Schools from across South Glasgow (P6-S3 classes) have fashioned their own models of local Art Deco buildings. Come to our Community Exhibition & Celebration Day where the pupils will showcase their creations and get feedback from our Community Panel!

BOOK HERE (free but registration required):

VENUE: 170 Queen’s Drive, Glasgow G42 8QZ

12.25 – Doors open

12.35 – Introductions of the Challenge exhibition themes, school teams, and Community Panel members.

Then tour the models before the big finale of the shared Feedback Session!

Event ends 2.20pm

On the cusp of Art Deco’s Centenary in 2025, Glasgow Southside is out in front, taking creative inspiration from the architectural icons of our Art Deco landscape where it really matters… at the community level.

With a new generation discovering this era and unleashing their creative design skills in parallel with the incorporation of recycled materials… new perspectives will emerge about the sustainability of these gems, their potential for adaptive re-use, and their place in shaping the city’s identity and Glasgow’s future.

Photos of the models will be added to an Online Gallery launching later in 2025 during the Centenary year.

Join us to see our Art Deco landmarks through the next generation’s eyes.

Meet our Community Panel

Many thanks to our project funders Historic Environment Scotland and The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

For more regular updates on the Art Deco Southside Alive! project and our other activities, follow us:

Facebook | X/Twitter | Instagram

The post Schools Model Building Challenge: Art Deco Southside Alive! appeared first on SGHET.

BOOK HERE (free but registration required): https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/community-archives-heritage-group-scotland-network-conference-cop26-tickets-167455093693

VENUE ADDRESS:
The Point Community Hub, 180 Queen’s Drive, Glasgow G42 8QD (1 minute walk from Queen’s Park train station and Pollokshaws Rd)

Deirdre Molloy and Romy Galloway from SGHET will present on ‘Digital Dilemmas: Creating a Sustainable & Accessible Community Archive‘ sharing their archive design research findings and touching on some of SGHET’s key archive collections, including Southside Memories, Southside Lockdown Lens, and Pollok Free State.

In turn, they’ll explore some of the challenges digitisation and digital activity in general presents for a climate-conscious heritage archives sector, and to communities already being affected by the consequences of the climate crisis.

The event (9.30am-4pm) offers a varied programme of presentations, workshops and a ‘one-minute-mayhem’ session of rapid fire talks, plus refreshments. During the breaks attendees can browse a range of heritage stalls including ours, at which we’ll have our South Glasgow Heritage Trails guidebook on sale (cash only).

For those who can’t make it in person, there’s also a livestream of the event accessible from anywhere, bookable below.

BOOK HERE:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/community-archives-heritage-group-scotland-network-conference-cop26-tickets-167455093693

SPEAKER LINE-UP & EVENT SCHEDULE:
https://www.scottisharchives.org.uk/explore/community-archives/community-archives-and-heritage-group-scotland/sustainable-stories-capturing-an-age-of-change-in-community-archives/

TIMINGS:
9.30am – Registration & tea/coffee
10am-4pm (with 12.30-1.30 lunch break) – Conference programme

Follow the organisers Community Archives & Heritage Group Scotland on Twitter for updates:
https://twitter.com/CArchivesScot

The post Sustainable Stories: Community Archives & Heritage Group #COP26 conference Govanhill appeared first on SGHET.

Despite a long and proud history, the Pollok story that most people are familiar with is one of post war housing, of growing up in a community on the margins, a community that was overlooked and easy to ignore. At G53Together, we’re planning on changing that narrative through a fuller telling of Pollok’s story. In telling that story we want to celebrate our community and shape its future, by understanding its past, both the good and the bad.

Today’s Pollok owes much of its existence to Sir John Stirling Maxwell, the 10th Baronet of Pollok, who sold a 746,368 acre site of fields and farms from his family lands to the City of Glasgow Corporation for the sum of £111,712 and 15 shillings in 1937. Working with some visionary Corporation Officials, they set to work on creating Pollok as a prototype community. Pollok is Glasgow’s first large scale housing scheme. It was fastidiously considered and confidently planned; Stirling Maxwell saw to that. In the year following the sale of the land, he writes in his book Shrines and Homes of Scotland:

“It is at last realised that the creation of a new suburb entails more than the mere erection of rows of houses – the indefinite extension of a large city, without attempt to preserve the beauty of the countryside or provide space for recreation, can end in nothing but discontent and calamity.”

The plan was to create a community, not just houses. Key to the plan was the inclusion of open community green space with local shops, schools and other amenities.

A report from the Corporation’s Housing Department in October 1937 details the desired hopes for the area to include “pleasure walks and garden plots which will give health and delight to many” “romping space for children” to play and explore among the “sylvan beauties” and “extensive woodlands.” The report further details the “central idea” of Pollok as the “foremost garden suburb in the City” with 50% of the total area of land “set apart as open space”.

It was a revolution of civic thought.

In the decades that followed, the Pollok project would suffer cutbacks and blows. The vision was bulldozed in favour of higher density, lesser quality, flat roofed, cramped, damp, cheaper housing. But people continued to arrive and Pollok became a home to tens of thousands of people; several generations of families have passed over the threshold of these homes.

Throughout those times, Pollok suffered from a lack of hope and an absence of belief. And that’s understandable when so much of what made the community was robbed from it. Schools and community centres, local shops and whole neighbourhoods have been wiped from the map. The last farm and parts of an ancient woodland were levelled for a motorway.

But the seed of a new idea has been planted. Covid-19 and isolation has in a strange way brought the community back together. It has given Pollok a new boldness and a growing sense of self resilience. We’ll be enabling a new sense of community spirit and empowerment through G53Together, a community collective of organisations, charities, housing associations and local residents.

While our focus for now is on covid-19 recovery, from next year, G53Together and our community partners will turn our attention to working to protect Pollok’s rich inheritance, to remembering the people and places that have shaped our community, to celebrating our heritage, and enhancing our green and public space.

If you want to be part of the dialogue and help build Pollok’s future, visit www.g53together.scot or like and follow our social media @G53Together (Facebook / Twitter).

By councillor David McDonald.

The post Pollok’s Story: G53Together appeared first on SGHET.