I Walk, I Cycle, I Look, I Think. I am the Bad Man of Rubislaw Hill.

I've just been Krakened!

After yesterday's upbeat feeling when we reported that maybe the tide was turning for the creative and progressive sections of Aberdonian society, we've been brought back to earth with a thump provided by the agency of our burgeoning police state and its ad-hoc amateur army of self-appointed busybody petit-police informants who have been empowered by the urgings of Operation Kraken - which we've complained about specifically before.

Denburn flows beneath Seafield House
'underground' carpark at Hill of Rubislaw

A little while ago, on the 10th of April, I was up on the Hill of Rubislaw. There are many, many interesting aspects to the geography, industrial archaeology and current use of this part of our town and the human interaction with that geography. We've got quite a lot to say about it, and will do so over the coming weeks and months as part of several interestingly intersecting projects. So there I was, on a mountain bike that day, photographing the Denburn as it disappears underneath the carpark of Seafield House. There are no signs which prohibit access, there are no notifications that the space is private; footpaths and roads criss-cross the site providing access from all sides and various routes across the campus.

Seafield House is a huge office building, once occupied by UK state oil corporation Britoil, latterly occupied by multinational plc oilco Shell, now split into suites with various occupants, some empty. Shell are still in some of those suites, I think. I took a handful of photos and had conversations with a couple of private security guard petit-police who (obvously having espied me on their CCTV panopticon monopticon screens) emerged from their airless cabin and took an indignant interest in what I was doing, they asserted (incorrectly) that I required permission to take photographs. I told them I was working on a writing / geography project, and they seemed to accept that. They didn't bother asking to see the photos I'd taken. They did ask my name. I declined to provide it. In hindsight the way they 'dealt' with me is quite fascinating and enlightening. One of these private-security guards was a blond-dreadlocked white-rasta multi-pierced crusty-type. When I explained the parallels between the non-underground underground carpark of Seafield House at Hill of Rubislaw - the way it fills the valley of the Denburn at that point - and how it parallels and provides a precident for the notorious proposal to fill in another part of the Denburn Valley further downstream, he agreed with my aims in wishing to point out this parallel. I can now see that this was one of the ways that these people have been trained to 'contain' non-conforming behaviour - I thought I'd made an ally for progressive urbanism - I thought I'd made him think, but all the time he was making me reveal my hand, reveal details about myself, and once I'd gone he got on the phone to the police. Stupid me.

Denburn re-emerges from beneath carpark
and Seafield House

So today, the police come to the door of our studios in the upscale heart of downtown Pituxton, demanding to be let in to interview me about this "incident" at Seafield House. ("Incident"?) As far as I was aware, I had a conversation with a couple of over-officious security guards who appeared to accept my explanation as to what I was doing - it's stretching a point to label this an "incident", surely? As I hadn't provided the petit-police with my name, I was surprised that the real police had managed to connect me with the "incident" at Hill of Rubislaw. It is of great concern to us, and a source of anguish and worry that police resources and capital have been expended in reviewing, cross-referencing and collating CCTV footage in order to arrive at an identification of me.  The footage was circulated within the police, presumably via some sort of internal notification communication system, and seen by a significant proportion of their officers, until one could identify me (no doubt from my 'footprint' left by the famous 'incident' at Union Square.) We cannot say how many police man-hours have been expended in making that cross-reference identification. Maybe they have AI expert systems based on fuzzy logic which help them make these connections. But perhaps we're getting just as paranoid as they are if we start to think like that - robot overlords, the singularity is close, etc...

Sign says "Underground car park"
But it isn't "underground" at all...
It's build into the natural contours of the Denburn Valley

In any case, with so much time and manpower being spent on mopping up the fallout from our perfectly legal activities which impinge on no-one else's rights, it seems clear that we've become quite a pest to the authorities (or businesses, or something) - what with all that walking and cycling around and noticing stuff and thinking about it and writing about it. How dare they accuse me of any wrongdoing or assume that I am intent on causing harm? Our intentions are quite the reverse. Yet there they were, in our studio, two Grampian Police officers excusing themselves that they had to investigate the "incident" because of the "terrorist threat". Really. The female officer said that she understood that what I had been doing at Hill of Rubislaw was harmless, but that nevertheless she was duty-bound to follow up, just as the petit-police were duty-bound to report me to the police. At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, it all sounded a  bit "we're just following orders" to me.

