Carbon Valley (2025)

 

Computer manufacturing plant, Spango Valley, Greenock, Inverclyde

My paternal great grand parents were born on farms in Donegal during the great famine. They married in 1872 and came over to Glasgow where Alexander became a platelayer. My grandfather Hugh, who was born in Wishaw, followed his father into that profession. He helped lay the railway tracks into Ravenscraig steelworks during its construction after the war. My maternal grandfather, Patrick Durkin of Mayo, was a miner at Kingshill No.1 pit where he dug coal that fed the furnaces of Ravenscraig. My father Frank was a turner to trade and he worked on parts for aerospace engines. I started my career in the silicon glen and ended it in the distillery industry. For thirty odd years I worked in manufacturing planning and logistics, mainly behind a computer screen. The giant computer manufacturing plant in Greenock where I started out is now a wasteland of abandoned concrete foundations. The two hundred year old distillery and adjoining offices in north Glasgow where I worked much later have also been leveled and are now reborn as bijou apartments. I recently quit industry when I turned sixty before ‘off-shoring’ or AI came for my job. Both of my sons have now graduated from university. One is a barista in a cafe, the other a barman in a wedding venue. They have ambitions to do better, but not in the manufacturing sector, and perhaps not even in Scotland.

Barony A Frame, East Ayrshire

My family’s story is not uncommon amongst ordinary Scots. Few of us have to look too far back before we find ancestors who were agricultural workers, immigrants, or both. The industrialisation of Scotland acted as a magnet for people to move into the cities and towns of the Midland Valley. Between the Highland Boundary Fault and the Southern Uplands Fault geology ensured a ready supply of coal and it was this that literally fuelled the industrial revolution. The Scottish economy was far less developed than England’s, so that when industrialisation and urbanisation came in the second half of the eighteenth century they grew at a pace that was unprecedented anywhere else in the world. There were temporary lulls in economic expansion but the overall pace of change was breathtaking all the way to the First World War. Even in relative decline Scotland remained a leading industrial nation until the rapid collapse of heavy industry in the nineteen eighties.

Falls of Clyde, above New Lanark Mill, South Lanarkshire

There was of course a downside side to the growth and wealth generated by Scotland’s rapid industrialisation. ‘Triangular trade’ saw slave labour forcibly transported from Africa to Britain’s colonies in North America and the West Indies to work on plantations in inhuman conditions. These plantations produced raw materials that were shipped back to Britain to be processed into finished goods by a domestic working class that was itself impoverished and highly exploited. These finished goods were then exported for sale throughout the British Empire and beyond, often within protected or monopolised markets. The flip side of the imperialist coin was the immense wealth embodied not just in the estates and offshore bank accounts of the powerful but in the now slightly faded architectural grandeur and infrastructure of the home nations.

Grangemouth Fuels Terminal, Falkirk

Today the Midland Valley of Scotland bears the deep visible scars of former industries such as coal mining, shale oil, quarrying, iron and steel, shipbuilding, canal and rail, engineering, and textiles. Before Margaret Thatcher came to power in May 1979 manufacturing still accounted for around 40% of jobs in Scotland, today the figure is less than 10%. Our new reality presents burning questions such as what will be the nature of work going forward, how do we reverse the ever widening gulf between rich and poor, and how can we live sustainably in a world threatened by climate change but built upon voracious consumption? These are complex questions no individual can fully answer. I carry them with me as I criss-cross the Carbon Valley making photographs and trying to make sense of it all.

Kelburn Timber Ponds, Port Glasgow, Inverclyde

* All images © Frank McElhinney

**Huge thanks to Creative Scotland for supporting the current phase of my project "Carbon Valley". Next autumn I plan to go on a tour where I can project some of the photographs I have gathered, speak about our industrial heritage, and discuss with local audiences what our future economy might look like.