Snapshot: park & ride, Skye

Seen during our first evening stroll after arriving on Skye. The island has a respectable network of local and national buses, although beware that the latter (Citylink) are very expensive for trips just on Skye or across the bridge to Kyle of Lochalsh. Although there are more services in the summertime to cope with the busier tourist season, we managed a six day trip entirely on public transport, seeing many different corners of the island. Careful planning with the Stagecoach Highlands timetable is recommended: you can find a pdf copy of it on this website.

Escape

Every journey has a beginning, and regrettably in Glasgow that usually involves an overpriced bus. Allowing for some traveller’s artistic license, I could happily remember a journey to the Isle of Skye beginning here, at the tranquil Helensburgh Upper railway station. Maybe twenty miles from Glasgow, Helensburgh has two stations, one with a regular service on the electric line into Glasgow and the other a modest single platform in a cutting on the northern fringe of the town. Having skirted along the shores of the Clyde for half an hour or so, the West Highland Line begins here. We have left behind the grey tower blocks, littered streets and urbanised horizons of the city, and suddenly find ourselves rattling through rolling rural landscapes.

I have taken this train many times before, although not since moving to Glasgow last year. This line is no longer a component of a much longer journey from England to the remote west coast of Scotland, but a practical escape hatch from the city to the countryside. A couple of times a day an unassuming train of railcars departs Queen Street station for Fort William and Mallaig, normally with a portion to Oban detaching en route. After winding up steep hills past suspicious looking military bases, the train approaches Loch Lomond and begins a sharper and more screeching series of curves. Above us, only mountain. Below us, only trees, glimpses of a road and water. At Ardlui we’re held up for a short while, waiting for a southbound train to leave the single track ahead.

Being so remote, the West Highland Line has no traditional railway signals to control access to its portions of single track. A team of doubtless charming British Rail boffins developed a system in the nineteen-eighties that could satisfactorily replace the traditional tokens. Until then (and to this day on other remote British railway lines) an actual physical token, normally a large coin or loop that could easily be scooped from a signalman by the driver of a passing train, must be held by a driver before he or she can lead a train onto a section of single track. With only one token, it’s a relatively failsafe system to ensure that only one train enters a section of track at any one time.

The solution of the dynamic and pre-portable computer nineteen-eighties is a radio-controlled system. The token is virtual, transmitted by radio to an ungainly metal box in the cab of the train. On clearing a section of single track (normally at a station with a passing loop) the driver releases the token for the previous section of track and then awaits reception of the new token.

Don’t ask me how it works, but it does. And it permits an archaic but astonishingly beautiful railway to continue to exist, with daily passenger service and popular summertime tourist trains winding through the mountains of the West Highlands, perfectly framing any escape from the city with a rolling landscape of beautiful scenery and wildlife.

Into the soil

Like two new parents leaving the maternity ward for the very first time, we carried two carefully packed boxes of heavily chitted seed potatoes from our apartment up to the allotment yesterday. With the gung ho enthusiasm of two people who don’t have a clue what they’re doing, we’ve ploughed a not inconsiderable amount of time, money and labour into our little half-plot allotment garden. Yesterday marked the beginning of the next phase in our nascent gardening careers. Our little babies were taking their first steps in the outside world.

Amongst various other crops, we’re experimenting with two kinds of seed potato: a second early called Lady Balfour and a maincrop called Vales Everest. These are not the most common varieties found in our allotments, but since we’re surrounded by cheap greengrocers and food stores in Govanhill and since we hope to have many more years of gardening ahead of us, we wanted to try two unusual (but nonetheless reportedly hardy) varieties. They arrived about a month ago, and have spent the intervening time sitting in egg boxes by our tall living room window. Glasgow tenements like ours aren’t much good for germinating seeds that need heat (as we have discovered) but the tall ceilings and large windows make this kind of light based germination (the right term for potatoes?) nice and easy.

The little green-purple sprouts that have appeared on the potatoes are mostly firm, although they still seem remarkably delicate. I was about to toss them all into canvas bags for the short walk to the plot, but we realised it would probably be safer to pack them in boxes. Over-cautious, perhaps, but that sort of detail is precisely the sort of question (how to transport potatoes that have chitted) that gardening books and seed packets don’t explain. Qualitative planting guidelines are great – e.g. “plant potatoes 20cm apart in drills 30cm apart”- but the precise situation we’re in always raises other questions – how close to our path can we plant a drill of potatoes without the crop growing under it?

Based on the conversations we’ve been having with neighbouring gardenings and from the information we’ve been reading, I’ve established two fairly comforting maxims since starting on our allotment. One – there is rarely a consensus about how to do something (sk two people in our allotments how they would do something and you will get two contradictory answers) and two – stop worrying. Since taking on the plot early in the year we’ve weeded it repeatedly, turned the soil and weeded it again before investing in a truck load of horse manure. In the words of one particularly helpful allotment holder nearby “everything wants to grow once it’s in the ground.”

