Site-as-memory: Rottenrow

Peeling to the left now, at the juncture between High Street and what is known as Rottenrow, I can see rubble forming in the distance. A building is being gutted. As I get nearer I see that the midsection of this building has been sliced open with great precision to reveal guts of steel and a bowel laden with fragmented rooms. 

I find that I have again been hauled into another piece of time, one that is far from both Victorian and Medieval. It looks like my own time, but slightly out, slightly behind. Recognisable snippets of things reveal themselves to me, such as a round of chewing gum pressed with conviction between a lamppost and a railing and, below it on the tarmac, a shard of CD. Those glimmers of the twenty-first century lead me left on Rottenrow toward a mess of jutting brick. The building that now kneels down in front of me, as if someone has broken both its legs, has been chosen as the next to go in an abrupt overhaul of the townscape. 

Turning my head I see the street sign: ROTTENROW. I recall someone saying that it was a Gaelic phrase meaning ‘road of kings’. The ‘kings’ must have been those who marked themselves as members of the clergy, the cathedral spokespeople, the ones who ascended the High Street to deliver the message of theology to the people both physically and socio-culturally beneath them. Did Rottenrow also have something to do with rats? I ponder. Both rats and kings rely on the structures around them in order to maintain their roles in society. The slick curve of an underground sewer has the same appearance in candlelight as that of the rounded sides of a church stoup filled with holy water. 

As I get closer, I see that the demolition of this building is releasing clouds of brick dust, and in doing so, puffs of memory escape the confines of that place. All the thought processes conjured by everyone who entered this building are dried onto window panes, who in turn slip down the face of the bulldozed structure like sheet tears. Behind those windows stood midwives and new mothers amidst the frothy haze of newborn fragility. I am walking towards the demolition site of a maternity hospital and I can hear crying and laughing and that high pitched scream that escapes the mouths of new flesh. 

Neighbouring the side of what is left of the hospital are banks of moss-laden grass, an oak tree and some smaller hawthorn trees. An alder scales the largest bank and one of its drooped branches touches the sides of a pile of pulled-down facade. The hospital once contained pioneers in gynecology and it was first built in 1834. In the beginning it was known as the Glasgow Lying-In Hospital and Dispensary. I think about women who laid in wards for several weeks after giving birth, the act of which was seen as a key aspect of post-birth recovery. Confinement  can be a method to condense something, to compress a hundred in-labour screams into a tight particle of dust and let it float out from the ward it was kept in for a hundred years. The dust settles on the soil surrounding a patch of ferns that look a bit dismal. I bend down towards the fern and lift one of its fronds. I know that it is called a Lady Fern and I wonder if the material substrates of a demolished maternity hospital exist within its DNA.

Lady Fern clump embroidery, 2020