Hardgate Well, and Another Hardgate Well

All the little and big stories, all the little and big artifacts, all the places and all the people. Woven together where the past meets the present and gathers its forces to generate the future. That's "Other Aberdeen"; that's what the psychogoegraphical toolbox we're building is intended to disclose. We are all part of the process, tools in the box, part of the story of the town.

That's why we're really pleased that 'Other Aberdeen' has inspired a reader to share his story of a place, an artifact and of people. It brings it all together - that's what Other Aberdeen's for. Today, many people seem to think that a town is merely the sum of all the business activity within it. Part of Other Aberdeen's mission is to demonstrate that this is wrong. Reader Bill Watt has joined in by clicking the e-mail link to the left of the page and sending a message to otheraberdeen@gmail.com with this story and photos:

When I first became aware of the intended destruction of a local landmark ‘The Hardgate Well’ I shot off the following series of photographs for posterity. 

Readers may find it interesting to know that the Hardgate Well had a brother/sister well just across the road which I very nearly fell into back in the early 1980’s.

 How I almost fell into the well; My Father (Bill Watt Senior) was employed by the owner of a house just across the road from the ‘Hardgate Well’ to renovate his basement. Part of the renovation involved lifting all the granite flagstone flooring in the basement rooms and hallway.

The need to remove the flagstones was caused by rats or voles, not sure which, tunnelling everywhere just under the flagstones causing the flagstones to sink and tilt in all the rooms and hallway, the intended solution was to remove all the flagstones, level the ground and pour in 4-6 inches of concrete to replace the flagstones thus preventing the rats/voles from returning, question being how were the wee devils getting under the flagstones in the first place.

 As my father was getting on and didn’t want to carry out the heavy work of lifting and removing all the large granite basement floor flagstones he approached me (Bill Watt Jnr) to assist him.

We estimated the removal would take a couple of days as the flagstones covered a couple of rooms and a hallway, each flagstone was about 2’ x 3’.

My job was to lift each flagstone and walk it out the back door and onto the Hardgate there the flagstone would be stacked until someone collected them to be re-used, probably in someone’s garden..

Removing the flagstones took two full days. To complete the job ready for the concrete delivery I worked into the evening of the second day, no electricity, no one to help me, I was all alone and the basement was getting dark, finally I had just one last flagstone to remove at the end of the hall.

The procedure was the same for removing all the flagstones, it was, dig my pickaxe just under the edge of the slab, prise it up just enough to get my fingers under the stone then with all my strength lift the slab and take a step forward to get my body behind the slab for the last shove to get it upright against the wall, as I had done with all the other slabs, except this time as I lifted and was ready to take my step forward I heard a small plop, like a small stone dropping into water! This noise saved my life, if I had taken the step forward I would have dropped down into a well with the slab slamming shut on top of me, crushing me and or knocking me out, once in the well I doubt if I could lift the slab again as the well was 4’ to 5’ deep with slippery walls and three quarters full of crystal clear water.

Could this be where the rats or voles were coming from? We never did find out. Next day I showed my father and the owner of the house the well, I managed to get a photograph before I was instructed to fill the well with rubble before the cement arrived. You may think from the picture that the hole is an old drain, which is possible, however this does not explain why the hole is so deep and why the water so clear, in addition no one knew it was there as it had been covered by granite flagstones for a number of years, probably since the house was built which was at least 200 years ago.

With our grateful thanks to Bill Watt for the story and photos. He retains all rights.

The well(s) of this slope featured in the notorious Battle of Justice Mills (pdf) during the Civil Wars, the battle being a curtain-raiser on a dark period of occupation for and atrocities against the then people of Aberdeen.

The original Ordnance Survey of 1867 shows many wells along the spring line at Justice Mill Lane and Bon Accord Terrace on the southern facing slope of the Glen of the Holburn (or Ferryhill Burn, or Howburn or Justice Mill Burn), today's Union Glen. It makes a fascinating connection to the past that Bill and his father discovered one of these wells while making a property fit to face the future. It's all the more gratifying because today we can spread the story in this most modern of ways.