During the interview with the police, which was conducted in the working studio of our business, surrounded by the tools of our trade and by artwork in progress strewn around the place in various stages of completion, I was insultingly asked by the interviewing officer: "Do you work, at all?" It was firstly incredible to us that she didn't notice that she was actually within a place of work, but secondly, and probably more pertinently, what difference should it make whether I work or not? Is it as if the unemployed are all evil with malfeasance on their minds, more likely to be involved with terrorism?

"Ground" level. Parking in the Denburn valley beneath.

I expressed my incredulity to the police officers as they stood in my studio, implying stuff. I expressed my incredulity that the petit-police at Seafield House, while appearing to accept my explanation on the day had actually taken the puffed-up indignant and self-important time to take the 'matter' further. "Oh, but they've got to report 'incidents' like these, d'you see" the female police officer patronisingly assured me.
"Incident?" I asked, eyebrows raised.
"Oh yes, there's a heightened level of threat at the moment," the policewoman told me. "Just look what happened in Morocco."

Yes. That's what she said. Words almost fail us. We find it offensive in the extreme that my taking photographs of buildings and burns in the West End of Aberdeen should be compared to the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents in a faraway foreign country characterised by unstable social, political and religious conditions. It is sick and sickening. The minds which make these connections are sick, it sickens discourse (this being an example) and it is part of the ongoing pathology of the society which we had hoped to help to remedy. It makes us nervous about our whole lives - nervous of finding things interesting - structures, textures, imprints, buildings - nervous and afraid to share the delight we find in the things we find interesting. Nervous to even write this. I steel myself and write on...

It sickens us to our stomachs that we're being made to feel bad about our way of life, our interests and the way we explore our city in order to reach an understanding of its past, present and future. In this way; in our own small way we hope to help influence societal development here, to try to make our future in our town better, livable, human. We care about our lives in our town, we care about this passionately - which is why we look so closely. And then for this we have to explain ourselves at length, to authority figures (and petit-police para-authority figures) who think it's just weird to look at a river and wonder where it goes. We submit that it is we who are normal and they who are weird, using as they do their authority to nosey in about and ask us impertinent questions, to compare us to terrorist murderers and to keep and refer to records on us at the behest of private security part-time self-empowered petit-police squinting suspiciously at their CCTV screens, hating, fearing, paranoid. We have done nothing wrong. We should have nothing to fear - yet we feel the yolk and shackles of suspicion beginning to chafe. As they have managed to identify me, and come to my door simply from pictures of my likeness, we wonder just how deeply their investigations into the background of my private life have gone. It's a creepy feeling.

It is becoming clear that by looking at, thinking about and writing of our surroundings in the way we do, we stand out to a degree which is increasingly regarded as unacceptable in our society. There is a Japanese saying "The nail-head that stands out will be hammered flush". Our interest in urbanism has prompted a three-week police investigation and has brought officers to our door: We just felt the hammer.

We'd like to say to the interests which wield that hammer:

Stop guessing! Go out and catch some effing criminals; go out and gather some intelligence on those who perhaps do wish to cause harm to people, property, society - these people emphatically are not us and you know it. Stop trying to stifle the creative people in Aberdeen, for one day you'll find there are none of us left. Our patience is wearing thin.

Of course, by writing all this, we are putting ourselves further in view as outliers. We are nail-heads that stand all the further out. By oppressing us and attempting to suppress our perfectly innocuous actions - by attempting to hammer flush the nail-heads - the authorities and para-authorities provoke our further criticism.

And so on...


