Games’ End Mitch Miller Foreword

Collective’s All Sided Games set Whether in or around a From taking part in weekly craft out to find new ways to work with venue, classes at Piershill, doing the families in their locality, seeking out All Sided Games and in particular rounds with staff at Meadowbank, areas of mutual interest by thinking Mitch’s work, raises questions to sitting around a fire with young and acting, through the production around the relationship between people at Baltic Street, Mitch’s time and presentation of art. From June two areas that are co-ordinated spent on All Sided Games, working 2013 until April 2015, Mitch Miller at both governmental and local alongside Collective staff and project produced Games’ End, a series of council level, under the auspices partners, afforded everyone involved three new ‘dialectograms’ – highly of ‘culture and sport’. Engagement a ‘dialectic’ enquiry into the world annotated drawings of places which with individuals and groups who live around, our differences and what we capture the stories of the individuals in areas geographically considered have in common. who live, work or use the places. to be in ‘multiple deprivation’ result These records of time and place, in differing amounts of resources Mitch’s project traced the route now hang in the main office in expended to increase cultural and of the Commonwealth Games in Piershill, Hall 6 in Meadowbank and sporting activity in these areas – Scotland from past to present, in the playground on Baltic Street, a participatory art project or a starting in in the area of offering those who live, work, play large-scale infrastructural project, the former host venue of the 1970 or simply pass through, a marker of being catalysts for ‘change’ in very and , the more ephemeral and transient different ways. Meadowbank and Sports social characteristics that constitute Centre, before moving to Glasgow’s Mitch’s work takes us beyond a place from within. east end, site of the 2014 Games. government markers that identify and This publication chronicles and Mitch’s dialectograms directly categorise entire groups by looking further explores Mitch’s time working address the immediate and the at and discussing the day-to-day lived on Games’ End in his own words local, revealing both tensions and experience of people in a specific and others and expands on the rich discussions in or around a specific locale, in turn revealing the complex encounters at Piershill, Meadowbank location, and resulting in what narratives and histories, which and Baltic Street, whilst providing a Mitch calls ‘a pigeon-eyed view.’ define a place. Mitch’s dielectagrams wider consideration of his practice in authoritatively map the unofficial relation to working in these and other or the colloquial, drawing our contexts. attention equally to how individuals or groups live their lives now, whilst James Bell also revealing the external pressures Producer, Collective and forces socially, politically and economically that enriches, encloses or displaces them.

2 Games’ End Mitch Miller

When the respective city fathers of Games’ End is the notional ‘hyper- The western environs of Games’ Edinburgh and Glasgow selected district’ of two major Scottish cities End are the newest, and remain a their dilapidated east ends to host where I made dialectograms – large story for the future. When Glasgow ‘The Games’ of 1970, 1986 and 2014, scale illustrations of place – as part of won the 2014 Games, Dalmarnock they promised a great deal. They All Sided Games. Its eastern portion and the neighbouring Bridgeton promised a cavalcade of athletes, is in Edinburgh. Built for the 1970 and Calton areas were earmarked trainers, journalists, managers, Commonwealth Games (and re-used for significant redevelopment. The Queens, presidents (some ‘for for the 1986 event) Meadowbank ostensible wastelands of Dalmarnock life’), fact-finding delegations and Stadium and Sports Centre sits were to provide the Athletes’ Village, spectators. They promised a carnival among the predominantly working Velodrome and the bulk of the legacy of sport, culture and fraternity class communities of Jock’s Lodge, projects. The city council (whose would come to districts that were Piershill and Restalrig. Used in its time relationship with the east end is decayed, denuded and poor. And for athletic meets, football and as a notoriously antagonistic) promised then, of course, they would leave. leisure centre, now being considered to use the Games as leverage to for demolition, the stadium’s history deliver an enduring legacy for the But the organisers had plenty of begs important questions about area, a better tomorrow for the blueprints and documents stuffed the legacy of the Games and its children who use Baltic Street under either oxter. The Games would relationship with the inhabitants. Adventure Playground, the last of be a brief, blinding spectacle, but Such legacies have indirectly shaped the dialectograms I made, and the this flash was a by-product of a the lives of the people in Piershill one that looks more than any other, deeper, longer-term transformation Square West and East, the people to the future. of the proverbial plan. New facilities, who use Piershill Community Health infrastructural improvements, Flat, the first dialectogram I made investment… Assets through which for Games’ End. the city fathers would re-engineer what was now the Games’ End of town from its doldrums.

