Ryan Mortimer

Marchland: a frontier, border, or boundary or the land lying around it, often of disputed ownership.

Socio-industrial: a peripheral space caught between an industrial past and a potential future as a primarily social resource.

This project explores the potential of peripheral sites along the Forth and Clyde Canal; land caught in a moment between industry and public use; through the former Temple Gasworks in North West Glasgow. Containment, Capacity, Development and Disconnection are interrogated and probed. Toxicities of soil and air, alongside hard edges of canal, railway, river and road result in seemingly inhospitable and redundant land.

Transforming the Socio-Industrial Marchland suggests a narrative for how such sites might be approached and given a renewed life. Structures that now symbolise the ghost of industry and current decay can become beacons of hope and progression. Limitations can provide strategic opportunities for remediation and purification of the land.

Temple Gasworks becomes a precedent for change within the ribbon of marchland sites that stretch along the banks of the Forth and Clyde Canal and offers an opportunity for reconnection between them. The value of time is recognised through the suggested soil remediation strategy with reeds, poplar and willow offering annual to multiple-decade long projections into the future; their placement becoming indicative of the next steps in the site’s rebirth. Barges deliver soil to be treated while the masterplan offers a sounding board for strategic development. The Hall becomes a community asset for learning, developing and reconnecting to the wider central belt communities and the site’s purification caters for an array of potential futures. This project aims to make a successful urban environment of containment, connection and civic capacity for current and future generations with a performance that only improves over time, acting as a credible alternative masterplan for the regeneration of the ex-industrial.