We've heard that locally-headquartered multinational oil service company Wood Group has leased space in the new office block development which now occupies the site of the derelict buildings shown in the first of Bill's photos above.

We're pleased that commerce/industry has returned at last to this historic part of Aberdeen. Now, it has a future.

Skybranding.

A brief follow-up to our ongoing "dunno" about whether we like or dislike the redevelopment of Justice Mill Lane.

We were intrigued by the double-handed backhand technique exhibited by renowned local architect Norman Marr in the award citation given to the IQ/Radisson Park Inn building at the 2010 Aberdeen Civic Society Awards (PDF here - see p4). The citation demonstrates what we believe is called "plausible deniability", and Mr Marr himself deserves a Blondin Award for his rhetorical high wire act.

There can be no doubt that the blight, vacancy, neglect, filth and dilapidation which characterised the location until recently was a blot. We're definitely glad to see it gone and we believe that hotel accommodation and commercial offices are ideal uses for such a central business district location. The question remains, though: Should we praise what we've now got on this site, simply because it's better than waste ground? Or should we be more critical, believing that the site deserved buildings of better quality and/or execution?

Well, we're still not ready to decide.

But today we'll draw attention to something we most certainly do not like: The new terrace of buildings has annexed the skyline with vulgar commercial branding.

Both from the West.

And from the East.

We dislike this brash subsumption of our town's skyline under these commercial banners. It serves as a psychogeographical negative, a minus point, a black mark towards our eventual evaluation of this new piece of urban placemaking.

Justice Mill Lane

We've mentioned the redevelopment of Justice Mill Lane a few times over the last months. Something we've tried not to do is prejudice our own opinion of the new buildings before they have settled into their use and made their presence felt in the wider urban environment through modified transport usage, work patterns, economic ripple effects and so forth.

Left to right: 
Travelodge (looming over Bon-Accord Baths), IQ office (Glass ziggurat), Radisson Park Inn Hotel.

Of the three major developments which have been progressing towards completion through 2010, two - the Radisson Park Inn Hotel and the IQ office development - are now complete and the third - a Travelodge budget hotel - appears to be on final fix. The Radisson is the only one of the three which is operational at the time of writing. And it looks quite nice inside. If you like that sort of thing. We'll go along for an omelette or club sandwich in the cafe-bar soon and report back. This is not a restaurant review blog, but in that instance we'll make an exception. Maybe. A neighbour of ours had a lovely big fluffy grey cat called Radisson, so that might prejudice our review because we loved him.

Pointy

The gigantic IQ office ziggurat also appears to be complete. We like the idea; we would greatly prefer to see office occupancy in the city centre - in the traditional Central Business District - than see continuation of the current trend which has speculative office 'campus' developments proliferating on out-of-town greenfield sites. 

Justice Mill Lane frontage Radisson Park Inn Hotel and IQ offices.

Out-of-town offices oblige the salaryman cubicle-jockey to clock up carbon-intensive commuting miles; reverse-commuting out of the city every day. We worry that this is one of the factors which helps condemn the traditional city centre to rot and vacancy, blight and decay, for lack of passing trade; lack of effective demand at pavement level. Moreover, more journeys by car erode the livability of our city which (some have forgotten) is actually charmingly compact and pleasantly walkable. It rains very little in Aberdeen, but, know what? Even when it does, umbrellas are available. So are overcoats and jumpers for when it's cold. Overcoat manufacture used to be a big part of the industry of this town, as it happens. But that's in the past, and we really don't want to turn back the clock. In today's global economy, it's better for everyone that overcoats are made elsewhere - we're all information-economy knowledge-workers in Britain these days. Mostly.