Piershill Community Health Flat

When I first came to Piershill Community Health Flat my intention was to use it largely as a base – a central node for my work in the wider Piershill community. But I soon found that the flat itself held more than enough of interest to keep me in work for months! A seemingly humble facility, the flat is funded by the NHS to implement ‘the social health model’, a way of improving levels of health in poor and vulnerable communities by addressing many of the issues that lead to health problems – stress, isolation and conflict being just a few. The work of the Flat Manager Beth Ekman, the volunteers and the core of mostly women who kept the flat an active, lively and non-clinical place had made the flat a genuine bastion of the community, a fascinating mix of collective will and Beth’s unique, quirky approach to her work. It’s no wonder I was so reluctant to leave by the end of my time there. 3 4 5 6 7 Meadowbank Stadium and Sports Centre

Meadowbank was always the big Then I got to know the people. By this point I had accepted that it one – mostly because it was the big The first were Jo Mathieson, would have to be a ‘doubler’ – two one – larger than any single place Manager, and Emma Ogilvie-Hall, A0 boards rather than the one I’d used I’d ever worked on, larger in surface Events Manager, who got me ‘in’ for Piershill. It started to take shape in area, larger in the number and range there and helped arrange my the Control Room, the largely unused of people involved. It was, in short, temporary takeover of the Control space where the scorers for Athletics daunting. Room, which I turned into an on-site meets would work. It was also the studio. Then I met Woody – a man best view of the track and stadium. What also made it tricky was that so long-standing he is practically From here I could look out at the I was coming into Meadowbank off an architectural feature. He offered running track and watch the sun the back of my work at Piershill – five me his special tour – an amble creep over as the day wore on, the minutes walk down the road, but a through every corner of the building shadow that never left the south side world away. I had become immersed (and every chapter of Woody’s life of the track. Runners would run, kids’ there, had practically gone native, story). He also dug out two boxes of clubs would cavort, the ground staff and now I had to shift my focus to programmes and photographs from lifted mats, erected goals, painted something entirely new. I kind of the past 44 years of the Stadium’s life. lines. On a sunny day the reds and resented it. So it took me a while greens looked fantastic. It was a to warm to Meadowbank. Emma arranged a meticulous good view. It was distracting; it schedule of meetings – with the But I did. The first thing that really was the point where I went beyond Scottish shooting team, a line dancing pulled me in was its architecture. warming to the Meadowbank class and the Auld Reekie Rollers, the Decayed, modernist and breezeblock building. I’d fallen in love with it. local Roller Derby team. I met Neil, – built, it isn’t immediately pleasing. the engineer whose unenviable task Then you look more closely, roam its it was to keep the place running. corridors and you start to find things – Mark, the Duty Manager, supplied moments of delight, surprising nooks some x-rated stories. I showed the and corners and unexpected glimpses drawing at staff training sessions of private lives and intimate moments. and discussed the white spaces.

8 Meadowbank Stadium and Sports Centre

9 From the very beginning it was as important to get a sense of how the drawing was going to come out as it was to record what I saw – whether we were going to make a three or two panel dialectogram (see opposite) or, as it turned out, a two panel arrangement as as I had roughly sketched here (see page opposite).

10 11

In order to get my head around the complex spaces of Meadowbank, I used rough 3D PIGEON-VISION sketches to establish the relationship between the different halls, practice rooms and studios. The View from the Dialectogram

