The media – of which I grudgingly accept this weblog is a small part – thrives on contention, scare-mongering and bogeymen. Issues which excite public feeling are its currency, and campaigning journalism sometimes generates stories which run for months. All the better, since as my grandfather used to say, “they ay need to find something to fill up the papers wi.”
Missing children, dead pop stars and pollution are three habitual column-fillers; whilst the parameters of the first two are pretty obvious, the nature of pollution has changed over the years. No doubt early editions of Blackwood’s Magazine and its predecessors complained about the poor sanitation of the Old Town: the gutters were open sewers, and the Nor’Loch was a giant cess pool. This pollution made cholera and typhoid almost endemic, and it took the Age of Enlightenment to fix Edinburgh’s plumbing. In Victorian Glasgow, the air was a choking soup of pollutants – sulphurous vapours from works like Parkhead Forge, Dixon’s Blazes and many other giant foundries; also chemical fumes from Charles Tennant’s works, the alkali plant which built the world’s tallest chimney in an attempt to fix the problem – or at least throw it a few miles further downwind.
Dundee, at the height of its reign as Jute City, had some of Europe’s tallest chimneys too, yet the worst pollution hung around inside, rather than in the skies above the city. Jute workers suffered from respiratory complaints due to the jute dust, and byssinosis (presumed by Lancastrians to be a complaint of cotton mill workers) was rife. In parallel, every town and city sat under a smog of coal smoke – coal and coke were the universal fuels of factory, mill, forge, kirk and home. The smog which contributed to London’s “pea soupers” was an issue in Scotland, too, often mixing with the sea haar to create a colloidal fug which hung around for days. Another by-product of the carbon economy, the Exxon Valdez was someone else’s disaster, news from a faraway place which we sympathised with – but when the Braer ran aground in Shetland, environmental pollution became our problem, too.
SInce the 1960’s we have gradually cleaned up our world, although noticeably more slowly than we fouled it up. The Victorians built treatment works and labyrinthine sewerage systems; the textiles industry discovered dust extraction; the oil companies paid for detergents, booms, and wildlife rescue centres. Perhaps the biggest, almost universal, change is that you can’t burn coal any more in cities. Between the Clean Air Acts of the 1950’s and the death of deep mining in Scotland, most coal either goes to old-fashioned thermal power plants like Cockenzie and Longannet, or is converted into coke for the shrinking steel industry. In each case, we either look on these sunset industries sadly, regretting their decline – or express relief that they have been exported to India and China, who are just starting to understand why the West gave up this dirty work. Both power stations and coking plants in the West have sophisticated flue gas treatment machinery fitted, anyway.
Other potential bêtes noires (literally…) were the big dirty lorries which used to annoy environmentalists so much. Not any more: Euro4 and Euro5-compliant engines burn low sulphur diesel oil, and use either exhaust gas recirculation or urea injection (AdBlue) to make their exhausts almost as clean as catalysed petrol engines. Refridgerants in air conditioning plant and freezers have been changed, replacing the ozone-depleting halon gases with friendlier alternatives, including ammonia. So what’s left? Surely everything in the city is coming up roses? Well, we have made huge efforts to fight air and water pollution, but in return the media have found new forms of “pollution”. The campaigners always need a target, whether it’s Donald Trump or traffic congestion in real life; or representations such as the Caithness uranium prospectors in James Miller's novel “A Fine White Stoor”. As a result, the story of the New Pollution proceeds like a Wagner opera.
The new causes of pollution are the things which middlebrow journalists class as “visual pollution”. We have dog crap, litter, chewing gum and graffiti – the first three are an annoyance, rather than being life-threatening. Graffiti is different. Its abstract patterns, giant cartoon animals and wry observations make up part of the city’s visual richness, creating colourful murals on the dreichest walls and animating hoardings in dead parts of town. Campaigns against graffiti writers are symptomatic of two things – a fundamental insecurity about folks’ right to self-expression in their own city, and the fact that the poison of political correctness has spread to every part of human life in this country. The fading paintwork on factory gables, the shop signs advertising goods from another era, the palimpsest of tags on lamp standards, the stencils which Banksy popularised, the cryptic punchlines scribbled on bus shelters – all of these animate the city. They remind us that other people are here, not just us, and that they make their mark too.
Graffiti has its enemies. The corollary of style magazines, makeover shows on TV, carping columnists, and politicians seeking re-election, is that attempts are made to sanitise everyday life. Not only risk and danger, but happenstance, clutter, and serendipity are being minimised. It would be terribly good if they could be made to disappear completely. The Valkyries screech at us – urban regeneration, pedestrianisation, traffic calming, red routes, green zones, tolerance areas, Twenty’s Plenty, Take your litter with you, Pick up after your dog. Are we happy for our little lives to be bound up by so many rules? Codification is a means of control, after all. Soon all traces of humans will disappear … leaving only prohibitions.
Elsewhere, the very “mixed uses” which the gurus of urbanism pretend to like are being wiped out by their very own urban villages. In Ediburgh, inner city breweries and whisky bonds have been replaced by flats, offices and supermarkets. The umbilical link to industrial processes which remind people where things come from, and which are our connection to the wider economy – the thing which built our cities in the first place – are being severed. In Kirkcaldy, linoleum plants and maltings are being replaced with flats. In Greenock, Scotland’s last marine engine builder has become waterside apartments. Scotland’s future is Glasgow Harbour (where the residents complain that the Govan shipyard on the opposite bank makes too much noise and is an eyesore); and the serried ranks of alien flats on Leith’s waterfront and Dundee’s docks.
The obliteration of graffiti is a step along the road towards a gated city, under 24-hour CCTV surveillance, with no litter, no graffiti, no smells or tastes on the air; no variety or grain. Nothing out of place. Only flats, and more identical flats. Mile after mile of tattie print flats. The only thing that will stop these flats is the Credit Crunch. I hate to raise the spectre of Wagner again, but in this context, it’s more appropriate to invoke him than Orwell. The Valkyries screamed down again and – puff – it was all over.
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