Save The People’s Story
“How can this shameful tale be told?
I will maintain until my death
We could do nothing, being sold;
Our only enemy was gold
And we had no arms to fight it with.”
-Edwin Muir
The sudden closure of The People’s Story museum on Canongate has taken everyone by surprise. Including the councillors for the area and the local community. The museum is unique in Edinburgh. Focusing on the history of the city through the experiences of the working class. Covering our lives at work, our changing cultural tastes, and our struggles for employment and political rights in the city. It tells the stories of our communities in all their complexity. The disagreements, the campaigns, the change in the city and the people, the solidarity. The story of Edinburgh from the bottom up.
To focus on the Old Town for a moment this latest closure is following a familiar trajectory. In recent years we have lost St Ann’s community centre in Cowgate (now providing services for homeless via Edinburgh University and NHS), South Bridge Resource Centre (soon to be Fringe Society’s new HQ) and the community centre in Dumbiedykes (soon to be reopened by the Charteris, a religious group in partnership with Edinburgh University). These are all social institutions gone. Public space that has become private space.
Each closure and transfer of power followed the same pattern. Years of neglect and disinvestment. Buildings allowed to decay and turn to ruin. The communities that use the buildings ignored, marginalised and excluded from the decision-making processes. Then closure. With the same explanation, that the Council cannot afford to maintain or repair what they have allowed to rot. Then we are told, every time, that some external body will be getting control of the building on a sweetheart deal and it’s gone. And we are supposed to be thankful. ‘At least it’s open’ or ‘better than nothing’ is what we are told. Community empowerment anyone?
We cannot allow Edinburgh Council to do the same to The People’s Story. It is all there is left for us in the Old Town. We have been socially cleansed, physically pushed/priced out, our social institutions eroded and passed to others, and now we are to lose The People’s Story. Our history swept away in one final act of social vandalism. Enough is enough. Edinburgh city centre has been turned into a citadel for the rich. They would be as well rebuilding the city walls. For all the wealth we are told the city attracts, for all the increases in property prices (and everything else) the city is a dispiriting soulless place. As citizens we need to pause and ask what is being done in our name? What is happening not just to our city, our communities and our culture, but what is it doing to us? To our psyche, our humanity? Our sense of self and home?
Too often working class experience is mediated through others. Through charities, academics, politicians or journalists. The People’s Story, better than anywhere else in Edinburgh, allowed visitors to see, read and hear the stories of the working class, in our communities and our work, unmediated. It allowed us to see ourselves reflected back at us. Through the history of the city. Our city. Not the city of Kings and Queens. It provided a vital sense of belonging in a city that, too often, makes working class people feel unrecognised and excluded.
Recently there has been much talk about the rise or racism and the far-right in working class communities. Politicians have lined up to tell us how seriously they take the problem. Some of the same politicians in Edinburgh who were shouting No Pasaran! a fortnight ago are now responsible for closing the city’s only working class museum. To defeat the racists in our communities we need to win the battle of ideas. That means defending social institutions and supporting working class anti-fascists. It means being creative and imaginative about political education. It means telling our own stories. The working class has always been multi-racial and multi-religious. We need to tell that story ourselves. We need to acknowledge the challenges and highlight the commonality of experience faced by working class people in Edinburgh. Nowhere in the city does that better than The People’s Story. If we did not have The People’s Story we would need to build one. And the Labour controlled Edinburgh Council have closed it. Whatever the financial savings (less than 1% of the budget) they will be dwarfed by the political and social cost to the city in the coming decades.
“We were, neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.”
-Pete Seeger
The immediate priority is the Culture and Communities Committee meeting next Thursday (3rd October) at 10am in City Chambers. We cannot allow the councillors to shame themselves and our city by closing The People’s Story (in a strange twist the museum has been closed before the committee meets to decide whether to accept the recommendation to close the museum. This raises questions about democracy and who is actually running the city. But I will leave them to one side at the moment. We must lobby the councillors in advance and we are asking people to gather at the City Chambers at 9.30am. It is time for action, not words. Both from the Council and citizens. The People’s Story must be saved.