Edit:

A friend points out that I'm probably not right to believe that I've been tracked by my likeness on CCTV:

...the way I'd do it would be look at the cellphone info to see whose phones were in the cell, get their numbers, id the owners. Fairly straightforward if you are in a position of power. Not that I do, but just saying. Going to CCTV mode is so inefficient.

Indeed, and thanks for that.

After having had a few days to reflect, we think that the most interesting aspect of the story is that the police went to the bother of tracking me. It strikes me that the Oilco's here in Aberdeen may be behaving a little like those A+ list celebrities (Tom Cruise and the like) who ban eye-contact with their underlings. Shell are saying "don't you dare look at me!"

We think that there are three possibilities for the police having followed up on the security guards' reporting of my presence in this semi-private semi-public place.

1. Oilco paranoia - police willing to act as oilco agents and deliver me a fingerwagging rebuke for daring to notice that there are oil company premises in Aberdeen. Police owned by business. We're doomed.
2. Genuine fear of terrorist attack by slightly chubby middle aged man making no attempt to hide his actions and happy to discuss what he's up to with the security guards. In which case the three weeks they took to getting round to intercepting me simply demonstrates their incompetence. We have no hope of these officers protecting us from genuine malfesance. We're doomed.
3. Mechanical box-ticking follow-up by-the-book. 

Of these, we reckon that the third is the most likely. It's the book that's wrong. It still makes the security-guards and police guilty of 'just following orders' by the agency of 'by the book' and incapable of autonomous action which would allow an independent response to unique circumstances. We're doomed.

Rubislaw Quarry. Update.

A lovely day for a look at the quarry loch.

Some months ago, we conducted a thought experiment with the water in Rubislaw Quarry Loch as the subject.

We'd been prompted by news coverage that the quarry loch had been purchased by Sandy & Hugh, friends of a friend of a relative of ours. They refused to confirm exactly how much they'd paid, only going as far as saying that it was "less than a one-bedroom flat". A reasonable answer to why anyone would want to buy such an obvious liability was, similarly, not forthcoming.

So we'd gone and had a look at the site where the great part of the stone for Aberdeen's 19th and 20th century buildings had been extracted. We were impressed by the level of water which had filled the 200 metre deep hole. Indeed, by dead reckoning from our viewpoint we could see that the level of water was higher than Aberdeen's prestigious, upscale Queen's Road, which orbits the south of the site.

This might be something to be concerned with, as we darkly fantasised at the time. [For those not familiar with Aberdeen - this site is in the very centre of the affluent and aspirational "West End" of the town. Just to the west of the town centre; an area of tree-lined avenues, stately terraces and the modernist offices of Big Oil. This is an inner urban issue.]

Returning to view the quarry loch some six months later (again, to our chagrin, neglecting to bring along the Other Aberdeen theodolite) we were forced to use dead reckoning and pour over the photographic evidence which we gathered. Loupe to eye, we can confirm that, in our opinion, the water level has risen about 1.5 metres in the last six months.

Is this really a cause for concern? Truthfully, we don't know. But what we can say is that published minutes of Queens Cross/Harlaw Community Council for November and December 2010 reveal that the Community Council has significant concerns.

It seems that since November 2010, the Community Council has been in disappointingly one-way correspondence with Sandy & Hugh regarding their intentions for the quarry loch, and seeking information on whether any progress had been achieved in their discussions with civil engineers at Aberdeen University regarding means of permanently reducing the water level.

No response has been forthcoming from the grinning new owners who say they want to "share" the quarry loch with the residents of Aberdeen. Just what form this "sharing" will take is what worries us!

Sandy & Hugh: Silence.

Living in the heart of upscale downtown Pitmuxton (down the hill from Rubislaw), as we do, we'd very much like to have an answer from Sandy & Hugh.

We can attest that the Damoclean threat of two megatonnes of water thundering down the valleys of first the Holburn, then Geldieburn then Newlands burn and Ruthrieston Burn on the way to washing the entirity of the Bridge of Dee parking and shopping experience into the Foords of Dee is an intolerable source of fretful stress to the residents of Pitmuxton, and may have an adverse impact upon the upscale and aspirational character of the neighbourhood, thus rendering it less nice. (But what really bothers us is that Ferryhill is well out of the way of this threat. Dammit.)