We reckon that today's knowledge worker (for such is what all office workers surely are, no?) should either be teleworking via broadband and skype and crackberry etc or, if actual - rather than virtual - 'facetime' (ugh) is really required, what better place could there be for office accommodation than the city centre? Knowledge workers in the city centre generate and distribute wealth firstly through the value added by their work pushing pixels around in the electronic sweatshop and secondly via their consumption of ancillary products and services which are also located in the city centre, close to the office electronic sweatshop. From the sandwich shop to the pub, from the bookshop to the boutique, all benefit from the passing trade of customers who are in the city centre for a different primary reason. 

On the flip side, the office workers benefit from the proximity of these services to their place of work - how convenient! And the city benefits from the mixed-use built environment created by a vibrant culture of pavement-level human-scale enterprises. Through this mix, the opportunity exists for new business and personal relationships to develop through a process of serendipitous accident or coincidence - the fountainhead of creativity.

By contrast, the out-of-town 'campus' concept de-humanises its workers by making them access the workplace by car, by spatially dislocating them from their place of residence and by divorcing them from human-scale interaction with other enterprises and their surrounding environment. The cubicle becomes a cookie cutter of conformity; the knowledge worker is forced into a monoculture and so creativity is stifled. Perhaps this is what the developers of out-of-town offices are wrongheadedly trying to engineer into the workforces which will occupy these campuses; compliance, acquiescence, surrender. Salaryman robot people.

Aberdeen Gateway - out of town, between Cove and Findon

Axcess Aberdeen - out of town, west of Portlethen

Westhill Business Park - out of town, south of Westhill

The completed IQ building looks not bad. But it is for the moment unoccupied and mothballed. Let's hope it gets tenants soon; a huge chunk of capital like that squatting at the west end of the city centre has the potential to regenerate the whole of the area.

IQ southern elevation

Reception mothballed

Now that the Justice Mill Lane builds are largely complete - formwork struck and scaffolding dismantled, roads re-opened and services commissioned - we can begin to think about the visual impact of the buildings on this important city centre site.

The view of Justice Mill Lane from the glen of the Holburn is radically altered, and not for the worse. The new terraces are visible from many points south, creating a dramatically and intriguingly scenographic vista drawing the eye to the west of the city centre. We do, of course, feel sad for the Bon Accord (Uptown) Baths, which are overwhelmed by the new development. Next to the dramatically contrasting upright slabs of the Travelodge, the glazed ziggurat terraces of the IQ, and the chequerboard and dental cladding of the Radission, the baths now look rather hangar-like and drab; a dated industrial shed, it has not aged well. It pains us greatly to write these things, but the truth is the truth. It is difficult to see how the baths can survive. Nothing good will last forever.

Bon-Accord Baths dwarfed by Traveloge and IQ

All our lives the Justice Mill Lane and Langstane Place corridor - historic though it may be - has been an unpleasant, dirty, drab and shabby canyon. It was as if the city centre was showing its semi-industrial arse to the pedestrian or road-user. Now, with the completion of these major buildings, along with other more modest developments further east, we begin to see the emergence of a different, brighter and more vibrant streetscape; significantly altered with new generous pavements contrasting markedly with their cramped predecessors. The more we look, the more we see a modern, clean aesthetic beginning to win over the former dirty, industrial, run-down, blighted and vacant area. 

Ironically, immidately across the road from the Radisson and IQ, the rear aspect of the now defunct Jumpin' Jacks nightclub, formerly the Capitol Cinema, is now one the most egregiously run-down examples of vacant blight in Aberdeen city centre. We can only hope that some group of developers and bankers can wrangle together regeneration capital for the Capitol soon. Ahem.

Not so good

However... these are only early impressions. We reserve the right to change our minds as all three buildings come on-stream and their full impact becomes clear over the months and years ahead. 

We have one significant gripe...

This is the pre-development artist's impression:

This is as-built.

The actual building is far more prominent and muscularly present from the Langstane Place viewpoint than early submissions suggested it would be. Bit naughty.

Regeneration, restoration, redevelopment.

Elsewhere, and in real life, we have had discussions regarding the relative merits of redevelopment or regeneration, as opposed to restoration of 'historic' areas within a city.

