Join us at 6.50pm on Thursday 27th April at The Deep End on Nithsdale St for the second of our 2023 #SouthGlasgowHeritageNights events – an illustrated talk from the After The Garden Festival team, followed by Q&A.

Places are limited – BOOK HERE

The 1988 Garden Festival changed how the world saw Glasgow, and how it saw itself. It lives on only in people’s memories as the buildings, objects and artworks from this temporary event are gone forever – or are they?

Join Urban Prehistorian Kenny Brophy, Project Maestro Lex Lamb, and Holder of the Official Garden Festival Umbrella Gordon Barr to learn how they have used crowdsourcing to build an ever growing digital record of the hundreds of pavilions, sculptures and attractions that made up the Festival.

“Items and memories are scattered across the globe with stories to tell: from the large (the Coca-cola Roller Coaster, now in Suffolk), to the small (a Garden Festival tea-towel, now in Papua New Guinea); we’ve identified surviving artefacts, ephemera and even some of the original plants and gardens that delighted visitors over that unforgettable summer, more than thirty years ago.

We’ll outline what we’ve learned so far about how the 1988 Festival was put together, taken apart and spread around the world, with the help of hundreds of individual submissions and leads, with plenty hidden in plain sight closer to home – and we’re learning more every day!

But we still haven’t found the giant tap, sorry.”

To donate directly to support the ATGF project please visit: https://tinyurl.com/AtGF1988

[Header image kindly reporoduced with permission. Photograph © Donald Whannell]

Book your tickets here on Eventbrite

TIMINGS:

6.50pm – Doors Open / Registration
7pm – Illustrated talk from the ATGF team followed by Q&A
8.15pm – Ends

More #SouthGlasgowHeritageNights coming soon

The post #HeritageNights talk: Taps aff? What happened after the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival appeared first on SGHET.

History teacher and new SGHET board member Thomas Oldham reports from the second half of the 7-day archaeological excavation at the site of First Hampden Park in Crosshill and reveals where they got to with exploring and mapping the world’s first modern football stadium …

Firstly, apologies for the delay in getting out report number 2. After the excitement of the first day, day two of the dig in Queen’s Park Recs. came to a quick halt after asbestos was found. From painful personal experience I can confirm that this is not stuff that we need to look any further into. It is horrible, should have been banned long before it was.

With the first pit’s findings inconclusive, attention then shifted to the geophysics work on the bowling green and Kingsley Gardens. And this is where my quip about ‘why dig?’ in my previous report comes home to roost…

Despite having a map seemingly showing us exactly where the pitch was, the digital mapping suggests it was actually a wee bit north and east. Or maybe other physical landmarks have also shifted a little? Either way, things were starting to show that everything is/was not quite as it seems in the archives. And this is why we dig!

With the new geophysics data in hand, the Kingsley Gardens dig began in earnest. Three plots were staked out and the turf was lifted (meanwhile the gardeners politely peeped to check their flowerbeds were untouched). Over time, all three sites revealed something quite flummoxing – a single plain of broken halves of bricks. Again, this is why we dig!

My instant instinct was that this was evidence of an early ‘astroturf’ – a pitch design to allow water to drain quickly through the turf and also maintain a good level surface.

Kieran and others from Archaeology Scotland had their own hypothesis – these bricks may actually have been the foundations of the stadium perimeter. After a lot of chat, digging and reflection on the wider history of the site they realised that this layer was probably the foundation of tennis courts that had been on the site.

Whatever is found in a dig can always be interpreted in a number of ways to support different hypotheses or versions of history, but therein is the joy of archaeology and history – however scientific and factual all the information laid in front of us is, something is always left to the imagination, or still has a question mark next to it.

We are invited to dream and wonder, and however recent the history under Kingsley Gardens, our imaginations were still wandering freely.

On Sunday 13th June 2021, on the site of the First Hampden Park, we were once again left to speculate, to theorise and to dream. Who knows what future investigations will reveal and confirm!

While football might not be coming home in its most visceral and physical form in 2021, we Scots / Glaswegians / Southsiders / Crosshill folk can remain safe in the knowledge that the game’s roots are snugly tucked up under some roses and neatly trimmed grass in the Southside of Glasgow.

As we at SGHET are a living, breathing and perpetually curious local heritage organisation I’d like to invite anyone with memories, knowledge or photos of Kingsley Gardens and First Hampden Bowling Club to share in the comments or get in touch with us directly.

Speculation and imagination are fun but knowledge and personal memories or stories are also great and we’d love to build on the various glimpses into and windows on the past that this archaeological dig has opened up.

By Tom Oldham

—

Images by Tom Oldham (SGHET) and Kieran Manchip (Adopt-a-Monument Project Officer, Archaeology Scotland)

Read Part One: First Hampden Park Archaeological Dig

Find out more about about the First Hampden Park archaeology project at: https://hampdencollection.com/4326-2/

Follow Adopt-a-Monument and Hampdeners on Twitter

Discover more about the footballing history of First Hampden, Second Hampden and more on guided walks at https://glasgowfootballtour.com/walking-tour

Crosshill at 150

This article is also part of a series of local history and heritage coverage we’re publishing to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the founding of Crosshill in 1871 as an independent police burgh before eventually being annexed to the city of Glasgow in 1891. See #Crosshill150 on social media,

The post First Hampden Park dig part 2: discoveries and speculations appeared first on SGHET.