We'll be following the future minutes of Queen's Cross/Harlaw Community Council with close attention.

Kepplestone!

On our way to seek out a prominent example of an Aberdeen Ice House (watch this space) we were struck by the cognitive dissonance provoked by the après-post-modern skyline at new Kepplestone.

Is it an Aztec ziggurat? We wouldn't mind if it were.

We had heard that taxi-drivers in the city have taken to referring to the new Kepplestone as 'the west-end Tillydrone', so we thought we'd better take a closer look. (We can, of course, read well the implication in that loaded phrase, and we don't like it. Tilly is much done-down; residents of other areas self-importantly assuming their own neighborhood to be "better", and populated by a "better kind of folk". It is not, and they are not.)

So, ready for anything, we approached via Viewfield Road. The developer has laid some engraved (if a bit breathless and ungrammatical) granite plaques giving an interpretation of the histobunk of the site.

So far, so good.

Interesting.

Didn't know that.

OK

That's what we were familiar with, before the new development:

Hubris?

So we continued wandering about, firstly on the lower level of the site, where we remember that there used to be rugby pitches. Now there are detatched houses. Not really to our taste, but nice enough and well mannered, if you like that sort of thing.

But why do the feel they must park on the pavements?

The bizarre sense of anti-place only really started when we turned round and looked north up the hill where a orotund yet oddly asymmetrical staircase hints at a touch of unhinged, slurring megalomania in the conception of the scheme.

All Grecian Sir! Modernist detail on a Classical body!

Climbing the steps, we arrive in a neo-Grecian courtyard. If you find yourself a little tired out by the climb, you'll be glad to see that the developer has thoughtfully provided some Granitette chairs where you may sit and admire the details.

Moving on, we are ushered under a pointless arch for a view of the 'exclusive' parking. A significant and important aspect of any housing development for the sort of people who want to live like this, we understand.

And so to the tower-blocks. Note the astroturf on the un-balcony. Honestly. Why?

Thrilling juxtaposition of old and new.

Turning round to re-orientate ourselves, we notice the remains of Kepplestone House. And we begin to lose hope.

We remember the College of Domestic Science - 'The Dough School'. Slab and plinth modernism, not to everyone's taste - fair enough - but it sat back from Queen's Road and down an embankment. Today's residential towers loom boastfully and alarmingly over what remains Aberdeen's premier residential area.

They rejected plans to build a supermarket into the profile of the slope, so they got this residential development instead. We'll wager that the longer-established residents of Queen's Road, Royfold Crescent and Anderson Drive would much sooner have the Dough School back.

Turning our eyes skyward (in search of hope), we looked up in the darkening gloom and we could see that the residents of three of the apartments, each flat atop the other, were watching television. The television screens shone out over Queens Road in the gloaming. Identical large screen LCD's mounted in identical positions on their respective identical and otherwise unadorned walls, all identically tuned to the same channel. There was an ad-break being transmitted.

From the 22,000 mile high 'Clarke-orbit' geostationary Sky satellite to the dishes of Kepplestone, via the walls of the over-mortgaged residents, the tired eyes of the rush-hour motorists - furiously becalmed in the tea-time gridlock at the Earls Court roundabout - were invited to consider whether or not they were paying too much for their car insurance.

We note that the entire complex is guarded by a tank. The gun points towards the development and its residents. We approve of that, and wonder if any of them have noticed...

By Gad! A tank!

Rubislaw Quarry: Source of Wealth. Curse. Liability.

We heard recently that the remains of Aberdeen's world-famous Rubislaw Quarry were to be put up for sale at auction, starting bid £30k. The sale is now complete.

We read that the quarry, starting work in earnest in 1778, produced something like 6 million tonnes of the fine grey silver granite we are so familiar with. The granite from the quarry supported an ecosystem of business networks in the city and the stone found its way into some famous buildings elsewhere in the world such as Waterloo Bridge, the Palace of Westminster and the parliament in New Deli. But all things must pass, and the quarry became uneconomic and closed in 1971, round about the time of this famous picture...

