Biting the Hand.

Union Terrace Gardens as they are.

People who live in Aberdeen will not be unaware of the controversy surrounding the business-community-driven redevelopment of the town's famous Union Terrace Gardens. The intention had been to create a very large new civic square. Promotional efforts used the name "City Square Project". This redevelopment scheme has since been rebranded as the "City Gardens Project".

Original concept

Here at Other Aberdeen House, our personal greatest vexation with this proposed redevelopment was the way than an opportunity to anchor a progressive arts and creative sector in Aberdeen was so thoughtlessly as to appear maliciously squandered. The City Square proposals caused the collapse of the Peacock Visual Arts Northern Light initiative which would have created a new contemporary arts centre for Aberdeen and the north of Scotland. Those unfamiliar with the controversy can read comprehensive and in-depth analysis on Fraser Denholm's excellent blog: Blerr De Blerr Blerr.

The creative sector forms an impressively huge part of the UK economy, contributing as much in Gross Value Added as the financial services sector and is a predominant source of export revenue. With the securing of the Victorian & Albert Museum's northern outpost, Aberdeen's 'competitor' city, Dundee, is now poised to take a leading role in this economic sector for generations to come.

Over the last few days, the City Square Garden Project has launched a new promotional website, presumably with the intention of winning 'hearts and minds'.

Revised concepts

Browsing the pages of the site is an odd experience. We mentioned earlier that some of the use of language and content came freighted with information which we might infer about the promotors of the scheme to redevelop the existing Victorian-era Union Terrace Gardens and replace them with a hyperreal diorama of our town's heritage.

Then, we looked at the "Cultural Space" page. What most disorientated us was the use of these words:

Imagine ... mixing with art lovers and tourists

It took a little while for us to pin down just what it was that troubled us about this. Then we worked it out, we managed to unpack the statement. It's that conflation of "art-lovers" with "tourists". The promoters of the City Garden Project talk to readers of their website as if they are not the art-lovers. The implication is that art lovers are, like tourists, outsiders; they are 'other'. It is clear that they believe that the people of Aberdeen are not, therefore, art lovers. In effect they are inviting us to: "Come and look at the funny art lovers - aren't they strange?" They obviously cannot see how insulting this is. Their assumptions are showing, and, in turn show us that it is the promotors of the scheme who are themselves not art lovers.

Original concept

The promoters of the City Garden Project have, by use of this one sentence inadvertantly dropped the poker-face by which they had hoped to assuage the concerns of Aberdeen's beleaguered arts community. They have by use of this unguarded phrase exposed their bluff which attempts to revise project instigator Sir Ian Wood's ill-considered and temerarious words in Scottish newspaper The Herald:

... this is ... for the wider interests of people in Aberdeen who don't care about the arts. Eighty per cent of the people who spend time in the square will have no interest in the arts.

Revised concept

From such a local-press-lauded "man of vision", this displays a breathtaking lack of perspective. We hope not to fall into the trap of condescension, but we would point out that all people who participate in our civilisation are consumers of the arts, almost all the time. We live and work, relax and consume in an architect created environment; we listen to music; we read literature; we watch factual and dramatic films and television; everything we touch, wear or see has been brought into reality by a designer - these all are branches of the arts.

One of the ways in which anthropologists working at the edge between archaeology and paleontology discern the human condition in the artifacts they unearth at early hominid sites is the artistic content of the objects. Art is not strange and other, it is ancient and basic to the human condition. It is the fundamental fountainhead from which all other culture and civilisation emerges.

From the earliest rock art and clay fetishes, through the anatomically super-perfect and beautiful statuary of Ancient Greece, we discern, understand and participate in our world in the way we do because of the filters and guidelines which the artists of those artifacts have created for our cognition to follow. You do not "feast your eyes" on art. Rather, you feed your brain. The arts is the branch of human striving which provides the context for our society and civilisation to then fill with content. That we think the way we do; that we say the things we say; that we behave the way we behave is all the product of the artists who have provided us with the collective cognitive tools to interpret and interact with the world around us since the beginning of human civilisation.

When the controversy surrounding the redevelopment of Union Terrace Gardens was raging at its height, we remember hearing and reading opinions to the effect that the arts community should be careful not to "bite the hand that feeds it".