History teacher and new SGHET board member Thomas Oldham digs into the archaeological excavation at First Hampden Park and what the Archaeology Scotland volunteers are hoping to find at the old site of the world’s first international football stadium …

So, it’s day one here at First Hampden. The tension is palpable and the excitement bubbling, ahead of what is expected to be a special and historic moment for Scottish football. The away team are wearing yellow and have arrived early – though their captain appears to be running a little late – that’s Kieran (Manchip, not Trippier), from Archaeology Scotland…

Kieran is a friendly and enthusiastic guy, and even has time to have a wee blether with me as we walk through the tunnel (of verdant green) towards his team (of volunteers…OK, OK, I’ll stop now)… Annoyingly he has already started answering my deep philosophical questions – he knows what idiots like me think of archaeology and is already infecting me with his enthusiasm. My inhibitions are not at all connected to the fact I’m English.

Surely there is no actual site of the fantastical early drubbing of England by Scotland (5-1) in 1882? Surely the English built the first purpose built international football stadium somewhere in England; and surely the English invented the passing game that we know today…It turns out First Hampden might have something to say about all that.

Quite what evidence they are hoping to find of the 5-1 drubbing I’m not sure, copious amounts of yeast from spilled celebratory pints? Huge chunks of chewed tobacco spat from nervous English mouths? Maybe a trophy?! Maybe there’s bleedin’ treasure down there! Who knows?

I am currently sitting in my loftily placed media box high in the North stand (i.e. my flat on Kingsley Avenue). As I look down, the team are now standing around in a circle (beautifully planted by volunteer gardeners David and Tahitia McCabe) and are discussing tactics and having a wee stretch. The topic of temperature drifts in the wind – it is uncharacteristically warm for a home game!

So, to ‘pitch’ out the week’s dig to you, the work will involve two plots in the beautiful Kingsley Gardens, an ultrasound scanning of the Hampden Bowls bowling green, and a dig in the trees in Queen’s Park recreation ground between the railway and skate park.

The bowling green ultrasound aims to seek out the centre spot and maybe some old pitch lines like penalty areas. The recs dig aims to find evidence of the grandstand. And the rose garden dig hopes to find remains of the clubhouse.

We have maps, know roughly where all this was (before the sleepy Cathcart circle line rudely blasted its way across Southside), know what happened here, and therefore why it is such a significant site. So, why dig here? I ask.

Being an oft-harsh critic, a historian, and a history teacher who spends their life desperately drawing out explanation, explication, and justification from begrudging, opinionated teenagers, I really, really want to know why we (humanity) bother with things like this. Hopefully we will start to find some answers from this enthusiastic and open-minded bunch of (mostly volunteer – much respect!) archaeologists. It can’t just be an opportunistic moment to get coverage for the bowling club, via a tournament programme filler during Scotland’s first international tournament in a generation, can it?

As we walk and talk, Kieran excitedly says he doesn’t even know what size this pitch was, or how big the penalty areas were. No wonder Scotland won 5-1, aware of England’s ‘prowess’, they probably just put the penalty spot 30 yards up the pitch!

A little later on I catch up with the team deep in the woods of the recreation ground. I finally ask Kieran why they are here and what they hope to find. While politely ‘understanding’ my scepticism of digging for things we know about and have a clear map of, his enthusiasm for the dig is palpable and catching.

First and foremost it’s about finding things that relate to the structures he says – it would be really great to find traces of the old clubhouse, that’s the dream! That is, a piece of the foundations from what they think is the same building that now serves as clubhouse to Hampden Bowls (give or take the odd extension).

There is also talk of trying to find a piece of old turnstile – Hampden was the first ground to have had them! Kieran laughs. He’d even be chuffed with a button or two, at which point Detectorists is mentioned and, like that, a ring pull emerges from the top layer (date unkown, probably Irn Bru). Most importantly though it is about deepening that sense of place and the layered history of Southside Glasgow, something that we at SGHET also care a lot about.

Meanwhile, the team have taken the top layer off their plot and are in good spirits. So far, the artefact tray has a piece of a till (!) and a lovely old Glasgow brick from Paterson and Sons (which once stood at 522 Pollokshaws Road near the junction with Albert Drive where Scottish Ballet now is).

After a wee chat about how to smash a till open and who might have been robbed, the brick leads the conversation. This brick correlates with others used in late 19^th century Glasgow. Is it a remnant of the grandstand? Or a piece of railway construction material? Or just a random old brick? Whatever it’s from, a locally made 19^th century brick seems a fitting first find to start this session of industrial archaeology.

By Thomas Oldham, SGHET Board Member.

—

You can find out more about Scottish brickmaking here and more about Archaeology Scotland’s excavations at First Hampden here.

Read: First Hampden Park dig part 2 ~ discoveries and speculations

Crosshill at 150

This article is also part of a series of local history and heritage coverage we are publishing to coincide with the 150th Anniversary of the founding of Crosshill in 1871 as an independent police burgh before being annexed to the city of Glasgow in 1891. See #Crosshill150 on social media,

The post First Hampden Park archaeological dig appeared first on SGHET.