tempered spring steel.   It comes in many varieties, yet all consist of a barrel spring with two lever-shaped handles.   Every household has several of them, tucked away in the back of a drawer, or the dusty reaches of the loft.   I first relied on its vice-like when I was a schoolboy taking art classes– several sets of strong jaws clamped a large sheet of Fabriano paper to a board, and that move allowed me to go outside to sketch.   Through its life, the bulldog clip evolved, and its highest evolution is the Waverley Clip.

The bulldog clip was reputedly invented at the end of the 19th Century in Birmingham, where experimental metallurgists developed modern spring steel, and where the British stationery industry grew up, centred on dip pen nib manufacturing.   The technology quickly spread…   MacNiven & Cameron was a firm of printers and stationers, originally founded as Nisbet MacNiven, a paper maker, in 1770 at Balerno.   They developed as a stationery wholesaler, after moving into Edinburgh in 1788, and for many years they had a printing works at 23 Blair Street, in the heart of the Old Town.   The brothers John and Donald Cameron became involved in 1840, and the firm’s name changed to MacNiven & Cameron in 1845.

Duncan Cameron, another brother, invented the Waverley nib: its narrow waist, with an upturned point rather than a convex point, took the extreme point of the pen off the paper and made writing smoother: it was first manufactured for the company by Gillott in 1864, and later by others.   In 1881, the company diversified, and the Oban Times newspaper was acquired, and was run for a time by Duncan, then his son Waverley Cameron– the boy being named after the pen, rather than vice versa!   As their business sought growth, MacNiven & Cameron were one of the first to develop the bulldog clip’s potential, and expanded their “Waverley” brand to include the Waverley Clip.

Premier Grip, which has been in production for a century, claims to be the “original bulldog clip”, but Myers make their Foldback clip, Rexel their Boston clip, and Perry their Victoria clip… all of which are variations on the same theme, yet the Waverley clip is perhaps the highest evolution.   It bears no ornamentation, nor decorative tooling, just a simple fluting of the handles for strength.   Its name, in chunky moderne lettering, is pressed into the steel lips of the clip.   It’s appealing simply because it is the ultimate in unregarded objects– even though artists of all sorts come into close contact, and many folk must have pondered its origins, you’ll be damned hard pressed to find an enthusiast for bulldog clips!

The clip’s trade name and trade dress recalls the powerful reach of Walter Scott, author of the famous “Waverley novels”, the first of which was published in 1814; his portrait was habitually combined with the McNiven & Cameron’s slogan on product packaging: “They come as a Boon and a Blessing to men: The Pickwick, the Owl, and the Waverley Pen”.   Scott is shown complete with bangs of flowing hair and a high collar, but of course he did not endorse the nib or the clip, since he died in before they went into production.   Brands like Waverley are strong and almost incorruptible simply because we know that their reputation grew from quality and longevity, and they emerged before the onset of corporatism and the relentless cost-cutting which is really the destruction of value.   If the clip was launched today, it would be pressed in plastic in a sweatshop factory east of Suez, then packaged to sell on price, rather than quality.

Eventually MacNiven & Cameron bought a factory at Watery Lane, Bordesley, Birmingham and manufactured clips, nibs and other things for themselves, from 1900 to 1964. By the 1960’s, the stock-in-trade of their factory was the barrel spring-type paper clip, although some nib manufaturing continued to the end, mainly for the Indian market.   After that, the company was based at Waverley Works in Edinburgh: thus, some Waverley Clips are stamped “Made in England”, and later ones “Made in Scotland”.   The remnants of the company then relocated again, still making stationery under the Waverley Cameron name, to Dunkeld Road in Blairgowrie.   That too became the Waverley Works… which is where the Waverley clip ended its days.

MacNiven & Cameron’s progress follows a familiar trend: a slow decline from Victorian times, firstly they close an old factory in the Black Country, as engineering firms all around them retrench; then their offices in the heart of Edinburgh were shut– thanks to the inexorable rise of property values, the buildings were worth more than the business they contained; finally to a modern industrial unit in a small provincial town– always moving further north, to lower overheads and the margins of the industrial belt.   The business disappeared– one day, Walter Scott will be rehabilitated– he fell spectacularly out of fashion at some point last century– but the clips are still going strong.

If you want to read more about our tartan traduction, I can suggest Murray Grigor’s Scotch Myths, Carl Dougall’s more serious-minded Painting the Forth Bridge, and McX by Todd McEwen, an outsider’s witty view of the Scots psyche.

Image from Maynard's Wine Gums advert – copyright Aardman Animation – used with permission.