These principles mirror with remarkable accuracy my experience of learning architecture at university. There are always two conflicting answers to every question, and ultimately it doesn’t matter so much as to lose sleep over it. We have a small plot and have squeezed as much in as we can for this first year. Whatever grows will be celebrated by the nervous young parents of this plot.

Dirty (un)sexy Glasgow

Terribly urgent business involving a punt and a smoke machine dragged me (kicking and screaming, of course) away from Glasgow over the weekend. I returned on Monday afternoon after a tolerable train journey, largely spent considering the three fallacies in the phrase “Try our mouthwatering meal deals!” that adorned adverts for the train’s buffet. Down south the weather had been changeable but largely pleasant, and with a conservatory tacked onto the house I was staying in, breakfast felt more like petit déjuner in the south of France.

Scotland, however, remains a bit parky, and there was still on snow on the ground south of Glasgow. The chill in the air welcomed me back to Scotland, and the mountains of domestic waste that had been dumped on the pavements of Govanhill welcomed me back to Glasgow.

These scenes might not seem unusual to a born and bred Glaswegian. But they are to me. They’re nothing short of shameful, in fact. While I accept that my neighbourhood (Govanhill) might not be the most attractive or affluent parts of the city, in general Glasgow is a monstrously filthy city.

I mean, downright sickeningly dirty. I have lost count of the number of people I have seen (of all races, ages and appearance, before any Daily Mail readers get hold of this rant) who openly hack and spit onto the pavement. Littering seems to be a Scottish art as well: carefree hands offer elegant flourishes as empty bottles, cigarette packs, wrappers and even (I kid you not) entire newspapers are thrown from the windows of moving or stationary vehicles.

But what gets my relatively tolerant back up the most is the city’s casual tolerance of street dumping. It’s quite acceptable for residents to haul outsize waste to their own kerbside for free collection. Almost any bulk domestic refuse – including furniture and white goods – can be left on the pavement for collection once a week. Everything gets picked up by a team of city cleaners and thrown into a refuse truck that crushes it in preparation for landfill. A few weeks ago a largely undamaged three seater sofa was dumped on the pavement across the street from my apartment. It was unceremoniously lifted in a rubbish truck and crushed for burial outside the city.

As far as I’m aware, no other city in Britain tolerates or encourages residents to dump on their own pavements. And while it’s true that no self respecting Glasgow hipster does not own (for example) a perfect 1950s telephone table that they happened to find while out walking, most of the stuff that’s dumped is just waste, often with no regard for the conditions for collection (nothing over four feet in length, nothing dumped loose on the pavement).

And because the city willingly cleans this up, residents continue to haul junk out without consideration to the cost or implications of its disposal. While I can see the logic in defending a system that allows other citizens to save bits of furniture before they get collected, this act is technically illegal, since household waste left for kerbside collection is technically the property of the council once it hits the pavement.

But here’s the irony. It’s legal for residents to expect uplift of ‘bulky items of domestic waste’. But it’s illegal to ‘fly tip’ … i.e. dump domestic or commercial waste, normally from a vehicle, in a public place.

I’m confused. So it’s legal for someone to dump their own waste on the pavement outside their apartment, but illegal for someone else to come and dump it there?

Shed

My first built project is emerging from the mud of the Queen’s Park allotments. It could well also be my first application to the Macallan Club, but its significance is no less important to me.

There’s an apartment complex in Northern Ireland to which I made some modest design contributions as a part one architect some years ago. It’s going to be completed later this year, and I caught an unexpected glimpse of it from a moving train a couple of months ago. That was probably the first time that I – as a young semi-legal architect – had come face to face with something I had had my hand in, albeit from a distance and not actually showing much of my work.

This is different, however, and building it has been an education. There have been some arguments (with nails, luckily, not my long suffering co-constructor) and there are some notable problems (notably that it is six inches too close to the adjacent path). We’re a couple more days away from finishing it; at the moment only three sides are approaching what you might call a state of functional enclosure. With the exception of the nuts, bolts, screws and nails, all of the material is reclaimed, some from Glasgow Wood Recycling, other bits and pieces from Freecycle and the heavily littered streets of Glasgow. The material cost has, in fact, been minimal; the small budget has mostly been spent on those small pieces of ironmongery and transportation.

My dream car used to be a modest second hand Saab or Capri; something unreliable and extravagant. Now I have a hankering for a Vivaro or Transit panel van. Much more useful.

As Britain continues its apparently unstoppable plunge into a recession, my advice to unemployed graduates like myself has been to keep busy and to keep physically active. In other words, get an allotment. The hours up there just fly by. For unemployed architects (especially young ‘uns like myself with no built credits to there name) consider an allotment without a shed. It’s been an unexpected opportunity to call upon the plentiful resources of free material in this city, and has produced something that I’m already beginning to identify as having direct (if not conscious) influences from buildings and design I’ve seen and absorbed over the last few years.

Now we just have to finish the damned thing…