We would counter that by suggesting that it is rather those who propagate condescending material like some of the words on the City Gardens Project promotional website should be careful.

They should be careful not to bite the hand thats create the context in which civilisation thrives.

Hyperreality Update. Taxidermy for Aberdeen.

As part of our ongoing occasional series "The A to Z of Aberdeen" we most recently posted "H is for Hyperreality". In that post, we gave the opinion that one of the dangers which confront our town as we face the future is our collective condition of hyperreality, which ill-equips us for the challenges ahead. It ill-equips us, because, by definition, it is a way of avoiding confronting reality and the implications which flow from realism.

Hyperreality can be thought of as the way in which modern life can cause us to seek and experience satisfaction through a "simulated version of reality". A sort of reality by proxy - where the real world or experience has been replaced by a simulation at surface level only: a "real fake" which is thought of as "even better than the real thing". By finding (or believing to have found) satisfaction in simulation, the boundary between the "real" and the "fake" becomes blurred to the point where we cannot perceive the difference. The substitution of the simulacrum for the authentic article or experience is no longer noticed, and, indeed the substituted item (the simulation) is sometimes considered to be superior to that which it has replaced (the original). In this way the artifacts and experiences of our lives become authentic simulations, "real fakes"; "hyperreal".

So it came as no surprise to us when we read the following words on the website which promotes the proposed redevelopment of Union Terrace Gardens as The City Square Gardens Project:

Imagine ... coming up onto street-level to be faced with displays showcasing physical pieces of our history and telling the story of our rich heritage.

Em. Isn't that just kind of all around us, all the time and everywhere? We do not require special permission or a roped-off display area with a 'look at this' sign which tells us what to think; dioramas are redundant for the story of our town is always and everywhere evident by the lives we live in it - we exist within the heritage, we are it and we have no choice but to participate in it. Attempts to put it in a box are futile. Anything in a box is already dead. What is being proposed here is a sort of taxidermy for Aberdeen.

By promoting this type of hyperreality integral to their scheme - this boxed, displayed and pre-interpreted version of 'heritage' - those who are intent on the redevelopment of Union Terrace Gardens via this project are demonstrating that, while they may reside in Aberdeen, they do not know what it is to live here.




(With thanks to Mike Shepherd for pointing us to the web-page in question).

Fernhill Unconfined

Looking north towards Fernhill over the Bucksburn Valley

Fernhill is a hill, a farm, and - by extension - the name of an area which sits in the greenbelt between Sheddocksly and Kingswells, to the west of the built-up part of Aberdeen off the Lang Stracht. A network of farm tracks and footpaths - some in use as farm access, some maintained by our favourite quango Aberdeen Greenspace - provides access throughout the area and connects with the splendid recently-completed Bucksburn Valley Paths network (also the work of Aberdeen Greenspace). These paths are part of Aberdeen City Council's (ACC) Core Paths Network. 

Looking at the ACC Core Paths web-page we see that :

Under the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, all Local Authorities and National Park Authorities in Scotland have a statutory duty to prepare a Core Paths Plan that will "provide the basic framework of routes sufficient for the purpose of giving the public reasonable access throughout their area. The basic framework of routes will link into, and support, wider networks of other paths" 

The vision for Aberdeen's Core Paths Plan is to "form a complete paths network throughout the City, encouraging healthy and sustainable access opportunities for all". The Core Paths Plan will form a key part of outdoor access provision and will help to support wider national, regional and local policy objectives on health, recreation, education, economic development, social inclusion, community development, sustainable transport and tourism.

This, of course, is right up our street. Or rather, right up our Core Path.

Heading north up Fernhill to Greenferns

From Fernhill, we get views west to the Grampian mountains and east down to the North Sea. But perhaps surprisingly, very little of Aberdeen itself is visible. From this location the majority of the town is hidden below the ridge which runs from Cairncry to the Hill of Rubislaw. At the summit of Fernhill, we stand on the watershed of our town. A raindrop falling to our immediate north will find its way to the sea via first the Bucksburn and then the Don. A drop of water falling to the south will travel via the Denburn and Dee. The sources of the Bucksburn and Denburn are both to the west of Fernhill, and are surprisingly close together at Kingswells, surrounding Aberdeen in its own 'ring of bright water'. Sort of.