Whether running with their crew or playing their own Since 2013 I have been making dialectograms for angle, Rattus Volaticus carves out its territory from the Collective’s All Sided Games, six artist commissions kerbs and cornices with a keen awareness of crumb, developed in and around venues used for the Edinburgh kebab and chip spillages. The pigeon is down, and it 1970, 1986 and Glasgow . is dirty. It is street-wise, it is, as the theorist Michel Images such as Piershill Community Health Flat or de Certeau would say, ‘clasped to the street’. Meadowbank Stadium and Sports Centre reflect the pigeon’s-eye view of such venues in Edinburgh and But it also flies, and that means it has the bird’s-eye view. Glasgow. We might see Meadowbank Stadium (home to People probably first imagined the bird’s-eye view back in the 1970 and 1986 Commonwealth Games in Scotland) the prehistoric age of the hand axe, and ever since it has from above, but the majority of what it shows you is based been the viewpoint of the privileged, the powerful and the on knowledge of what’s happening in its corridors, halls elevated. As geographer Hayden Lorimer remarked to me, and pitches. Like the women of Piershill Square West when we think of the bird’s-eye view, we imagine great who keep an eye on their community from the flat on the migratory birds – swallows, swifts or geese – the real corner, the pigeon-eyed dialectogram gets to know its turf high flyers. intimately – who is who, what is what, where it all happens We do not imagine pigeons, the rat with wings, the flyer of – while keeping in mind how it all fits together. low birth and lineage, irredeemably a bird of dirt, asphalt, This is the opposite of what we tend to see in modern muck and discarded things. maps, where this kind of local knowledge is rarely Six years ago I invented something called a ‘dialectogram’. included or even seen as relevant. The strolling, loitering, I made the name up by conflating diagram with dialect; perambulating pedestrians are cleaned away from the so diagram + dialect = dialectogram. Both words streets that only exist because people need to move from incorporate the Greek ‘dia’, meaning across, through or place to place. The map is an example of the drawing apart – definitions I could squeeze and manipulate as I language of the powerful, not particularly interested in needed. But why incorporate ‘dialect’ at all? I see drawing communicating low-level experience. as a language of sorts – the different marks, lines and You have to be careful when taking the bird’s-eye view. gestures we make in a drawing are as particular as speech. Back in the ‘90s I read ‘What I Hate about the News’ (1994) And like spoken or written language, drawing has its an essay by the poet Tom Leonard on the first Gulf War. accents and variants. It can be formal – or posh – like the He describes the spectacular news footage of guided mannered drawing style of the art academy or the precise missiles dropping on Kuwait, far enough below to look ‘jargon’ of technical drawings and architectural plans. It pretty much like a map: can be as down and dirty as a sketch, or have the qualities of a demotic or dialect in the form of graffiti, folk or naïve It’s one thing to have wide-angle spectaculars of art, or be as peculiar and individual as a pencilled portrait twelve-rockets-at-a-time whooshing upwards into or doodle. The word ‘dialect’ as I use it, represents a whole a dark desert sky, patriotic flag somewhere on screen; range of ways in which language can vary beyond official it’s another to have wide-angle spectaculars of what or ‘proper’ usage. happens to the conscripts on whom the over eight thousand disintegrating ‘bomblets’ fall from each salvo.

14 15 16 It’s a long way from the Gulf to Edinburgh’s east end, but I live in the east end, as do a sizeable chunk of my when I came up with Games’ End I was in some respects family and friends, part of those apparently non-existing thinking about Leonard’s words. Top down views obscure communities who sat in the path of this redevelopment. local culture; they observe – and describe – life, but do Cases of resistance and disagreement were already not participate in it, or take any stake in it. It’s a view that coming to light in the mainstream media: local homeowner makes it easier to realise the masterplans that politicians Margaret Jaconelli engaged in a long, bitter, stand and architects dream up. But it can also make it easier to off against Glasgow City Council, documented by the be callous, to clear away what is inconvenient or messy filmmaker and photographer Chris Leslie. And yet there to your grand plans. In architecture, lines enforce or was much smoothing over: Stephen Bennet’s otherwise represent to a greater or lesser degree, an exercise of excellent series on the changes to Dalmarnock running up authority or at least intended authority, over a given to the Games left out the large community of Travelling space: the power to build a wall, prevent people moving Showpeople whose yards are located in the area (even in freely from one point to another – to tell them what its aerial shots which, given how numerous these yards the landscape is. It is interested in its own agenda and are, was quite a feat in itself). Dalmarnock was put at the disinterested in the local culture of that landscape. centre of a paradoxical narrative that, on the one hand, indicated it was deserted, yet on the other, emphasised * how much ‘existing’ communities would benefit alongside When I signed up for All Sided Games it felt very much the new. as if my work had come full circle. Dialectograms And that is where the dialectogram came in: it began are as much a creation of Glasgow’s Commonwealth as a vernacular, demotic counterpoint to the authoritative Games project as the Emirates Arena and Sir diction of maps, diagrams, anthropological schematics Velodrome or dancing Tunnock’s Teacakes from the and architectural floor plans. A satire of official drawings Opening Ceremony. In 2008 Glasgow announced it had and the agenda they push. I began the first one by won the hosting of the Games and that, as a result, an drawing the place where I came from as if I was seeing ambitious programme of regeneration would change the it from above – the Showman’s Yard where my own east end. This dovetailed with plans for a major extension parents, siblings and relatives lived. It showed not a here to the M74 Motorway and the ambitious strategies of today, gone tomorrow ‘encampment’ (the loaded word Clyde Gateway, the partnership that oversaw much of the local politicos deliberately used to describe them) but Games’ legacy commitments in Dalmarnock, Parkhead what it was – a place that had been there for 11 years, and Bridgeton on the north side of the river Clyde, and that had its own order, values and culture. My drawing Rutherglen and Shawfield to the south. ‘borrowed’ the bird’s-eye view to make a point about what The plans were ambitious; the much-neglected district existed in the white spaces of the east end masterplan – of Dalmarnock, home to Baltic Street Adventure the scratchy marks that would never be included in a Playground, would be home to the new Emirates map of the new Dalmarnock. Arena and Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome and Athletes’ Village. * The Clyde Gateway vowed to bring 20000 jobs to the area and build significant new residential properties, Backcauseway, the proto-dialectogram based on my sports and leisure facilities. ‘New’ was very much the experiences as a member of Glasgow’s travelling show watchword, the stated goal being to create a ‘vibrant, community, was born partly in anger at the way in new city district’. This led to a process of land which Glasgow’s new ‘Games’ End’ was being created. procurement through compulsory purchase orders and Its most immediate inspiration was however, from the subsequent clearance of existing communities within the sociologist Judith Okely who described a Gypsy Dalmarnock – although much of the official images and camp thus: rhetoric acted as if there were no existing communities. When Gypsies choose the layout, they often place And fair enough, when viewed from an architect’s the trailers in a circle, with a single entrance. The masterplan, high up where the swallows flew, main windows, usually the towing bar end, face it’s not as if they were visible. inwards. Every trailer and its occupants can be seen by everyone else.

