sarah lowndes

For a Better Life: Thoughts on Moving

In the late summer of 2015 I moved with my family from Glasgow (population 605,340), a city with a local population density of 3300 people per square kilometre – four hundred miles to the south-east, to live in a small hamlet with a population of 129 in rural North Norfolk, an area with a local population density of just 22 people per square kilometre. Relocating from the biggest city in Scotland to live on a farm in a remote area of England, did feel like a radical and at times, disorientating move. Over the course of the last few months, as I’ve been researching histories of migration, I’ve come to reflect still more on earlier moves in my life - and how moving shapes identity and how we experience the feeling of home.

The first big move in my life was in 1983, when I was seven years old, when we left our tenement flat in a predominantly white and middleclass Edinburgh suburb to move to Constitution Street in Leith – a journey of only five miles to the east, but one that changed everything.

Continuous growth in the 19th century meant that the port of Leith had been merged with the adjacent Scottish capital city of Edinburgh in 1920, but this was a “lightning plebiscite” resisted by many of the people born in the port, who described themselves as ‘Leithers’. The burghers of Leith voted six to one against the merger, seeing themselves as having different values from those “uptown”. Leith had not only been Scotland’s main port for almost five centuries but also the country’s largest enclosed deep-water port, with the capability of handling vessels up to 50,000 deadweight tonnes. Leith ships traded with the Baltic, the Low Countries, France, America and the Mediterranean, carrying coal, grain, fish and hides and returning with spice, cloth, whale oil and wine. Leith was also a centre for wine bottle making, soap manufacture, shipbuilding, lead-making, whisky production and the site of 100 warehouses for whisky and wine. Leith was a place known for innovation, hard work and heavy drinking. The place was literally saturated in booze: the ceilings of the Vaults, on Henderson Street, where wine brought in by sea has been stored since medieval times, were covered in a fungus from the Bordeaux area: Leith is the only place in the world outside their place of origin where they thrive.

Leith had its own provost, magistrates, criminal court, town hall and council. The burgh ran their own police and fire service, and had their own bye-laws, one of which meant that the denizens of Leith were allowed to drink half an hour later than their Edinburgh neighbours. The Boundary Bar, which stood on the old boundary line between Leith and Edinburgh on Leith Walk, held two licenses, meaning that up until 1920, when ‘drinking up time’ was called on the Edinburgh side, the clientele would simply move across to the Leith side of the bar. Until 1923 it also used to be the case that Leith travellers had to disembark their electric trams halfway up Leith Walk, to board a cabled-hauled Edinburgh tram. When we went to Leith to see our new house, the maroon Lothian Regional Transport bus sailed straight through that historic border, but it was clear we were entering a different land.

For starters, Leith was a much more ethnically diverse neighbourhood than the one we had left behind, which had attracted Irish and Italian immigrants since the 19th century, and more recently become home to African Caribbean, Asian and Eastern European communities. There were loyal congregations at both nearby St. Mary’s Star of Sea and the Sikh Temple, and our local favourite restaurants included Kavio’s Pizzeria, where the waiters threw dough across the room and Tommy Miah’s acclaimed Bangladeshi restaurant The Raj. The Port of Leith bar on Constitution Street had been hosting dockers and visiting sailors for decades, under landlady Mary Moriarty “the Queen of Leith”. Those seeking a “lock in” after midnight were admitted to the bar by simply knocking on the side door. But Leith in 1983 was only just beginning the process of “coming up” that has today resulted in such pronounced gentrification - and it was still a very troubled place, with high levels of crime, heroin addiction and an unofficial ‘tolerance zone’ for street prostitution on Coburg Street.

The former church warden’s house that we moved into on Constitution Street had been derelict for seven years and had been squatted by homeless and drug addicted people. The room that was to be my bedroom had no floor as some of the squatters had lit a campfire right on the wooden floorboards. All of the copper pipes had been stripped out and sold and all the windows were covered over with sheets of corrugated iron. There was no heating, lighting or running water.

