Glasgow Photobook Club

Glasgow Photobook Club #7
Colin Templeton - The Barracks
Carolyn Scott - Rye Hill, Newcastle 1968
6.30pm Thursday 15th December
Free and all welcome

Glasgow Photobook Club returns for a winter instalment, bringing together two bodies of work that each take large social housing estates as their subject matter, and document the changing face of urban living in our cities, across the span of over fifty years.

Colin Templeton has been working on a long-term documentary portrait of the Wyndford Estate in the North of Glasgow, a sprawling brutalist housing estate since 2021. Still known locally as The Barracks, until the 1960s the land was occupied by Maryhill barracks - home to a tank division during WW1, and briefly home to Hitler’s deputy Rudolph Hess, captured after his aeroplane crash-landed in Scotland during WW2. Dominated by four 26-storey point blocks, the estate is scheduled for demolition. As the months go by, there are fewer lights on. Residents move out, never to be replaced. 

Colin is a freelance photographer based in Glasgow. The Barracks is published by Another Place Press.

In the spring of 1968 Carolyn Scott photographed the streets close to where she lived on West Parade, in the Rye Hill district of Newcastle upon Tyne. Once a hugely important industrial city, Newcastle was world-renowned for shipbuilding and the coal industry. In the 20th century, coal exports and shipbuilding declined dramatically, resulting in the change of Rye Hill district, on the West side of the city, from Victorian, middle-class affluence, to an area regarded as a slum.

Originally from Edinburgh, Carolyn now lives in North East Fife. This series of photographs is held at the University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums and published by Café Royal Books.