17 I had not invented the pigeon’s-eye view when I read But there could be a pleasure in this too; the this, but Okely’s piece of diagrammatic thinking is all contradictions of Red Road put paid to ideological purity street-bird. It begins from above, with the notional, but kept things interesting – and that has certain narcotic not-quite-closed circle described and then immediately qualities. Negotiating between my own values, those of forces us to swoop back down, to the level of the main a big, ambitious project and those I encountered was not windows (discernible only when looking at a trailer face exactly fun but it was enlivening, constantly requiring a on). She ends up placing us in a trailer, appreciating hop from one back foot to another. Being out in the field, the view from the window itself. Her pigeon-vision embracing a community that is not mine but I come to poaches the strategic vantage point to better explore terms with, has pleasures of its own, small but important and understand what she has learned at ground level. triumphs. The pop-culture critic Philip Sandifer calls this Like a pigeon, she only flies in order to get a better sense ‘collectivist hedonism’, squeezing joy out of the world as of how the streets all fit together, so she can continue part of an on-going existential inquiry into how we relate to interact with it and crucially, be of it. to one another. For Okely and myself you could say it’s a ‘hedonism of the field’ where we embrace lives that are From Backcauseway I went on to produce a series of unlike ours. With every dialectogram project I run the risk drawings at the Red Road flats, based on long periods of being changed every time I pick up my sketchbook, of working with its tenants and employees, struggling chap on a door, hunker down by a playground fire pit, at all times, to find authentic means to let them speak or gratefully accept a cup of tea. I’d be lying if I said through the work. The basic idea of the dialectogram was I didn’t enjoy it. a good start – the tension created by drawing out a floor plan as if from above, then insisting upon explaining that Since that first satire, the dialectogram has become a floor plan in terms only attainable from below. The scholar participatory thing – and I do mean thing. I am not a fine Scott Hames described this to me as a ‘clever way of artist; I have no training in that tradition and am fortunate ‘hijacking’ third-person/monumental style for first-person that bodies such as Collective are happy to work with knowledge and concrete experience, without relinquishing interlopers such as myself. I am an illustrator, which means its authority.’ It flutters down to the tarmac, grabs the I straddle the great aesthetic tribes of art and design. discarded chip, then hovers up, looking for the next one… That is, I can merrily steal from both. In putting together Games’ End with Catherine Sadler, James Bell and Kate I like being called clever as much as the next person, but Gray at Collective, I drew inspiration (if you’ll pardon the this was also a genuinely useful statement. It scanned pun) from design practice, in particular Bruno Latour and fairly well to my then professional position, working on Pelle Ehn’s notion of the ‘Thing’ as an assembly around these weird illustrations in the everyday swim of Red material. What do we mean by this? Road for a cultural project run by a partnership of such satanic majesties as the Glasgow Housing Association and We’ll start with the material; at Piershill this was the flat, Glasgow Life (it has to be emphasised that on a personal the allotments, the clinking mugs for tea. At Meadowbank level the representatives of these organisations were the grand scheme of the stadium, the judo mats, the steel frequently very good people). The contradictions of the spars left over from the old terraces. The Baltic Street political arrangements that made this activity possible are Adventure Playground’s materials are its grass knolls, the never far from the surface, so that not only was I trying to fire pit and the bits and pieces that are potentially, swings, depict the tactical cleverness of the people of Red Road ladders and thrill rides. That’s what we talked about in as they lived in those massive blocks, I was having to be Games’ End. But in all three of these endeavours there was tactical myself in the face of various establishment bodies. that other material we assembled around – the big white That’s what happens when you step out of the studio. mount board I would draw upon and the oral accounts of the participants who agreed to take part. We discussed their lives, what the place meant to them, but also what we could illustrate about their place, and how. This meant asking them to imagine it as if from above, and then anchor that in their grounded experience. It asked them to think a bit like me, just as I was learning to think a bit like them. It asked them to be pigeons.