However, beyond the committee meeting, we must also listen to what Edinburgh Council are saying. They have closed the doors on a museum admitting they are incapable of running it properly. This is a huge admission of failure and we should take it seriously. One of the largest arts festivals in the world only ended in the area three weeks ago. Canongate is one of the busiest streets, not just in the city, but in the country. Edinburgh does not have a problem attracting visitors. We have a problem with over-tourism. The city must have one of the highest student populations per head in the world. And Edinburgh Council cannot keep the doors open of a small museum in Canongate. You have to be really good at failure for The People’s Story to fail. Step forward Edinburgh Council. World leaders in failure. The only thing they have mastered is a form of managerialism which in incapable of managing anything.
So, while the immediate objective is for the Council to see sense and reopen The People’s Story, we also have to think strategically. We need to accept that if the same people who have failed so badly, that they just had to suddenly close the doors, are allowed to continue we will be back in the same place in a year or two years’ time. That cannot happen. The Council have admitted they have failed. There is a vacuum where leadership should be. They now need to accept the help being offered. We need to be creative and install a new management structure. A structure which is inclusive of local residents, trade unions, educators, historians and more. We need to collectively devise a plan that guarantees a sustainable future for The People’s Story for the next 50 years. To do that we need transparency from the Council and a willingness to listen to people.
I want the museum reopened but I do not only want the museum reopened. I want it to be the best in the world. I want to see it embrace new technology, be updated, be invested in. I want to see every school pupil in the city visiting The People’s Story. I want universities to be not only welcomed but actively encouraged. I want new migrants to be shown our past. People on the periphery of the city, in every sense, to be encouraged to visit and to participate. We need to speak to people who run similar museums around the world asking them how it is done. Adopting best practice and making Edinburgh’s People’s Story the very best it can be. If that all seems like a huge challenge. Good. Let’s go. Let’s save The People’s Story. Let’s save our history and our city.
#SavethePeoplesStory
I agree, in principle, completely.
With the systems of economics (over people) that we are subject to just now, councils and governments will say they have no choice but to make cuts, balance the books.
So, for every museum that gets hit there are many others facing the same. And many many other services shouting for their priorities too.
I wouldn’t try to understand what factors are considered when priorities are decided. But you can see the problem when everyone wants their thing supported/funded and the person in charge of the money doesn’t have enough.
Of course, these economic and money systems could be changed, more money could be found by raising more tax and by other means.
After all, the UK was, not long ago, the 6th richest thinking in the world (I wonder where all those riches were).
And, I’m thinking, Edinburgh could well be the richest city (its population) in Scotland. If so, who’s got all THAT money?
I wish you – and all others shouting on behalf of good causes – luck.
“I wouldn’t try to understand what factors are considered when priorities are decided.”
I would. The priorities are visitors not residents. As Jim says: “Enough is enough”.
Sums up a great deal about this city. Tourists over locals has been going on for some time now. And hotels above social housing so that those from the city move out to surrounding areas. And those that remain, at least within the working class, now have over 20% using food banks. On top of this there are thousands of Air B&B properties taken out of circulation making houses even more precious with the resultant rise in house prices. And then there is the predatory power of Edinburgh University, a corporate if ever there was one, buying up properties for student accommodation and adding to their property portfolio. The People’s Story could well be the latest casualty which spineless councillors will let go, eradicating any history of the city’s working class. Sums up our times exactly.
The council seems to have become the enemy of the people in the city. In the west we have scaling down of public transport as they try to force everyone on to pushbikes, even if they are unable to get out of their wheelchair.
I agree with the sentiments expressed in the article but I am convinced that the council will do what it does no matter the protests. At the same time they will plead poverty but do nothing about inefficiency and waste. They seem to be a poundshop version of Westminster.
Sandy talks about raising more money by raising tax. Any money raised will go to more crazy schemes like Spaces for People, vanity projects like the trams and money raising projects like unneeded parking zones in Western Edinburgh. Raising taxes is not the way to go
But wait… Isn’t Edinburgh celebrating its 900th anniversary this year, with a whole range of events, including popular talks on many aspects of the city’s history? The decision to close The People’s Story doesn’t look very joined up!