Wooooaaaaahhh!

Here's a picture of the quarry in its high Victorian hey-day in 1885.

Interestingly, in this illustration looking south towards the low hills of Kincardineshire, on the brow of the ridge in the middle-distance we can see Kepplestone House to the left (east) and Rubislaw House to the right (west).

Rubislaw House has been well preserved and added to over the years, and today houses the Gordon Highlanders' regimental museum.

Kepplestone House has fared less well.

Back on-topic... Often fetishised by Aberdonians, 'the granite' - and the perceived need to maintain the city's 'granite heritage' - can sometimes act as a brake on innovation in urban realm architecture and spacemaking in the city. Worse, as the grey silver granite is now hard to come by, all too often we see builders paying lipservice to this heritage through the use of 'granitette' blockwork simulacrum (which is concrete breeze-block with a coating of rice-crispie-sized granite chips). This is used to hoodwink the passerby into believing that a building politely fits in among its Neo-Grecian Georgian and Neo-French-Gothic Victorian neighbours. This 'granitette' un-material can be seen most obviously on the deck of the St Nicholas Ctr in the heart of the city. But look at any - yes any - residential building built between 1972 and 2010 - it's everywhere. And it's horrible.

Ironically, the granite itself built the long breakwater pier at Aberdeen Harbour from which it was exported worldwide. Today, in Aberdeen, the quarry exhausted, rather than dig and blast our wealth from the ground, we sook it from beneath the seabed. This over-reliance on one business sector is known as 'the Dutch Disease' and is related to 'the Resource Curse'.

There is, however, in addition to this economic disease, a real physiological disease associated with Aberdeen granite: lung cancer. Granite contains uranium and radium, both of which follow a radioactive decay chain to form radon gas. Radon is the single largest contributor to an individual's background radiation in the UK and there is a well established link between breathing high concentrations of radon and the incidence of lung cancer. Radon is heavier than air, and so accumulates in the basements of granite buildings. You have been warned.

It's often said that the quarry is the biggest man-made hole in Europe, but we can't find any reliable confirmation that this assertion is a fact. But one thing's for sure, it is now one of the largest man-made lochs in Scotland!

We didn't have the Other Aberdeen theodolite with us on the day we visited the quarry loch to take this photo, but by simple dead reckoning on line of sight, we could establish that the water level is now significantly higher than the road level of Queens Road at Queens Avenue (opposite Kepplestone) where access can be gained to get a look at the quarry loch.

As mentioned at the top, the quarry loch was put up for sale with starting bids of £30,000. And, as luck would have it, the buyers happen to be friends of a relative of ours. They won't say how much they paid, but will say that it was "less than a one-bedroom flat". We scratch our heads at why they bought this obvious liability... one day, the water level will overtop the berm on the Queen's Road side.

A friend has calculated that the quarry loch now contains about 2 million cubic metres of water. That's two megatonnes in weight. He asks:

"How do you get rid of that amount water? Do you simply drop a sump pump down the hole with a riser draining onto Queen's Road and hope the water finds its way down to the sea?"

This makes for an interesting thought experiment: On it's way downhill, the water would first encounter Stewart Milne's magniloqent (if oddly asymmetrical) grand processional stairs at Kepplestone:

"All Grecian, sir; Modernist details on a classic body"

We think that the resulting cascade would be most beautiful and spectacular! It might even become a top tourist attraction for the North East! Unfortunately the SuDS at the bottom of the Kepplestone basin would need upgrading.

Kepplestone SuDS

We don't think that this is up to the challenge of half a megatonne of water.

And the culvert of the West Burn of Rubislaw (or the Holburn, if you want) which drains this entire basin is only 1.5 metres in diameter.

This culvert runs below the houses of Cromwell Road and Union Grove, so we can't see any way to increase its capacity other than by demolishing some of these prestigious, exclusive west end properties.

But hey, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs!