I learnt about the public artworks in my home town when an acquaintance started posting topless selfies with them on Instagram. How had I never noticed these enormous concrete totems before, I wondered as I tried not to be distracted by the daisy emojis obscuring her nipples.
Unlike me, your first encounter with the artworks of Glenrothes might be via a charmingly bonkers new documentary fronted by the Guilt actor Mark Bonnar and his father, Stan. Bonnar senior is responsible for the town’s hippo sculptures, which he created during his tenure as the apprentice of Glenrothes’ official artist in the early 1970s. In Meet You at the Hippos (available on iPlayer) the pair tour Scotland’s five postwar new towns, introducing viewers to the artists employed to live in housing estates and make environmental art for parks and pavements. You may know some of their pieces already, such as the listed Western Avenue underpass with its braille-like concrete exterior.
I bet you don’t, though. How could you, when my acquaintance and I grew up here and barely noticed? She began posting her topless selfies during lockdown after discovering the artworks on her daily walks — she wanted to share their history with her followers (as well as cheer them up). We had passed the roundabout with its bouquet of 24ft fibreglass irises every day on the way to school and never given them a second thought.
I left Glenrothes for Glasgow in 2007. Last summer, my interest piqued by the selfies, I went back one July afternoon with the idea of writing a book about the art I grew up not seeing. I parked south of the River Leven and wandered up to South Parks, one of the many grey pebbledash housing estates that splinter off the town centre.
The architecture seemed terrifically weird. Dated and yet somehow defiant of time. In a neighbouring scheme, called Macedonia (yes, really), many of the properties have tiny hyphens for upstairs windows, like the modern equivalent of arrow slits in fortresses. Under the grey monocloud sky it gives a grim effect. Every so often I spotted the art. Most of the time it was purely accidental: pass Asda and stumble upon a group of highly detailed columns. Outside the county offices a flock of minimalist aluminium birds rises from a rock as if taking flight. I saw the artworks — I mean, I really looked — but I barely wrote a thing because I had no idea how they made me feel.
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Looking back later over my photos of the sculptures, a theme emerged from each location. Decades after the blueprints of postwar Scottish new towns were drawn, the French anthropologist Marc Augé came up with the term “non-places” — motorways, shopping centres, airports, the area in front of cash machines. In other words, spaces linked by transience, where human interaction is not a priority. Anonymous, vacant of emotional connection, utopian and obsessed with consumption. Far from being platforms where you can actually make friends, they actively discourage eye contact.
To me these non-spaces, of which there are so many in Glenrothes, highlight the problem with new towns. Scotland’s new town planners engaged artists to galvanise transplanted communities — they wanted art to be what sparked identity and feelings of belonging. The hippos are a success because they lived alongside us. But elsewhere, by transposing art on to underpasses, placing it in front of offices and supermarkets, its power is decommissioned. As we learn in the very watchable Meet You at the Hippos many of the works by Glenrothes’ town artist, Malcolm Robertson, have since been moved to spots where they can be seen by motorists, to better “sell” the town. Perhaps the commodified nature of art in non-places explains why the language of Glenrothes is lost to me.
I still don’t know how I feel about my home town. I only know what I see. Before I drove back to Glasgow that afternoon I went north to my childhood house. At the top of Glenrothes is a community woodland. What I remember as saplings are now tall trees that envelop the road like an arbour. In the woods you’ll find more artworks: strange obelisks, stone owls and timber carved with koala faces. As the woodland matured it concealed each sculpture in green, visible only to those who go looking. For the kids who grew up playing here they were never ornamental, only functional. Not a way to make meaning of the world but a trail to find our way home.
@palebackwriter
Knowledge building
Ian Nairn, the late English architecture critic, is still the best writer on Scotland’s towns. Acerbic and witty, and mean, his words make the dull stone of our built environments shimmer. I cannot get enough of his books, especially Nairn’s Towns (Notting Hill Editions, £14.99); nottinghilleditions.com