The Fernhill reservoir occupies the very summit of Fernhill, looking for all the world like a truncated stepped pyramid built by an ancient civilisation. Its sepulchral forms devising an apposite (but surely coincidental) mirror of the Aberdeen Crematorium, which sits at about the same elevation at Jessiefield across the Denburn valley towards Hazlehead. 

The stepped forms, splayed walls and truncated summit of the Fernhill reservoir remind us of the Peel Ring of Lumphanan and the vitrified fort at Tap o' Noth, and this thought in turn puts us in mind of some of the things we said when we berated the panopticonic "Project Kraken". Fernhill reservoir is today a crucial piece of infrastructure, crucial to the provision of a vital life-sustating service to the people of Aberdeen. But all things pass, and one day, in the normal course of development (or decline) its function will be redundant, and its structure will be left to decay back to the landscape, function all but forgotten, the arcana of its operation the subject of esoterica.

Peel Ring of Lumphanan - Motte.

Tap o' Noth - Vitrified fort.

Fernhill - 20/21st Century Reservoir.

As if to illustrate this point, an earlier (yet still from the 20th century) reservoir is visible just to the east of the presently used facility.  Heavy manhole covers protect path-users from the tank-voids of the redundant facility. The words "CAUTION - CONFINED SPACE" are stenciled on the face of the manhole covers as a warning to adventurers who are tempted to explore the formerly watery void below. 

Redundant

Confined

The paths at Fernhill link working farms, old forges, semi-rural cottages, stately old stands of impressively mature trees and (last week) just-ploughed fields, the scent of the good earth rising from the newly-broken winter's crust of working farms. The very picture of Aberdeenshire. 

Unconfined

The good earth

One of these working farms is Greenferns, and is on council-owned land. This land at Greenferns is one of the so-called "pockets of market failure" which have been identified for "remediation" by the forthcoming work of the City Development Company "One Aberdeen" (which we wrote about a little while ago). We would like to point out that this definition of failure is not the same as ours.  We fear that the City Development Company appears to be set to fall into the trap of believing that a community is nothing more than the sum of the businesses which operate within it and that the market should be the final arbiter of success or failure. We deplore this pencilneck-narrow vision. 

The Core Paths at Fernhill do not in and of themselves make money; of course they don't. But they create value by enriching in non-monetary ways the lives of those that use them and the environs of Aberdeen. This is the true definition of wealth. The generation of money and profit is merely the creation of affluence. The two things are not the same.

Ferryhill's Mystery Masonry; Enigmatic "S"

A little while ago, we posted about "unknown stones", and in the post, we included this picture of an "S" marked stone in Ferryhill.

At the acute angle meeting of Ferryhill Road and Ferryhill Place

We had assumed that, like so many marked stones we see around Aberdeen, this was a boundary stone, marking someone's commercial or political property. These stones are very often shown on the large scale Ordnance Survey maps, but there's no sign of this one on the 1869 25 inch-to-one-mile map. So, it's later than that...

The map shows a couple of 'stones' on the northernmost curve of Ferryhill Road. That'd be close to where the defunct public toilet is situated. We hear that the toilet is still in occasional use; No 17 bus drivers having a key! Brilliant!

Stop the bus!

Walking down (northward) Ferrhill Road from Ferryhill Place towards Crown Street, we see these:

This one's got an OS Cut-Mark and Rivet Bench Mark,
down at the bottom.

They're all the way down the road, each about 50m from the next. A neatly incised "S", surrounded by a perfect rectangular border, on a piece of flat-faced granite - ashlar at the top (southern) end of the road, rubble at the bottom (north). The bottom (north) end of the road is characterised by a large retaining wall which encloses the steep-sloped common green of Archie 'Pech' Simpson's Marine Terrace.

