The Bowling Green Together

Early on during the Covid 19 Pandemic I discovered the actual meaning of “climbing the walls.” Grounded in Glasgow inside a tenement flat with two nursery aged children and no immediate means of returning to Shetland I looked to local outdoor spaces for relief. Being used to the freedom of running feral in the great Shetland outdoors, my young twins had literally taken to picking gloss paint off the interior woodwork and plaster off the walls of our flat, such was their distress at being cooped up inside.

Our initial attempts to find a nearby green safe-haven failed spectacularly. The trip to an almost deserted Pollock Park saw us confronted in minutes by a white man shouting racial abuse at my children, who despite being metres away from him were apparently still too close for his comfort.

Stressed and frazzled I bundled the kids home. My next attempt were the local allotments where I had taken the children for gardening sessions at the local urban garden project where there was a spacious common green. We lasted half an hour there.

The children were playing happily on the green when a white middle class hippie couple who were tending to their allotment, queried our right to be there. “You don’t actually have a plot here do you?” They stated in cold, glass tones whilst eyeballing my playing children.

I held my ground saying that the common was surely free to be used by all. The Bob Dylan T-shirt wearing, pony-tailed man was quick to inform me that that wasn’t the case – the allotment committee had declared that only plot-holders could use the space during the pandemic. Despite their nods to counter culture this couple were clearly ensconced in their liberal Good Life fantasy.

With stress tears stinging in my eyes I asked them if they didn’t mind my kids playing for a little while longer. “Sorry. Rules…I mean if we let you in then…” Slightly shrugging and backing away as they spoke. “You can see our dilemma,” the couple explained, clearly anticipating swarms and floodgates rupturing their little Scottish Eden, their equivalent of an “English Country Garden”, the purity of which must be maintained at all costs. I imagine in between urban farming, recycling, signing online petitions and posting Black Lives Matter memes on Facebook these fine and good people were too time-poor to exercise actual acts of compassion.

We left disheartened and walked around the corner to the bottom of Kenmure Street, where we saw that the gates to the Bowling Green were open. We stood on the threshold looking in at the inviting green space and were met by a smiling, gallus, Pakistani woman who encouraged us to come in and make ourselves at home. That was my first encounter with Tabassum Niamet and the beginning of my relationship with this verdant local community space that became vital to me and my family’s mental health. I know that if I hadn’t met Tabassum that day and been welcomed so warmly by her, I wouldn’t have had the courage to try and access another outdoor space where I may have had to navigate racism or the policing of the space by white people. I cannot state how highly I value the Bowling Green. The fact that my family weathered the pandemic as well as it did is in part due to the access we had to a quality, green space within our community. We are now supposedly in post-pandemic times and my family and I have continued to be regulars there until the gates locked unexpectedly on September 13th.

The Bowling Green is managed by the Pollokshields Trust, a charity registered with the Scottish Charity Regulator and states in its objectives that it has been formed to “benefit the community of Pollokshields… by maintaining, improving and regenerating its physical, economic, social and cultural infrastructure, and assisting people who are at a disadvantage because of their social and economic circumstances; To advance protection or improvement of the Community through the preservation and conservation of the natural environment, the maintenance, improvement or provision of environmental amenities for the Community, the provision of other environmental and regeneration projects and/or the preservation and conservation of buildings or sites of architectural, historic or other importance to the Community.” The trust is also a community employer with a handful of jobs, all but one of which have abruptly been terminated.

In many places around the world there is an idea that land is held in trust and as much to Pachu Mama as it is to human beings who occupy that land. The idea of ownership in this context has a certain liminality. Land held in trust is very differently understood and translated in Scotland via institutions like the Crown or the National Trust and on a local level organisations like the Pollokshields Trust that are usually made up of people with a local connection to and interest in the land. My family and I, like many other users from the Pollokshields East community assume that the trust holds the land in trust for all. However recent events suggest otherwise.

It was a surprise to recently hear that the Trust had agreed to Police Scotland hosting an event on the Bowling Green. This was an insensitive and tone-deaf decision on many counts including the fact that Brown and Black bodies are disproportionately policed and that many of the regular users of the Bowling Green have legitimate grounds and actual lived experience that causes them to be wary of the Police and similar institutions. The Bowling Green is on Kenmure Street, Glasgow G41, the same street where the local community gathered to prevent our neighbours being taken by immigration services and the police. I remember Tabussum and others from the Bowling Green protesting alongside me and hundreds of others who spontaneously gathered to halt the immigration raid. It was poignant too to note that when the Trust closed the gates, it put up a notice in English only when in fact the space was predominantly used by Urdu, Punjabi and Arabic speakers. It makes me wonder, who does the Pollokshields Trust think their core constituent group is?

Today an Open Letter from the community has emerged asking that the Pollokshields Trust relinquish control of the space and surrender it to a community body that actually reflects the needs and interests of residents. The letter also suggests that staff have been unfairly dismissed or made redundant.

Yesterday Tabassum Niamet confirmed in a social media post, whilst paying tribute to her local community, that she had indeed been made redundant. Last week a private letter from local residents was sent to the Trust asking for clarification regarding the enforced closure of a community asset without consultation. A response from the chair cited ‘staff shortages’ and the need for ‘the land to rest’. All of which has been refuted by former staff including gardeners.

The fact is that the real success of the Bowling Green is built entirely on the relationships and hard work within the community that Tabassum and her team nurture and maintain and can only be sustained through consistent support, acknowledgement and encouragement from a Trust that values their staff and recognises that they are the living interface with the actual community the Trust is set up to serve. The Pollokshield’s Trust has revealed itself to be a community organisation that doesn’t recognise the lived experience of the local people it works with and employs. A Trust that appears not to acknowledge the precariousness many people in the community face, terminating staff employment with vague offers of future re-employment and suggestions that funding is an issue. If there is no money to pay staff, as they have been told, why are there board members on the Trust who are paid to fundraise?

We know that community has been systematically eroded over the years and we understand that we live within a system that cultivates individuation and discourages collective care and responsibility. It’s hard work to create alternative structures that don’t succumb to this. It’s sadly far too common to have community bodies, places of worship, school boards and even local pieces of land held in trust lapse into personal fiefdoms and prosaic empires benefiting the few. Let me be clear, I am not impartial in this. The Bowling Green matters to me and mine. Since hearing the news I have been thinking about how do we, in community, demand accountability when an organisation fails to live up to its stated values? What are the values of these organisations and how do they actually translate into the way they value their constituents and how do they reflect these values in the way they treat their staff? Do we want our community enterprises and trusts to mimic the machine like institutions that wear us down individually and collectively? Or do we want and deserve something different? Who are we trying to be if we continually recreate oppressive structures?

You can find out more about the Bowling Green and the community led initiative to take control of it’s management and sign up to offer solidarity here.