18 In Piershill, this method allowed a group of women to What I am trying to get across is that the dialectogram rethink and illustrate the complex relationships and illustration is not just the drawing but a kind of behaviour, problems of their community flat. The drawing itself, a state of mind. As well as drawing, I participated in which was shown to them many times during its long, fun-days, baton-relay events, games of hidey. At the fun tortuous road to something like completion, became day I drew pictures to order, at Meadowbank Stadium and a sort of place where we could build new relationships Sports Centre I gave an idiosyncratic walking tour that between each other, remember old stories, create new encouraged those who joined it to see the stadium in my ones, discuss things that were not usually discussed skew-whiff fashion. I tried to create an atmosphere where but left implicit. we could all acquire pigeon-vision. Participants did their own fieldwork on my turf – they visited my studio, saw my works in progress, came to the Edinburgh International Book Festival where they could share my arch-comic geekery. We got to know each other. We flocked together. We made dialectograms.

Mitch Miller Illustrator Pigeon

An important part of Games’ End was the ‘handover’ of the original dialectogram drawing to the communities I’d worked with. These pages show an early concept for how we could install the Piershill Community Flat drawing in the main office area.

19 Baltic Street Adventure Playground

What can be said about Baltic Street Proximity is not the only comparison; With a whole playground to compete with, keeping Adventure Playground that gets leading the playworkers is Robert the interest of the young people at Baltic Street Adventure Playground was not always easy. Among anywhere near the feel or atmosphere Kennedy, someone who, much like the activities we did together was to ask them to of this place? On my first visit I saw Beth at Piershill, has given his all express their thoughts and feelings about the place in their own (much more vivid) drawings. These cost a kid just shy of seven brandishing to make this place work – not just me a lot of off-the-cuff sketches of skateboarders, an axe. It was to cut wood for the through his organisation, persuasion BMX bikers, (enough with the already!) and the occasional vampire. campfire that sits at the heart of the and supervision of the project, but in playground, a converted gap-site imprinting a large part of himself onto just a short walk away from the it, and encouraging others to follow sleek new builds of the Glasgow suit. The likes of Beth and Robert 2014 Commonwealth Games. It’s are the kind of people routinely a playground the children build derided by would be sophisticates as themselves, under the light-touch ‘do-gooders’. It’s an epithet we need supervision of the playworkers. to reclaim for its positive connotations Baltic Street stands in much the same because these guys really are relation to the signature venues of do-gooders. And we’d miss them the Games (Celtic Park and the new if they ever became a bit more like Emirates Arena and Sir Chris Hoy the rest of us. Perish the thought. Velodrome) as Piershill does to the Meadowbank (signature venue of the Edinburgh 1970 and 1986 Games). Tiny in comparison, blink and you’ll miss it, but arguably, every bit as important to the health of Games’ End.

20 21 22 23 All Sided Games was a series of Collective is a contemporary visual art off-site commissions, placing artists organisation that delivers an exciting in and around venues built or used and ambitious programme of new for the Edinburgh 1970, 1986 and exhibitions, commissions Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth and projects. Games. It brought people together Established in 1984 to support new to make work of mutual interest. and emergent artists to exhibit work in Edinburgh, it now commissions new work by artists who are at a pivotal stage in their development.