By the time we reached the bottom, our eyes were well-opened, and we also noticed this wall-bound artifact:

"Presented by
Andrew Lewis Lord Provost
1927"

So regularly spaced, so unlike the other boundary stones; these "S"-marked stones are perplexing. Often, boundary stones are marked with the initials of the landowner, like this one at on the top of the Broad Hill:

Marked "R" to the north, "ND" to the south. Grooved on top.

So these stones in Ferryhill aren't the usual Aberdeen boundary stones, they're quite different. We've got a few theories:

• We've often noticed the words "sundry proprietors" marked on older maps of our town, and we wondered whether the single "S" might refer to that. 
• My old dad thought that the "S" might stand for "Simpson": that's Archibald Simpson, who built Marine Terrace, up above the stones.
• Someone suggested an infrastructure connection, referring to Soil- or Sewer-pipes.
• Similarly infrastructure related - Aberdeen's first source of electricity - the "Corporation Electricity Works" is at the bottom of Ferry-Hill, and so at the bottom of Ferryhill Road. Might the "S" be something to do with that? Substations?
• Aberdeen's first electrified tram ran up Ferryhill Road to the south and Crown Street to the north, it's source of power being the "Corporation Electricity Works" at the bottom (south) end of Crown Street. Perhaps the "S" is related to the trams?
• Ferryhill Road connects with the bottom of Crown Street, and so is close to the Masonic Temple. Amongst many things, the Masons are/were know for "masons marks". Is it possible that the "S" is a latter-day and more literate version of these ancient esoteric signs?

I grew up and went to school in this specific area, and I played on Ferryhill Road and the Marine Terrace green countless times. Since my childhood I've walked up and down Ferryhill Road regularly. It's amazing to me that I'd never noticed these plain-as-your-face marked stones before the day that we walked down Ferryhill Road looking for anything out of the ordinary. 

Neither our local council's Sites and Monuments pages, nor RCHAMS "Scotland's Places" pages mention these "S" marked stones on Ferryhill Place. So, if anyone knows for sure what they are, or has any other theories, we'd be delighted to hear about it. 

March Stones 40 to 43 ABD

Over the weeks and months we've been tramping the ancient boundaries of Aberdeen, and tracing the marker stones or "March Stones" which identify the extent of those boundaries. The word "march" deriving from the Old Scots word translating as "border", we probably see the same linguistic derivation in the "Welsh Marches", meaning "borderlands".

There's all sorts of histobunk available online, and we recommend having a look at both this article in the Leopard Magazine, and this heritage trail leaflet (pdf) from Aberdeen City Council. Both are excellent sources of information and both were compiled and written by our local council's Chris Croly. We thank and congratulate Chris for his work, without which we probably wouldn't have been able to do what we've done in tracing the location of each stone.

Newhills Church, Newhills 

The stones we're going to write about today take us from Newhills, on the eastern face of Brimmond Hill into Bucksburn on the north-west edge of the built-up part of our town, and this marks a bittersweet end to the more rural side of the adventure of visiting all the stones. Bittersweet, for we've very much enjoyed the rural journeys and destinations; they've taken us to places we wouldn't otherwise have gone, and so we've seen and done things we wouldn't otherwise have done. We've also gained an insight into the three four-dimensional (including time) shape of our town that would have been impossible to get by any other means. Actually getting to all these spots under our own steam and being there - in the open air is its own reward. Having said all that, though, we'll not miss the clambering over barbed wire fences. We're getting too old for that sort of thing. (Not really.)


Stone 40 is in a field, south of Newhills Home, and north of the church at Newhills, accessible via the unsurfaced road which runs between the road to Bucksburn and the road from Forrit Brae.

Stones 41 and 42 are on opposite sides of the road into Bucksburn, about 200 yards apart. Stone 41 is on the south side of the road, Stone 42 is on the north.

Gorse!

Barbed Wire!

We noticed something about both stones that we'd not seen before... You'll notice that stone 41 has what appears to be a little metal button set in its top surface.

Stone 42 has marks which look like a bird's footprint incised on the top surface. Both the button (know as a "Rivet") and the incisions (know as a "Cut Bench Mark) are Ordnance Survey Bench Marks or ("Vertical Control" marks). These mark points of known height, from which other points of know height can be derived through a surveying process known as "levelling". Which is all very boring and technical.

