Mulched Identities

Sulphur Tuft fungi grows on dead wood near Saltmarket
It's genus name, Hypholoma, translates as 'mushroom with threads'

Upon waking, I shift my body and feel not water around me but warm air. I stand up and drift away from Moledinar Burn, edging downwards across the topography of East End Glasgow towards Saltmarket. The air is thick and smoggy - dark patches of sky linger above and buildings have risen up from small plots. High rises made of slabs of stone appear as thin slices squashed together to form long streets of tenement housing. Downtown Mercat Cross is packed. I can hardly see past my own nose because of the sheer business of the space in front of me.

Arresting smells of industrial toil linger here. This end of the city has become a mulched neighbourhood, with identities, existence and survival laid bare on doorsteps, intertwining with the smoke bellowing up-land from Shawfield. 

I am in the late Victorian period. The manufacturing progress has infiltrated cities across the UK and the limits of what a city can be geographically and industrially are beginning to edge into non-urbanised territories. The tenement housing I am surrounded by is indicative of the concept of creating civic residential areas in small spaces based on an increasing demand for homes. I know that within each home, there will be maybe two or three generations of family living within a few square metres, making life incredibly dense and saturated, spatially and with regards to the cloying agency of newly developed materials such as coal, lead and iron ore. 

I sit on a doorstep and peer across the street to the identical tenements facing me from the opposite side. These tall buildings are made of blocks of red sandstone. The sandstone is this hue due to its iron-rich substrates, forming over 200 million years ago when Scotland was mainly an arid desert-land. The blocks were imported from Dumfries and Ayeshire, and although quarries did exist in Glasgow, the imported bricks were cleaner looking and less crumbly. The ‘rubblestone’ that could be found in the city’s quarries did not have a polishable appearance, and would often be used to build the back of tenements or the parts of buildings that were used by the lower classes. Beginning to think about social hierarchies, I remember that I had heard within my own time period that Glasgow has historically considered itself as class-neutral. The sprawling city-scape tells a different tale.

Three colours representing three types of displaced spoil: human-made, animal-made and plant-made

Embryonic, the layout of the streets of Glasgow existed in a tangle until sharp grids were designed and put in place for ease of movement from the East to the West. Thinking of the former embryonic street grid, I reconsider the displacement of the 'spoil', (and industry term for material moved during construction and/or civil engineering), that made up the ascent of High Street in order to make it less of a climb for the Victorians and future Glaswegians. That mound of spoil contained an archive of thoughts, conversations, arguments, laughter. It bore witness to the way human endeavour can shift the spine of a city. Practices of erasure are implicit within conquering land and mastering wildlife throughout each period of time. I wonder about the erasures that will take place in Saltmarket and its sister wynds and begin to grieve for those bits of matter that became, and will become, loose, lost, compressed or saturated. I am thinking of soot, soil and speech, mulched together to form a materially ‘true’ account of this place, deemed as spoil and removed from the scape.

Are the homes I am witnessing around me classed as slums? If I am thinking of erasure, then perhaps I am too thinking of avoidance. Karen Barad laces accounts of frontier-driven colonial and imperial conquest, where historically white folks have tended to speak of the unknowns of a place and its people as terra incognita or the not-yet-civilised, with the material intimacies that those unknowns harbour. Slums fit into the category of not-yet-civilised, as decreed by the higher classes as they are usually created for, and inhabited by, those tarnished with the brush of ‘working class’. During late Victorian Glasgow, the labourers worked in the East of the city, as the West of the city had been turned over to ventures in academia. Here, in Saltmarket, the air around me is metaphysically threaded and mulched with traces of toil by human, animal and plant agents. I take a deep breath and realise that I am breathing in those mulched identities.

Red sandstone, biro on paper, 2020