Northing Is Lost

In the award-winning project Nothing is Lost, Recollective set out to document Glasgow’s East End before, during and after the 2014 Commonwealth Games. We met market traders, travelling show people, playworkers, community activists, cafe owners, and local children to gather stories and create images from a district undergoing rapid change.

The East End has had its share of hard times. The coming of the Games promised change and regrowth, economic and cultural investment – a new city where gap sites were filled, homes and shops were improved and people afforded fresh opportunities.

Nothing is Lost is offered both as a question and a statement – Are things better for the East End? Worse? Much the same? Nothing is Lost offers no neat answers or comforting fictions -just hope, complexity, nuance and doubt. It is for the reader to work out, through words, photograph and dialectograms, the truth of the post-Commonwealth city.

The story Recollective tells takes us from the glamour of the Barrowland Ballroom to the hidden communities caught in the crossfire of major regeneration. It taps into the hopes, fears, and dreams of East End youth and the fading memory of demolished districts and East End entrepreneurs. We meet Games volunteers and visit the Adventure Playground built by Assemble Architecture in sight of the new Athletes’ Village in Dalmarnock. We find an East End of many faces and many possible futures.

OUTPUTS – Limited edition Box Set of Books / Short Film / Community Engagement Events / Film

Project commissioned by Glasgow Life. Launched at Aye Write 2015

Box Set of Books