The council and Joined up Thinking do not go together.
An absolute scandal. Yet another Tory move from a Labour administration. Bring the Peoples Story into REAL public ownership run by workers, on a voluntary basis, who have a real sense of the history of our city.
I just heard about this yesterday and am absolutely gutted by it. The People’s Story was the one museum that really clicked something in my brain when I was wee and looking back I am sure it’s because it was the first place that really gave that sense of there being stories in the places I lived, in my world, rather than history being something that happened Somewhere Else.
I think the first time my mum and dad took me there I was maybe about six years old, I’d been looking at this display in the entrance of an 18th century Edinburgh family and there was a model of a wee girl about the same age as me playing marbles, and I’d kind of knelt down for a look at the marbles and got lost in thinking about what it would be like to live in the 18th century version of the city… and I must have been there for a while because when I eventually moved there was a chorus of shrieks from a group of tourists who’d been taking photos and assumed I was part of the exhibit. I couldn’t have told you at the time but this was one of my earliest memories of really understanding that history was as much about the people who had lived it and how they experienced it as what ‘really happened’, and it made me see the places I walked through differently.
I’ve gone on to work in storytelling and local history and have researched folklore and working class literature and I genuinely think having the People’s Story as an early influence is part of why I even knew that was a way to approach culture in the first place, and it’s definitely been a massive inspiration to the way I work.
Not long ago I was speaking about what would be good to see in Scottish heritage and my first thought was that if the People’s Story could be supported to update its collections to encompass some of the really big developments in local workers’ experience since it opened – things like the experience of call centre workers, delivery drivers/cyclists, work in the digital age, the Living Rent movement, things like that – that would be a really important step forward. Instead we’re having to fight to keep it open.
I have to to mention my other favourite thing in the museum which was the model of a punk called Rodney Relax, in the part about youth culture – I thought the mohawk and leather jacket and safety pins in his ears was just the best thing ever, and I wanted to be a punk, I went home and tried to put safety pins through my fingers (okay, I was a strange child, but that’s not the museum’s fault.) But because the great thing about the People’s Story is everyone represented in it is, or was, based on a real person… a few years ago, I was invited to come and tell a story at a spoken word and audiovisual event which was happening at a VR studio in Dundee. They had a few people there but top of the bill is a poet named Rodney Relax, and yes, it is him! And he is clearly this legend of the spoken word scene but I am pure excited out of my mind to meet him because I remember him as the punk from the People’s Story museum. He was very sound about it as well.
And we need to have these stories of working class and immigrant life and culture right in the middle of our cities where people can just come across them, where people can take their (weird) kids on a rainy Saturday or drop in in passing and just see how things all come together. Remembering and telling stories is part of everyday life, how we get inspired to keep going, and how we make new culture for the future. It’s nowhere near good enough to tell us, ‘well, it’s still there, but only at restricted times and they change every month/only if you know exactly what to ask for.’ And it’s definitely nowhere near good enough for a city which claims to be a world leader in culture to tell the workers and immigrants who made it and who still make it that their stories are less important to the city than yet another Harry Potter tat shop experience or whatever other dystopian capitalist theme park nonsense is going up this week…
A horrible let down. This small space does tell the story without gimmicks and spin.
So, how do we fix it? What is the way to find another, better way to run the city for the benefit of its residents and not extractive capital? What are the levers that can be used by the council given current legislation? Levers that maybe aren’t being used but could be used by a different set of councillors, elected on a residents’ manifesto? Can the opposition to the current council come together sufficiently to work together or is there too much reactionary nimbyism to really challenge the status quo?
I think there are people planning ways to organise that will be announced next week, and hopefully invite people to get involved.
In terms of the question: “What is the way to find another, better way to run the city for the benefit of its residents and not extractive capital?”
The first is to reclaim some of the institutions that exist that have been co-opted and the second is to retain some of the massive amounts of money that flow through the city and divert it inwards to local residents causes, needs and services.