I found the move to Leith exciting but at times it was a challenge. As a teenage girl, I used to walk down the street at night with my keys in my hand, the tip of one key poking through my knuckles. It was common to be apprehended in the street by someone on drink or drugs, either begging, making a proposition or looking for a fight. When I read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), set in 1980s Leith, I recognised as accurate his portrayal of poverty and degradation in Leith, but also smiled at the local energy he captured: the humour, grit and magic of Leith. At Hogmanay all the ships docked at Leith would sound their horns. When the local football team, Hibs, who were known for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, triumphed in the 1991 Skol Cup Final, Duke Street was lined with fans cheering as the team passed in an open top bus. The burgh motto of Persevere encapsulated the hardworking and against all odds spirit of Leith.

When I moved to Glasgow, aged 17 in 1993, to study at the university, I felt at home there straight away, although I didn’t know a single person there. Glasgow was like Leith writ large, operatically large. Glasgow had grown from a small town to a polluted, overcrowded metropolis in the space of a hundred years – by the late 19th century the city’s population had swelled enormously, mainly due to the massive influx of settlers displaced by the Highland Clearances and the Irish Potato Famine. The majority of the first Irish settlers were Catholic, and worked mainly as sweated labour in the new industries – textiles, chemical and dyeing works – and as casual construction workers and dock labourers. The smaller community of Protestant Irish immigrant workers were more concentrated in the textile trades and later in shipbuilding and engineering. By 1900 the city was the jewel in Queen Victoria’s crown, the very cradle of the Industrial Revolution, where engineering and shipbuilding prowess earned the city the moniker of “workshop of the world”. By the 1930s Glasgow had over 130 cinemas and by 1946 the city had 93 dance halls…it was a city where people worked hard and loved going out at weekends. It still is that kind that place, as Newcastle, as Manchester, as Liverpool are.

The creative rebirth of Glasgow that gathered ground from the late 1990s onwards was not a lucky accident – it occurred because of the combination of three key aspects: the city’s long-established internationalism; the empty spaces created by the decline of heavy industry; and – most importantly – the ambition of the city’s artists, writers and musicians, to create opportunities for themselves. For many years, the DIY scene in Glasgow thrived, due to affordable rents and the low cost of living which allowed artistic practices to develop slowly and without undue pressure from market forces. Although the city lacked the established infrastructure and opportunities of a major centre like New York or London, it had numerous notable contemporary art spaces, set up by artists and curators, such as Transmission (est. 1983), The Modern Institute (est. 1998) and studio complexes housed in disused warehouses and factories such as SWG3, The Glue Factory and The Pipe Factory. The city’s celebrated School of Art also played an important role in attracting fresh waves of enthusiastic students every year, many of whom I had the pleasure of meeting and teaching over the years.

Much as we loved Glasgow, we had a sense that we wanted something else, a new chapter in our lives, that was different from what had gone before. So, in the summer of 2015, we decided to leave, in search of another way of life. We moved, like most families who move from the city to the countryside, in search of more quiet in which to work, less stress, more contact with the natural world and less crowded schools for our children. We moved from our tenement flat in the West End of Glasgow to live in a beautiful but decrepit 18th century red brick building, where threshers had once used flails to beat seed out of its chaff coat on the floor, prior to the advent of mechanized farming practices and the infamous Swing Riots that swept agricultural areas of England in the 1830s. The roof of the barn needed replaced, parts of the walls needed rebuilt and it had no plumbing, electricity, windows or doors. Perhaps unconsciously, I was revisiting the experience of moving to Leith, which had also involved a long process of rebuilding.

The colours of the surrounding landscape were astonishing. Like Betty MacDonald, in her humorous account of going to live on a mountain chicken farm, The Egg and I (1945), “I watched mornings turn pale green, then saffron, then orange, then flame-coloured while the sky glittered with stars and a sliver of a golden moon hung quietly.” In this beautiful and quiet place, we spent more time walking and looking about, more time reading and on doing things: playing football, climbing trees, building dens, pond dipping, going crabbing and fishing, camping out, making sandcastles, skimming stones on the sea, whittling sticks, making paper aeroplanes and going in search of seasonal food, like watercress from the stream, blackberries from the hedgerows and samphire and oysters from the coast. When we first arrived, the nearest field to the barn was a vast stubble field, newly harvested, where I loved to walk our dog. It was vast and beautiful, hardly populated except by passing wild birds and flighty roe deer. The experience of space and freedom was exhilarating.