Anyway, there used to be about half a million bench marks but since the advent of the Global Positioning System they aren't needed any more and about half have disappeared in the normal course of land and building re-development.

There is much we hear of today about the need for 'resilience'. We usually hear the term just after some bad weather or natural disaster or something unforseen has caused some sort of infrastructure breakdown. It strikes us as sad that a highly resilient method of mapping the land has been rendered obsolete by a method (albeit much more convenient) which lacks reliability and resilience, and is in the control of foreign powers (albeit 'allies'). We have sacrificed resilient autonomy for tenuous agency.

According to the Ordnance Survey's (OS) website:

Traditional horizontal control stations, triangulation or 'trig' stations (pillars and other survey marks) and vertical control (bench marks) have been the mainstay of control information in Great Britain for many years. They provided the means to link surveys to the national horizontal and vertical datums as well as providing structure to a survey. To do this it was necessary to physically occupy either the triangulation station or bench mark with survey equipment and purchase the control coordinates from Ordnance Survey.

Ordnance Survey has made a commitment to continue to offer traditional control information to surveyors who do not use methods such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) to provide control. However, due to the quantity of traditional stations and the expense of their survey, tied in with the greater accuracy and uniformity that new satellite-based survey techniques provide, it is neither sensible nor realistic for Ordnance Survey to maintain the triangulation and bench mark network.

Thoughts of agency versus autonomy aside, We find all this, unsurprisingly, quite fascinating - these March Stones are (were?) dual use! Not only do they mark the ancient boundaries of our town (political), they are also known reference points which technically and accurately denote the precise shape of the landscape (geographical).

Another fascinating aspect to us is the obsolescence of these items, both the March Stones and the Bench Marks which they host. There is no functional reason for the March Stones to have survived, yet this ancient method of denoting land boundaries
survived functionally in our town well into the Victorian Era, by which time the system of land surveys and title deeds lodged with central authorities had rendered all such physical markers redundant. Yet they survived, and were replaced if necessary because of damage, flood, landslide or whatever.

We cannot help but wonder if there's something very Aberdonian about this. Sure, other towns have boundary stones, but as far as we can find out not even Washington DC (a far newer and completely planned city) has managed to retain all boundary markers in situ. It is as if the new-fangled survey technology of theodolite and trigonometry was distrusted by the city fathers and land-owners of Victorian Aberdeen, it is as if deeds lodged with a notary or in a city hall meant nothing - all that mattered was the good earth, marked out by stone pillars that you could go and see. There is probably some merit in this attitude - it's certainly resilient.

As well as hosting the OS Cut Bench Mark, Stone 42 is adjacent to a "saucer stone" which predates the Victorian Era marks. The stone has two saucer marks, full of moss when we arrived.

No-one knows for sure what the 'saucer' holes were for. Some suggest they may have been filled with molten lead, and impressed with the town's coat of arms - other theories have them as survey-holes, used in some process of surveying the land - this use would be similar to the rivets and pivots of OS benchmarking.

Today, this area is characterised by a busy road which takes traffic from the west into Bucksburn. Being high above a residential area, there is a reservoir, and having good line-of-sight to a population centre, there is a mobile phone Earth-station. These things are vital infrastructure today, but we wonder for how long they will stay as they are, and we frame that question in the context of the March Stones.

Stone 43 is in Bucksburn, beside some lock-up garages, out the back of someone's house in Nether Brae.

Edit, Addendum.

OS Cut Mark Bench Marks are really common:

Geo VI Bridge

Holburn Junction

Music Hall

Fear the Kraken

The taste of living in Aberdeen got a little more bitter yesterday with the launch of Grampian Police's "Project Kraken". The Kraken is a mythical sea-monster from Norse tradition - big as an island. Look it up if you want.

The announcement of Grampian Police's implementation of Operation Kraken was, in our opinion, fittingly monstrous. Appearing on North Tonight STV News, Assistant Chief Constable Bill Gordon of Grampian Police called on members of the public to report "suspicious activity". This "suspicious activity" taking the form of individuals snapping photographs or making notes regarding (amongst other things) "significant buildings", "locations" or "bridges". This is supposed to protect us from terrorism. The police are actually encouraging people who live or work on the coast to register with them as "members" of Project Kraken. We can't remember the name of the society to which the child informants belonged in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but we'll assume that being a member of Project Kraken is something like that. There'll be a quarterly newsletter. Really, there will. O how we wish we were joking.

