Edinburgh Central Library 7 - 9 George IV Bridge EH1 1EG

Mixed media art exhibition

1 August - 30 September 2024

Workshops: Adults 18 September 6.30-7.30pm Book via Eventbrite

Children Saturday 14 September 2-3pm. Book via Eventbrite

The title for this exhibition comes from two sources: the charming Granton story I was told by Betty, my former neighbour, in which she was handed a tortoise which had stowed away in an esparto grass boat which put in at the harbour in the 1940s. And the Taoist practice of ‘walking leisurely like a tortoise’ which I and other T’ai Chi enthusiasts do as a mindful meditation. When we do that, something fascinating happens: we feel part of what’s around us and also separate; we are conscious of everything—the details as well as the bigger picture—and aware of our own feelings too.

I practised a version of this slow walking around Granton as a counterbalance to the pace of life around me. It allowed me to meet other residents, notice what is there, and have time for reflection and reassessment, which is something that rushing does not.

How much are we missing because we are constantly on the go..? When will we make space for our bodies to reflect and for our hearts to widen so we can connect with who we are? Tricia Hersey ‘Rest is Resistence’

Walking slowly around and hearing people’s stories has helped me to feel part of a multi-cultural community. I found that we all have different backgrounds, but share a need to belong somewhere, that there is something unifying about how we live and use our local resources. Going to one of the Co-op stores slowly on foot, for example, is a chance to catch up on news; the Granton Community Bakery queue is ideal for some lively banter; and scything wheat in the Granton Community Garden and eating lunch together afterwards is a choice opportunity for swapping experiences.

However, there are tensions at this edge of Edinburgh. A young Chinese woman told me about her feelings of loss over the cutting down of trees overnight to make way for new flats, despite the fact that she and other residents chained themselves to the railings the previous day. Older people who have lived here much longer than I, have demonstrated their disorientation at the renaming of streets and stations because they remember things the way they used to be.

Walking Like a Tortoise - mixed media art exhibition at Central Library until 30 September 2024

In this exhibition, I show Granton maps which I used to plan my walks; historic maps and hand-drawn ones, maps which show where the area begins and ends according to different groupings and in different eras. They chart distinctions and definitions which can separate or unify people and places. They are always political, prompting the question, ‘Are you in or out?’ Maps are networks, a tracery of streets and cycle tracks which lead to somewhere important, and I have walked these pathways to find how they sometimes connect with each other and are sometimes dead ends which offer privacy, but no way through.

You can use these maps to find your way out to the fringe of Edinburgh, to the beach and wastelands at the border of the city where the best wild flowers grow for foraging, and where there is hidden art. Or, you can use them to take you right into the centre of Granton where the library and health centres, homes for the elderly, and clubs for young people are.

Once, Granton was outside the main city and shown in a ghostly grey on the plans.

Once, there was no harbour, no outward reaching / welcoming arms from our shores. Later, Granton was part of Crammond, a large and sprawling geography which contained parts of the River Almond, Newhaven, Inverleith, most of Ferry Road, swathes of Leith, and Davidson’s Mains. It has got smaller over the years, halved and subdivided.

Today, Granton is part of entities of varying sizes and shapes and it’s not always easy to know where the dividing line is between it and its neighbours: Pilton, Wardie and Trinity. It depends if you are thinking about ‘Edinburgh North(ern) and Leith’, the Scottish parliamentary constituency, or the Westminster (UK government) ward of ‘Forth (Edinburgh) which tends to be altered at each election’. Then there’s the Edinburgh Parish of which we are part, the ‘EH5’ área, and the more generic, ‘North Edinburgh’.

Planned at least as far back as 2019, it is only recently that the City of Edinburgh Council from the centre actually embarked on further extensive apartment building out here. Although the architects and planners who spoke at a recent Pecha Kucha public event (EDI- v.45: RETROFIT ‘The greenest building is the one that already exists’) were unanimous in agreeing that changing existing buildings is infinitely better for the environment than putting up new ones, these newbuilds are now happening apace.

The Granton, Royston and Wardieburn schemes (housing estates) which started being built in 1932, have long been demolished and substituted. Now, much older, formerly industrial buildings have been raised to the ground and green/brownfield sites have been replaced with tall, rectangular boxes of oddly coloured bricks, some already discoloured and damp, with no history and no gardens (although some advertise dog grooming facilities), and this despite Historic Environment Scotland stating, “The historic environment shapes our identity. It tells us about the past, the present – even points the way to the future.”

I have been asking who lives at the edges, and I’m very interested in the relationship between the periphery and the centre, those who live on the outskirts and those who inhabit the core of somewhere. I am curious about where, geographically, creative ideas often come from, and am pleased that new artist communities are springing up in Granton

Is Granton still on the edge of the Firth of Forth? Well, it depends who you ask. Online, the coastal strip seems to have been renamed Edinburgh Waterfront. Do we need to let go, then, of that fragment of Granton and accept that our border is an inland one, or is this still part of our community? Certainly the people I have spoken to and walked with believe that they still live “in Granton”.

Granton Heritage Walk (Granton Waterfront with Granton:hub) with participants who live in the new Granton Harbour development

I have some insistent patches of eczema which are itchy. They get dry and I sometimes cannot resist scratching them. My skin, the boundary between me and the outside world, draws my attention to the edge of myself where I meet everyone and everything else. This condition seems to be a symbol of what is going on in the world; how the edges of our land are being eroded by the sea as a result of climate change, how some of us are nervous about people crossing our borders (even though we have all done it at one time or another going back through history), and how the values that once underpinned our looking after each other (think NHS, Care in the Community) are being corroded.

In Slow Living, Wendy Parking and Geoffrey Craig write that Slow is “a position [that is] counter to the dominant value-system of ‘the times’”, and go on to say, “We believe there is a positive potential in slowness as a means of critiquing or challenging dominant narratives or values that categorise contemporary modernity for many”.

Granton has no equivalent of the Leith ‘Persevere’ emblem, and thinking about what one might look like, I wondered whether the tortoise would be part of it. What do you think? What else could we add to represent us?

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