Leaky sites: Polmadie Burn

Still with my feet in the burn, I lay back and fall asleep. I begin dreaming of another body of water that I visited in my own time, about a mile and a half away over the Clyde. It is another city-dwelling burn and as the water is pooling around my upper thighs now, I can see this other burns’ garish appearance as it envelopes the vista in front of me. Water is lapping at my hips and arms; the temperature of this water is unpleasant and I feel like my skin is burning. I look down and, although seconds before I was well aware I was drifting into a dream, the appearance of the burning flesh of my wrists and waist as the green water laps against them sends me sitting upright. There is no pain. I peer at my blistering skin - I can hear the atomic liquid take hold of my flesh. I grab my right ear and toxic froth spills from it into my palm. Coughing now, I pull my body from the water but the pull of the wet swathe is dragging me back in. Waking up, I can see that Moledinar Burn is once again before me. Moledinar would have practically been an open sewer back in Medieval times, as systems to improve sanitation would not have appeared until the renaissance. The other water body washing over my dream was brimming with a different kind of waste.

Polmadie Burn flows around the edge of Richmond Park and pools into the Clyde from the southside. The word Polmadie is tied to the words pool and god in Scottish Gaelic and it seems fitting to think of the burn as a rich, elongated pool who just so happens to have a kind of pre-eminent power over those who live within, and by, it’s waters.

Polmadie is within Shawfield, a part of Glasgow who’s visible surface is today pockmarked by arid trees and shrubs, only growing lush if within short distance to the riverbed. During the early 20th century this dry stretch of land used to be home to various industrialised spaces, such as a waste incineration plant, a railway depot and a chemical works named J & J Whites. Shawfield was the backdrop to manufacturing endeavours within Glasgow, with shipbuilding taking place along the Clyde and a thriving textile district just to the north of it. Shawfield is in the present day a ghost of the industrial revolution and there are zombies living in its soil.

In January 2020 I walked to Polmadie Burn for a second time, after being told about it in 2019 and making a trip during the late summer. I already found the site to be leaky, in the way that visiting it was done so because of rumour and escaped stories from various sources. The burn had almost become mythic when I visited it and witnessed it’s green, charged waters. 

Why was the water this way/in this state/of this hue? According to regional newspapers, secretions of a chemical, which laid visibly dormant, had begun flowing into the burn, causing it to become tinged. The chemical was described as hexavalent chromium, a compound that is highly dangerous to living organisms and organic life. Why was it in Polmadie Burn?

The tit bits of information I garnered from the papers was not enough to point me to how this compound had ended up visible within a body of water. I instead began to use the Mitchell Library to find accounts of Shawfield in order to locate the beginnings of pollution in the burn. The textile industry was an enormous part of Glasgow’s industrial past and I thought that perhaps this compound was derived from the chemical processes used before measures, controls and regulations were introduced to inhibit the dumping of chemical waste into public water bodies. 

Stumbling across an online forum on the website Glasgow Guide, I found a long thread of comments regarding Polmadie Burn and it’s atomicity. The culprit chemical works was named as J & J Whites, also known as Shawfield Chemical Works, established in 1820 and producing chromium-based chemicals for use in the textile and paint industry. Discarding chemical waste was permitted during the 19th century, which explains why the dumped toxic seep existed in the first place. J & J Whites were responsible for poisoning both the surrounding lands AND their workers, with work-related deaths at a high due to the carcinogenic hexavalent chromium. Breathing in this compound over a period of time caused workers to experience life-threatening lung conditions and they were nicknamed the ‘white’s whistlers’ due to the whistling sound workers’ nasal cavities made. The compound was eroding living tissue in both human and more than-human-others for over 100 years. 

Embedded within the Glasgow Guide forum, there is a post regarding a letter written by a student from a local high school called Julie Chricto in 1994. Julie wrote the letter in order to draw local media attention to the toxic legacy of her surrounding landscape. She pleads with the powers that be to notice this hazardous history and the fact that it is still affecting residents of the locale. 

Julie’s humility is incredibly striking to me, and I remember upon a walk to the leaky site of Polmadie Burn in early 2020 I felt deeply saddened that her resilient voice had not been heard and that the problem of toxic waste was persisting in the area over 20 years on.

Letter-writing still seems an apt way to bring to the fore issues that may be invisible or insignificant to wider and greater powers. I had a deep urge to reply to Julie’s letter in some way, and I began to paint images of the burn and surrounding neighbourhood in order to try and understand it as a leaky site in both physical nature and Glaswegian folklore.

The way in which an image could describe the state of a place without being overtly figurative or descriptive in its visual language seemed a means to ‘reply’ to Julie in a way that would invite deeper exploration of the polluted matter of the burn. I began making paintings of the burn and surrounding area, using layers of atomic hues and pastel washes to transform the painted surface into an investigation of the site in question. 

Atomic Remains, Remains Atomic, acrylic on curtain, 2019

This painted series could be a reply to Julie Chricto, a way of communicating with an ally from the past who shared the same environmental concerns as I do. Through numerous Googling I cannot find her name or details lodged anywhere. I have wondered if she read in the Herald that the burn is atomic once more. Or perhaps she understood when she wrote her letter that Polmadie Burn would continually hold memories of toxicity in this way, whether physically through its watery flesh, or through the telling of the chemical-laced stories. Perhaps Julie knew that at points in time, chemical-laden recollections would splatter the banks of the burn, forcing humans to dredge up the past to try and remediate the persistent damage.

Himalayan Balsam, a prying species that flourishes along the edge of the Clyde and near the mouth of Polmadie Burn