A non-linear account of High Street

Walking steadily and gazing upwards towards the strands of pathway and road between Saltmarket and Tollcross, I see the rise of a steep ascent. My head is forced to tilt on the axis of my nape; I now see the dusty vein that will carry me up the hill and traverse the seam that shares stitches in both the East End and City Centre. 

The material forming this rise in ground-level is made mostly of manure, plant moulds, sandy stone and other organic derivatives. Speckled along the route are dwellings made from latticed wattle and daub structures. Amidst jutting and fragmented wooden fascias, there are faces peering outward whose mouths are partially covered by scarves made of wool.

It is the Middle Ages and unbeknown to Medieval Glaswegians, the matter which constitutes their walk to the Cathedral will be altered and displaced.

I have come to the Middle Ages to seek the narratives of those organic matters embedded within the ascent of High Street toward the cathedral. These storied substrates are the bedding for civic society in Glasgow’s East End and speak of the palimpsestuous structure of negotiated power relations that became the underpinning for the city’s society.

Friaries have risen towards the West of High Street. Springing up amidst the thatched roofing of domiciles, the buildings provoke town folk to move upon shifting grounds to their holy appointments.

Edging their walks are pale roses, flattened mounds of meadow-grasses and holly climbing around the corner of High Street and Grey Friar’s Wynd. I continue to climb between downtown Mercantile towards St Mungo’s; to my left a red sandstone building makes itself visible.



The building has an intricate entrance, however my attention falls to the way in which my feet are at a steeper angle than I can remember them being the last time I walked up High Street, (sometime in February, 2020).

Beyond the friary is a meadow. Curtained by alder trees, I cannot see farther than those backlands, those edges of periphery. 

Muddling again toward the cathedral, silt and sand crumble softly and edge up in ripples around my feet. The land is becoming dry and malleable. Drifts of sanded wind creep over the other bodies shuffling along, either back home towards the commercial heart of the city, or upward like me upward, however I am not climbing the High Street in order to be ushered into medieval theology. Papaver Soniferum is growing in a clump on the unruly edge of the track.

Dust gets in my eyes. When I open them, I realise that my position is roughly two meters below that which I stood before.

The dust was in fact not dust. It was a material swirl of soot, soil and speech, brewed in the cradle of Tollcross, thick with spores from the monastic gardens and tingling with the pain of bent over spines huddling over fires and ambling across the thresholds between domesticity and worship. 

Instead of beams of wood threaded together to form housing, tall tenement buildings rise from the filth around me, touching the sky. Everything is rust black. The smell of fish encircles the vista before me now. It seems to be floating up from the River Clyde on the skirts of two women who pass by me, marching upwards, hair neatly pushed underneath matching aubergine-coloured bonnets.

The ascent of the High Street has been made less steep by the decree of those in charge of Victorian Glasgow. The land upon which I was ascending only seconds ago has been altered. The vein on the face of this city, connecting the Upper Old Town to the Newer Lower Town, has been dug out, left bare, collected, shifted, composited. Layered intricacies of mattered-being, such as...

a hunk of peat bog

  once affixed to the hoof of a cow,

   later falling off just East of Rottenrow and stood on by a girl of about five

   

Who had stomped up the hill most days

     On the way to what she might have named god's house

have been purposely moved or eradicated.

I felt the impact of sudden geographical movement in the bones of my legs. A carving out of the surface of High Street. My knees straightened and I wanted to know what happened to the ground I had been moving on only moments before. Who had taken it? Where had it moved to? Which microbial life lived within it now?

Excavating the hidden narratives of those embedded beings seems a standpoint to tell a story from. The changing landmass of High Street and its sister streets, wynds and riggs is a story.

Embroidered wattle and daub, 2020 - I find that embroidery allows me to explore the material quality of substances that I cannot access immediately or have never experienced/seen/touched before except in imagination.