C O N T E X T 1 3 6 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 37 DAWN McDOWELL Surveying Glenrothes’ town art Historic Scotland has carried out a listing survey of the 140 works of art integrated into the planned urban landscape of Scotland’s second post-war new town, Glenrothes in Fife. Although inventories of public sculpture have been compiled by local authorities in Scotland’s new towns, the identification and selection for listing these works of art in the context of the post-war planned urban landscape had not been addressed on a full scale until Historic Scotland undertook a listing survey Glenrothes’ town art in 2010. More than 140 public art works, of various scale and type, located in the townscape, were considered.1 Glenrothes was designated in 1948 under the New Towns (Scotland) Act 1946 as Scotland’s second postwar new town, after East Kilbride in 1947.The original plan was to build a new settlement for a population of around 34,000 to house mining families, following the recent opening of the Rothes Colliery.The early failure of the mine was mitigated by the Scottish Office’s establishment of electronics and high-tech companies in the town as part of Scotland’s emerging technologies economic development programme, ensuring a continuation of access to local employment from around 1961 to 2000 and a certain level of stability in the local economy which gave flexibility for a more ambitious town plan. The assessment of a significant body of work across an entire new town can be seen as a convenient entry point into the post-war urban townscape at Glenrothes in particular.The need to identify and measure – or rather ‘inventorise’ – the work before statutory listing could take place was an accepted first step of the proposed listing review. It was also anticipated that the act of inventorising would foster a positive understanding of the town art to help decision-making for statutory listing, and to provide further recognition of the artwork as individual assets and within their architectural context. The result of over 30 years collaborative working between planners, architects and artists produced around 140 individual sculptural objects, sculptural groups, architectural reliefs, or ‘environmental works of art’ (as David Harding has preferred to refer to the work) located in Glenrothes.The works of art are of varying scale and purpose, contributing to multiple layers of meaning in the context of the post-war planned urban landscape. During Harding’s tenure as the Glenrothes’ first town artist, which coincided with the most intense period of urban development for the town, he had the opportunity to work closely with different teams in the development corporation, ranging from the commercial, industrial, landscape and civil engineering departments. Notwithstanding the expectation of the requirement for care and maintenance which fell to the local authority, Fife Council had already recognised the unique contribution the art made to the town. From 2009 it had already initiated a recording project of the art. Supported by interested volunteers, a comprehensive list of art works was compiled locally.When art works began to disappear, Historic Scotland was asked to engage formally with a review of the work for the purpose of statutory listing. The task was to identify and select the public art by considering its ‘special architectural or historic interest’ under the terms of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) (Scotland) Act 1997 and to assess the work against set published criteria, whose broad headings are: age and rarity; architectural or historic interest; and close historical association.2 A building is defined broadly, and can include structures such as sculptures, public monuments, grave stones, war memorials, garden ornaments, market crosses, fountains, wells, bridges, milestones, finger posts, phone boxes, post boxes, and any objects which are fixed or are fixed by their own weight. Inventorising for this project meant assessing each sculpture according to the listing criteria.The first task was to consider the context of the work: a post-war urban landscape developed for a mass-housing environment where no comprehensive listing survey had previously taken place, and where there were three existing listed buildings and no designated conservation areas. The lack of existing statutory designations inGlenrothes is typical of all five new towns in Scotland, which were designed on mass scale with common and repetitive building types. It is also typical in this context that the few listed buildings which exist are community-defining Ex Terra (1965) by Benno Schotz was the first major work of public sculpture in Glenrothes. Welded in bronze, it depicts a maternal figure emerging tree-like from the ground, symbolising the growth of the town. Its title is a take on the motto of the development corporation ‘Ex Terra Vis’, which means ‘from the earth comes life’ and is a reference to the town’s inception as a mining community. References 1 See www.historicscotland.gov.uk\ glenrothestownart for more information about the listing review and the project.To search listed buildings see Historic Scotland’s data webpages http://data.historicscotland.gov.uk. 2 See www.legislation.gov. uk/ukpga/1997/9/contents. The criteria for listing are published in the Scottish Historic Environment Policy (SHEP) 2011, see www.historic-scotland. gov.uk/index/heritage/ policy/shep.
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