Scotland is often imagined in the register of deep time: mountains scarred by glaciers, islands flung deep into the Atlantic, glens hollowed out by water and ice. Such wild places have inspired some of the nation’s most enduring writing. Yet for centuries, many Scots have lived not out in the hinterlands but in close quarters among neighbours, in the press and hum of settlement.
If landscape is shaped by geology, urban places are the physical architecture of collective imagination. They are born from the continuous, shared decision that this specific place is where life will cluster – where people will gather, trade, worship, argue, govern, celebrate and make their homes. The history of Scotland is, in no small part, the history of people learning to live together in ever-changing configurations of proximity.
From Pictish hillforts to high-rise horizons, Scotland’s urban landscape has unfolded as an ever-changing terrain: a patchwork of royal burghs and mill towns, market squares and housing schemes, sprawling cities and shifting suburbs. It has been stitched together by industry and unpicked by globalisation and the end of empire; reshaped by clearance, migration, boom, bust and the lingering afterlives of each. And just as Scotland’s wild topography gives rise to distinct natural worlds, so each settlement grows into its own unique imaginative ecology. The dark, claustrophobic wynds of Auld Reekie, the sprawling tenement grids of the Dear Green Place, the bone-pale granite arteries of Aberdeen: each offers different stage-sets for the imagination, acting out their own distinct dramas.
Literature has long understood these spaces are not fixed entities. Maps might trick us into thinking a city is a stable black dot on a page, pinned down with neat labels and boundaries, but our stories and poems reveal something far less settled: volatile processes, continually revised by those who inhabit them. A city is a living document, always caught in the act of becoming something else.
Small wonder, then, that Scotland’s writers return to such places so often, shining a light on their different forms: the Scottish city as engine of enlightenment and machine of exploitation, site of opportunity and place of entrapment. At times it is backdrop, indifferent as weather. At others, it steps forward as the central character. Occasionally, it becomes the villain.
Of course, Scottish urban writing does not end where the bypass begins. While the metropolis offers anonymity – where chance encounters spark unpredictable, sprawling plots – the town keeps a closer watch. Behind its green shutters are lives in full view, close-knit enough to feel secure yet tight enough to suffocate.
Nor are writers housebound by reality. Fictional towns, future cities and uncanny urban landscapes remind us that literary geography is governed by different rules from cartography. Municipal boundaries mean little to the imagination. The map, as ever, is only the starting point.
In this issue of The Bottle Imp, we become flâneurs of the Scottish streetscape, wandering the literary map to explore the psychic geographies of the nation’s towns and cities. Evie Glen explores how one writer expanded the horizons of a city constrained by post-industrial stagnation in ‘Alasdair Gray’s Expansion of Glasgow’s Stilted Imagination’. Our paths then cross with Maureen Farrell, who examines imaginative urban spaces for young readers in ‘Living in the City – or not: Urban Scotland in Scottish Children’s and Young Adult Fiction’. Turning to the overlooked corners of the urban grid, William Poole uncovers ‘The Lost Libraries of Early Modern Dundee’, before David Manderson guides us through a sweeping survey of ‘Twentieth-Century Urban Scottish Literature’. Finally, we take a detour down grit-lined alleys with Oliver Robinson-Sivyer, who tracks ‘Urban Decay, the Body Politic and Working-Class Scotland in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting’.
Upon Another Point, we leave the city behind for the rural North East, where William K. Malcolm considers the ways in which James Leslie Mitchell’s biography informed his literary achievement in ‘Sunset Song as Autofiction’. And, for those ready to map out their next literary excursion, our new book reviews are well worth exploring.
Let’s go doon the toon!
