With the help of Kate McAllan, I ran Wild City walkshops with pupils from two schools on Glasgow’s Southside, Shawlands Academy and Annette Street Primary School. We had a full school day with each, in late April and early June respectively, and with both groups we explored the local area, making notes and sketches as we went, before working these up back at school into maps and posters.
Wild City is a project exploring the diversity of wildlife within the city, and alongside that ecological diversity we were also interested in linguistic diversity. At Shawlands we’d asked to work with pupils who spoke more than one language, and between them the 12 S1 pupils could speak Spanish, German, Slovakian, Polish, Czech, Russian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Arabic, Romanian and Romani – or “gypsy languages” as one of their speakers said.
Leaving the school we turned into a nearby back lane, and looked at the flora outwith the tended gardens – escapees from those gardens, and incomers blown in by the wind, or dropped by birds, flourishing in cracks and crevices.
We stopped and sketched by an extensive spread of cotoneaster in Tantallon Road. This, and other street names hereabouts, are taken from Walter Scott’s works: Peveril Avenue, Quentin Street, Dinmont Road, Ravenswood Drive. For the kids, and many adult residents, these and other names will accrue particular associations, to do with the people and events, major and minor, of their own lives, unconnected to their literary source. (I grew up on a Lady Helen Street, and it was only as an adult that I had any curiosity as to who ‘Lady Helen’ might have been – that I was even able to form the question.)
In Queen’s Park we stopped at a stone platform. What its purpose was, now or in the past, none of us could tell, but it served us as a kind of ‘outdoor classroom’. I asked the pupils to collect something fallen for a quick ‘show and tell’, and once we’d regrouped they presented and sketched their finds –the twigs, leaves, mosses and feathers that had caught their eye.
As we walked round to the pond I began to wonder if it was a mistake to bring a group of distractable, excitable young teenagers here. In fact they were absorbed by the scene, sitting on a wall to chat and sketch, seemingly calmed by the water and the movement of ducks and other birds across it. We talked about describing the spot in other languages, and there are notes above in Slovak and German. Despite the calm, some of the Roma girls said they were disturbed to see frogspawn, since frogs are considered dark in their culture.
Back at school, we spent the time until lunch making large-scale, coloured, personal maps of the route we’d taken earlier. The idea was for pupils to work in pairs, and some did, while others gravitated to working individually, or in threes. Some of the text was written bilingually – here in Romanian.
After lunch we discussed rewilding the city, which not everyone thought was necessarily a good idea, before composing slogans for a wild city, including variations on the motto ‘Let Glasgow Flourish’, and names for wild days-of-the-week. The pupils selected some of these to write with brush and ink on A4 card, which they did entirely in English, with admirable concentration – and without spillages. I’d suggested they might coin new place-names for places we passed today, or which they know otherwise, but I think the only renaming was for the city itself,
Glaswan.
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It was a warm, sunny day in early June when Kate and I arrived at Annette Street Primary School to meet the P6 class. Again all had languages other than English, mainly Slovak and Romanian.
I began by asking them how our project title ‘Wild City’ might be translated, and was offered the Slovak ‘Mesto Velki’, but there was some debate among the kids as to what ‘velki’ meant – some said ‘wild’, others said ‘big’. Looking in an online dictionary later, I think the latter, with perhaps ‘neskrotený’ or ‘nepestovaný’ for wild, in the sense of uncultivated or undomesticated. (On the
relevant page of the dictionary, it’s striking to see how many Slovak words are offered as options for ‘wild’, reflecting the wide range of meanings the English word has accrued, to do with human behaviour as well as the natural world.)
Again we started with a walk, up the street towards Govanhill Library and Baths; we walked around the block they form the main part of.
In sunny, traffic-free Ardbeg Lane we found plants including buddleia, willowherb, sticky-willy, nipplewort and grasses were thriving.
Round the corner in in Kingarth Street, we found a cluster of brightly painted and bountiful planters containing strawberries (at the flowering rather than fruiting stage), herbs such as chives and oregano, pansies and plantains, fronted with creeping buttercup.
Vehicles used Kingarth Lane to deliver to some of the businesses based in the block. It was messier and grimier than Ardbeg Lane, with fewer plants growing on the ground below the walls here, but we admired how ferns had colonised the brickwork. When I’d been there in January the pipe had been leaking, and the ferns were thriving in the damp. Now everything was much drier, but they seemed to be clinging on nonetheless. Round the corner on the main road, Calder Street, a mouse ran across the pavement and occasioned great excitement among the children. More so than any birds we spotted, but I suppose seeing birds is much more commonplace.
Back in school I sketched on the flip-chart an outline of the route we took, a basic square around the Library and Baths with an extension to the school, somewhat like a letter q. I wrote down some of their suggestions as to what we saw where, then asked them in pairs to make their own maps on large sheets of card. Many of used the ‘q’ blueprint, adding their own drawings, decoration and words, especially in the centre of the square. Most words were English, though one pair wrote in Romanian. Later we composed words and phrases for a Wild City manifesto, with Wild Days of the Week again a popular option.
Like the older kids they seemed to enjoy the challenge of writing with ink. When I asked how they’d found it, one said ‘not too easy, but not too difficult’ – which I suppose is where you want to aim in any session. Again they wrote in English. Speaking with a teacher after the session, I was told few were literate in their home languages. I wonder how a child’s bilingualism can be better integrated into school, given it may be a language their teachers don’t speak, and the child may not have had a chance to become literate in it. Mapping the locality certainly seem to be one way, with the mix of visual art and writing – images as well as words, and referents common to all in the classroom.
I’m struck by the names of these streets with their now opaque meanings. In the contemporary city these names, with their Brythonic and Gaelic roots, are archaic. ‘Ardbeg’ is ‘small point’; Kingarth is ‘hill head’, and ‘Calder’ is ‘rapid water’ (or possibly ‘hazel’). The closest associations I have are with other places with these names: Ardbeg, on the south coast of the Isle of Islay, and the site of one of the island’s many distilleries; and there are three Calders – East, Mid and West – in the Lothians, as well as several rivers of that name. Another kind of wildness, perhaps, a reminder that the city we have cultivated and domesticated is the surface image on top of a deep, dark body of water.
Ken Cockburn