Often, when we speak to older relatives or friends, who have a deeper well of memories, it is tempting to indulge in a sort of "oooh it's not like the old days" nostalgia. A case in point is the recent comprehensive redevelopment of the major part of the south of Justice Mill Lane. Let's have a little think about the context in this 'historic' area.

A large office complex flanked by a premium hotel on one side and a budget hotel on the other now occupies a site which has, for the last 30 years been more-or-less derlict, home to itinerant small businesses, ad-hoc car-parks, vacancy and neglect.

The area, without doubt, is 'historic' - being associated with a particularly regrettable episode during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms; but the built environment in the area has, throughout our lives, been host to a different source of regret - that of blight. (Yeah, alright, nobody dies of blight, but bear with us...)

Now as the new-build complex approaches completion, we are aware of increasingly strident voices denouncing the development. This surprises us.

Did those who denounce the new development prefer the derelict motor trade premises and brick & concrete former furniture factory which most recently occupied this site on Justice Mill Lane? Or do they want to turn the clock back further still?

The car sales/service/filling station place (Town & County Motors) did some nasty now-you-see-it now-you-don't misdirection in order to achieve the demolition of Strawberry Bank in 1967, but that was before our time, so we cannot honestly lament it. We're certainly not going to call for its restoration. Of all things we might dislike in the built environment, we detest hollow pastiche the most.

Where would it stop, with that sort of "keep everything as it is/was" philosophy? We note that during this particular area's industrial and residential heyday in the 1860's, the recently grassed area with the shallow steps close to the former (wrong) site of Hardgate Well was occupied by a public house. The Hardgate Well itself was on private ground, with no public access, and a little down the hill a large tannery operated. Would the voices of reaction wish to restore all that? Would they restore the agricultural implement factory (which was on the site where the Travelodge is about to open) even though it would have no hope of finding staff to work in it or a market for its products?

When in time do they believe that the 'perfect Aberdeen' existed? We have no wish to live in someone else's idea of an 'ideal' utopian or arcadian past, for we know that no such thing ever existed. By contrast, we have every intention of living in the future - a future in which we will be full participants - making it as great a place to live as possible.

Or is it that those voices raised against redevelopment simply do not like the physical appearance of the new buildings? Here at Other Aberdeen, we do not have any particular favourite architectural styles; beauty, or otherwise is in the eye of the beholder. Fashions come and go. You've got to give architecture time. Tastes change.

What we do appreciate is quality, authenticity, and integrity. We believe that these aspects cannot be judged instantly when a new building is unveiled - so we're reserving comment on the architectural merit of this complex for the moment. Did similar controversies rage when the redundant Upper Justice Mill was demolished by Scott Sutherland to make way for his Regal Cinema (latterly Odeon, most recently some sort of gym)? Did the folk of Rosemount object to the building of the Shell HQ on the site of Altens farm?

This position is subtle; for instance, there has been much comprehensive redevelopment in Aberdeen which was regrettable. St Nicholas Street and George Street spring instantly to mind; the buildings which were destroyed to create the covered shopping malls had quality and integrity. The threat to Union Terrace Gardens is similarly intolerable.

Here at Other Aberdeen, we are not dogmatically pro- or anti-development. We are pro-quality - we appreciate authenticity - we love integrity.

The Hardgate Well

The Hardgate Well which dates from the 17th century and its commemorative plaque on the "Dubbydykes" section of Aberdeen's historic Hardgate have gone. Obliterated by the new Park Inn hotel development on Justice Mill Lane. The well and plaque told a very important story crucial to the history and character of Aberdeen (both the city and its people), and contributed to the geographical and historical legibility of the city.

Other than a (primary-school friendly) interpretation panel at the Bridge of Dee, this was the only public site in Aberdeen where the Civil War was commemorated in any way.

The wording on the plaque itself was very well considered; providing facts without interpretation, and inviting (by implication) the interested reader to find out more by his or her own initiative.

Will the well and plaque be re-sited? Or are they sitting, significance ignored, in some far-off architectural salvage yard?

I've written to the city archeologist. We'll see what he says...