Creating a Community Portrait of the Southside Under Lockdown
by Deirdre Molloy, South Glasgow Heritage & Environment Trust
Do you find your daily walk therapeutic? Has lockdown led you to new local places? Have you rearranged your home – or even just your kitchen table – to fit in home schooling or home working? Have you learnt new skills or played new games to while away extended time indoors? Which shops, pubs or cafes do you miss the most? Now you spend more (or all) of your time in the Southside, what have you spotted that floats your boat or gets you thinking..?
These questions and our new habits and activities are the focus of South Glasgow Heritage & Environment Trust’s latest community project to document the COVID-19 era. We’ve set out to build a Southside-centric picture of our diverse community’s response to lockdown and the pandemic – with a focus on what locally (indoors and outdoors) is lifting our mood, catching our eye and giving us hope in the present and for the future.
Joining forces for #SouthsideLockdownLens
To assemble this portrait, we’re looking for photographic contributions, but video and written comments are also welcome. Join in on social media with the hashtags #SouthsideLockdownLens or #SouthGlasgowLockdown on Twitter or our Facebook page (or email us direct on info@sghet.com). Share what you’re doing and noticing locally and tell us how the rhythms of your life, and the area around you, have altered.
Much is uncertain, but one thing is clear - piecing together a picture of this present reality for the future can’t be done by a few. We can’t meet up to share our stories and experiences. By the time we can, it’ll be too late to capture the moment. Community-centred action online – for now – is the only way to map our shared landscape and create the bigger picture.
What type of things can you contribute photos of?
From almost traffic-free streets and wildlife-spotting to furloughing and home-schooling/working; from chalked street art and home haircuts to self-isolation support groups and virtual family hangouts – everything is different, even as lockdown slowly eases. We’re open to all contributions but some themes we’re focusing on include: parks, gardens and nature, tenement life and architecture; rainbows, signs and windows; crafts and DIY; and street life and shops.
Personally, I’d be lost without cycling and my daily roamings. Just the other day I realised I now cough into my elbow without thinking, when in March I reckoned that was impossible. That’s just me though. Adapting is everyone’s jam now and no two folk are identical. What are you doing differently in lockdown and what’s getting you through this?
What is building a local archive of lockdown life good for?
Dealing with the immediate changes to our lives can be all-consuming. We’re not sure what’s around the corner. But in the future we’ll want to be able to tell our nephews, nieces, grandchildren and others what lockdown was like here, not just personally but as a collective of residents, communities, neighbours. People will want to study this time to understand it better but our individual photos and feelings can get lost, accidentally erased and forgotten.
To remedy this, we aim to create an archive of the images we receive (with individual permission) so the community has a resource to explore and refer to. What’s happening today is tomorrow’s heritage, and what’s done in the Southside will teach us lessons – about us, our local lifelines, our coping strategies, the special things and places that make us tick.
Pooling your photos together we’ll see the full spectrum of what we really need to keep us nourished and on-track as we re-emerge from this crisis as a resilient urban community. Perhaps we’ll even pinpoint new ideas for local services, projects or improvements…
Get involved & share your lockdown perspective
If this pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s that we depend on each other as we’d never imagined – so let’s make something lasting from that sense of togetherness.
Delve into your lockdown pics or snap some new ones – follow SGHET on Twitter and Facebook and see our project blog post for more information. We look forward to seeing your photos, hearing your comments and getting a wider perspective on the Southside’s unique and varied lockdown spirit.
contributions by the SGHET team
