As our research accumulated, alongside a series of articles on our website and a guest article in Greater Govanhill Magazine, we also gave talks at three events, for the Scottish Civic Trust 2020 conference, Govanhill International Festival 2021, and Black History Month Scotland 2021.

Now we are delighted to announce that our lead researchers in the project – Dr Saskia McCracken and Mark McGregor – have had a jointly-authored five-page article published in the January / February 2022 issue of History Scotland Magazine.

It has been our intent to begin to assemble a more honest picture of our current and past landscape, and we’ve achieved a lot in two and a half years but more could be done.

If you have ideas or suggestions for our project, want to write for it or get involved in other ways, please contact us on our social media channels or by emailing info@sghet.com and check out the resources below.

Purchase a copy of the History Scotland Jan/Feb 2022 issue here:

https://www.historyscotland.com/store/back-issues/history-scotland/history-scotland-vol22issue1-janfeb22-issue-123/

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More #SouthsideSlaveryLegacies info:

Read our Southside Slavery Legacies posts here:

The Tobacco Lords: James Ritchie of Craigton & Daniel Campbell of Shawfield

The Stevens and Bellahouston Park

The Maxwells of Pollok
[see sections on: Sir James Maxwell 6th Baronet (1762-1785) & William Stirling of Keir]

Maxwell Park, Pollokshields Burgh Hall & Henry Edward Clifford

Sugar, Enslavement, and Glasgow’s Southside [Greater Govanhill Magazine]

Watch our presentation at the Scottish Civic Trust 2020 ‘Race & Heritage in Scotland’ conference:
https://www.scottishcivictrust.org.uk/race-and-heritage-in-scotland-conference/

Subscribe to our Southside Slavery Legacies mailing list

Follow the #SouthsideSlaveryLegacies hashtag on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Follow SGHET on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Image sources:

Craigton House, 1870 [blog post header photo] – photo courtesy of Glasgow City Archives, Virtual Mitchell website (brightness adjustments by SGHET)

History Scotland Jan / Feb 2022 cover – cropped and full versions courtesy of History Scotland magazine

History Scotland ‘Meet the contributors’ and ‘Contents’ snippets – photos by Deirdre Molloy

The post Slavery Legacies in Glasgow’s Southside – History Scotland article by SGHET 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.