We [Grampian Police] are also asking users and residents of the Grampian Coastline to register with Project Kraken free of charge. As a registered member of Project Kraken you will receive timely information updates by email, and a quarterly newsletter providing a summary of local and national incidents and activity that might be of interest.

In addition, you will be added to an email distribution list which will be used, when appropriate, to circulate urgent information and intelligence updates. There may also be times that we contact you with a request that you assist us in ‘observing and reporting’ particular individuals, groups or vessels.

Well, we photograph a lot of this sort of stuff a lot of the time. We also sometimes take text or audio notes. For instance, the photo at the top of our pages has Aberdeen's North Pier, Breakwater, Guiding Light and Harbourmaster's Tower photographed at the exact moment of the turning of a very high tide at the mouth of the Dee. We exhibit this photograph because it is both photogenic and metophorical. It's apparent aesthetic appeal or esoteric message can be appreciated by the viewer as they wish. Also apparent in the photo is the old, now redundant, Harbourmaster's tower, this too is significant to our aims at Other Aberdeen.

We photograph and discuss infrastructure because our human world is made of infrastructure. Part of the human condition is the story of our interaction with the infrastructure which we have summoned into being, this is one aspect of the human adventure which most fascinates us. Without infrastructure, we are like any other mammal; individual or tribal, our daily concerns are those of feeding, family and shelter. When the individuals and tribes of humanity are connected and serviced by infrastructure we transcend this baseline animal condition and become a collective society, a wider culture: a civilisation. When Other Aberdeen chooses an aspect of infrastructure as a suitable subject for psychogeographical exploration, we are looking at nothing less than the atoms of civilisation. It fascinates to see infrastructre planned and built, it satisfies to see infrastructure humming with vitality, used to full capacity. Then, at the end it similarly delights to see older, redundant infrastructure obsolesce and decay back to a trans-natural post-industrial state.

One Source of the Ferryhill Burn

One of our very first posts last year: Somewhere in Aberdeen coyly alludes to this idea. The photograph is of a pond at Hazlehead which, at one time, was one of the headers to the Holburn/Ferryhill Burn. The dammed pond was used along with a sequence of others to control the volume and speed of the water flowing into the water course. That water, in turn, turning the wheels of industry at the Justice Mills, Ferryhill Mill and Dee Village Mills. This was a water course which worked hard before it was allowed to drain into the Dee Estuary. It powered one of the means by which our nascent city nurtured itself with an industrialised food source.

It's industrial vitality (and vital industriality) now gone, the pond enjoys a photogenic retirement as an ad-hoc nature reserve. Man-made though it was, nature is taking it back, and the process is quite beautiful. Literally and metaphorically.

We usually try our very best to avoid using cliché, but clichés come into existence because they are true. Therefore, today we have no compunction in saying that we can't make up our minds whether a police initiative which might stop us taking nice photos is Ballardian, Kafkan, Orwellian or (Ray) Bradbury-esque (per Farenheiht 451).

That the police are asking members of the public to inform on photographers and others with an interest in this sort of stuff promotes a culture of secret denunciation like that of pre-Napoleonic Venice. Moreover, as pointed out by these people, the collective visual history of our country is extinguished by anti-terrorist initiatives designed to protect the heritage it prevents us recording. The irony is not lost on us. It further troubles us that these exhortations from the police will empower those who have an unhealthy interest in exercising arbitrary power over others. We have famously posted about this before.

Whatever it is, it's disturbing, it's unsettling, it's an affront to our freedom and a constraint upon our ability to go about our lives at our own liberty as free agents. To offer another cliché:

People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.  

(As Benjamin Franklin is purported to have said.)

The fact remains: in the west we are by far more likely to be struck by lightning, or killed by our family doctors than we are to be killed in a terrorist outrage.

Here's a photo of a bridge (co-incidentally, at the turning of the tide):

(With our thanks to reader spottiewattie17 for the heads-up.)