Using ancient maps from the National Library of Scotland and drawing new ones, Tamsin Granger walked around the edge of Edinburgh in Walking Like a Tortoise. The result was more walks, creative responses and art-making, much questioning, conversation & radical hospitality.
This intervention is one of the shortlisted pieces for the 2024 Marŝarto Awards. Below, Tamsin talks about her experience.
In 2024, I walked slowly ‘Like a Tortoise’ around the edge of Granton, a rough area on the edge of a famous city, Edinburgh, where I live. Using maps from 1870 to the present day which each showed a different boundary line, I collected stories of peoples’ heritage and local history as I went. These explorations were a way to define the place and to root myself – an older, single Englishwoman in Scotland. I asked, ‘How are the people who live in Granton related to each other, the wider area, and the rest of the world?’ ‘How does an incomer like me fit in?’ It became an enquiry into the links between geography and community, into mapping and belonging. I was saying ‘Hello, how are you?’ to those I lived amongst: humans, plants, animals and birds, the ocean, all who make up and contribute to where I have my home.
There are tensions at this brink of Edinburgh because the landscape is changing on a daily basis. It was once made up of fields which supported cattle and crops, overseen by noblemen and separate from the city. Later, this coastal apron was covered in smoking brick chimneys and railway cuttings, exchanging goods and services with Scotland, the rest of the UK, and internationally for over 150 years. After the recession in the early 2000s, much of the earth lay dormant and city dwellers who had never ventured so far from the centre, began to enjoy it for its wild places and sea swimming once again. Now the ground has been scraped bare, the orchids which thrived during the pandemic uprooted, and new housing is being erected at a dizzying rate. As we walked together, a young Chinese woman told me about her feelings of loss: “Although we chained ourselves to the trunks during the day, they cut the trees down afterwards, overnight, while we were sleeping.”
Who has been documenting the changes? Despite Historic Environment Scotland stating, “The historic environment shapes our identity. It tells us about the past, the present – even points the way to the future.” buildings have, in the main, been demolished rather than preserved. There’s something depressing about the new, darly coloured blocks which are already showing damp on their outside walls. Although the word ‘consultation’ seemed to be in every official report I came across during my research, residents I walked with often said they felt disempowered and uninformed. This is not a rich and propsperus place. When the harbour was built in the 1838, its arms literally reached into the Firth of Forth and drew in boats and shipping from all over the world. Since at least 1946, people of various nationalities were given accommodation here when there wasn’t anywhere else for them to live, and our Community Garden, churches and community centres still welcome them. However, recent changes have disorientated some older, long-time residents who I met as I inched my way around; the renaming of streets and stations, of the whole area as ‘Edinburgh Waterfront’ by the City Council, has meant that these places are confusing rather than familiar.
First, my steps stitched together these streets and the people I met, then I mapped them with needle and thread, and exhibited at the local community centre and in the city’s Central Library (with a Vsual Artist and Craft Maker Award from Creative Scotland / Edinburgh Council). The original Granton tenants and the New Scots (originally from places like Dubai, the Ukraine, Poland, and Mumbai) allowed me to take their portraits and gave me words to display in answer to my questions: ‘Where do you think the dividing line is between Granton and the surrounding areas of Pilton or Trinity? Does it matter?’ ‘How does it feel now that your house which was in Granton, has been repositioned in a parliamentary constituency with a different name?’ ‘Do you still feel as if you belong?’ The exhibitions, art workshops, local history drop-ins, presentations and celebratory events that were part of Walking Like a Tortoise stimulated discussion and debate between residents and decision-makers, offered opportunities for creative expression, and allowed for some seblance of citizen power.
Skirting the urban and coastal landscape of Granton, I and the people I walked with looked into hidden corners, viewed the architecture from unlikely angles, foraged, and spent time sharing fears about the tram system being extended out here, and dreams for more harmonious living spaces. In Arabic and Polish, as well as English, we listened to each other’s stories and made art. I shared my neighbour, Betty’s tale of a tortoise she was given by North African and Spanish sailors, one they had found in the bottom of an esparto grass boat which put in at the harbour at the bottom of our road when she was a child in the 1940s. In return, I learned about the Xmas parties that United Wire, one of the biggest employers, laid on for the workers and their families in the early ‘90s. I shared the Taoist (T’ai chi) practice of ‘walking leisurely like a tortoise’ with visitors to the exhibition, so that they, too, could try this practise which counterbalances the ‘normal’ fast-paced way of life, and gives its practitioners time to look around them and feel how they are. In return I was told about how Queen Victoria was given tea and cake at the local hotel because her journey had been delayed by poor weather and she arrived a day late, at Granton instead of Leith as planned. (I don’t know if this is true but it’s a good story!)
It became clear through walking, alone and together as part of this artistic practice, that our feet were connecting directly with our heritage, even if most of the fabric of the industrial revolution has disappeared. We were breathing in the past as well as the present, and drinking its water (the Granton Burn (small river) was one of the original boundary markers). The earth itself, peoples’ memories, and the other-than-humans such as the local Wheatley Elm trees which are over 100 years old, are as vital a part of Granton’s heritage as the solitary remaining gas holder and small ice house on Middle Pier.
Over a period of 8 months, this project participated in The Cultural Heritage in the Metropolitan Peripheries project with the Edinburgh College of Art and delegates from Madrid and Paris, worked with the local history archive making sound recordings, with neighbourhood groups of carers and young people, invited women of colour (who are so often overlooked in Edinburgh’s heritage stories) and various key organisations which advocate for them (The Edinburgh and Lothians Regional Equalities Council, the Edinburgh Caribbean Association, Project Esperanza, and Engender) to an evening event, and celebrated lives through accessible walks. It recognised that this community shares the area with generations of ancestors and ghosts who it is necessary to honour and make friends with, in order to feel deeply connected. Making collective memories over mugs of hot tea while we warmed our cold fingers after walking, we started to make plans and prepare the ground for future collaborations.
This article first appeared on Tamsin’s own website on December 15.
The winner and honourable mention of the Marŝarto Awards 2024 will be announced in early 2025.