I had grown up in Leith and then lived as an adult in Glasgow: under the cover of streetlights, warmed by central heating, seeking shelter from the almost year-round rain in tenement flats, libraries, shops and cafes, art galleries, cinemas and bars. In the country, you felt the change in season more – as the mud and the darkness and the shortness of the days pressed in. Where we now lived there were no streets and consequently, no street-lighting and when darkness fell (around 4.30pm), it was like a lid being put on a box. That first autumn, when the academic teaching term would have been getting underway, I felt a pang of losing, not only the meaningful activity of teaching, but also the feeling of being part of something - and of being recognized and acknowledged by peers.

I grew used to hearing the expression “born and bred” to describe someone who had been born and grown up in ”Nelson’s County”. As with “Leithers”, it wasn’t possible for interlopers to become “Born and Bred”. But in Norfolk there was also a lack of ethnic diversity and relatively low inward and outward migration which might affect how people moving here from outside are welcomed and included, or rejected and excluded. I had left the stability and social cohesion of our old life, for the new situation of being an outsider. Soon I began to yearn for conversations and community. I started to organise free public projects in Norwich, Cromer and Great Yarmouth, mostly working with people in libraries, to read, talk and write together. These projects were also about how people can come together in groups, and learn from one another.

Earlier this year, I began working at Time and Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth, to deliver a project called Migration, Heritage and Belonging, which involved collecting oral histories from local migrant communities. I wanted to work on this project mainly because the energy, historic atmosphere and diverse communities of Great Yarmouth reminded me of Leith and Glasgow. In 2019, 96.9% of Great Yarmouth’s population identified as ethnically white, broadly in line with the rest of Norfolk. However, in the two wards covering the town centre ‐ Nelson, Central and Northgate – 18% (or 3,081) people do not identify as white British, and it’s estimated that 7,000 people in the borough are non‐British. Around 1,170 children living in Great Yarmouth have a first language other than English, speaking around 50 languages, with Portuguese being the most common, followed by Polish and Lithuanian. The task of capturing and representing migrant experiences of moving to Great Yarmouth from round the world resonated very strongly with my previous research, which had all sought to capture social history and to expand existing understandings of cultural heritage by representing areas I considered under-documented. Since January 2020, I have been interviewing people from first, second and third generation migrant communities in Great Yarmouth including people from Afghanistan, China, Cyprus, East Timor, France, Germany, Ivory Coast, Lithuania, Mozambique, Portugal, Romania and Russia, all of whom have made Great Yarmouth their home.

Like Leith and Glasgow, for centuries Yarmouth had been a hive of port-based industry, memorably described by Daniel Defoe in his 1724 travel journals as having such a busy harbour, “that one may walk from ship to ship as on a floating bridge, all along by the shore-side”. From South Quay, it’s only a stone’s throw to Time and Tide Museum, which occupies the premises of the former Tower Fish Curing Works (1850). The museum tells the story of Great Yarmouth and its historic herring industry, which at its peak employed 10,000 people on Yarmouth’s quaysides and curing works, gutting, packing and salting the fish, icing and curing it for overseas sale. Yarmouth’s herring trade drew thousands of Scottish people to Yarmouth throughout the 19th and early 20th century. Beginning in the 1850s, Herring Girls from Scotland followed the herring fleet, often manned by Scottish crew, down the east coast - starting in Shetland in May and reaching Great Yarmouth by October. In Yarmouth, the Scottish Herring Girls had to work 12-15 hour days on the quayside to gut the fish and pack it in preserving barrels of salt. Lots of the herring caught off Yarmouth would then go to the Tower Curing Works to be smoked, packed and sent around the world. The first time I visited Time and Tide Museum, I looked at archival photographs of the Herring Girls. As I inhaled the lingering historic aroma of smoked fish, I felt a profound and relieving sense of being in the right place.

Today in Great Yarmouth, all the buildings Daniel Defoe described, including the Custom House (1720) and the Elizabethan House (1596), still stand resplendent on South Quay, and still look, as he described, “like little palaces.” When I drive into Yarmouth, across the Haven Bridge that spans the river Yare, then turn right on to South Quay, I always look up at the golden ship weathervane, atop of the central clock tower of the Town Hall (1882). It reminds me of the model merchant ship which rests upon a globe on the domed corner tower of the Merchants’ House (1873-7) on Glasgow’s George Square. It reminds me of Leith, where there were so many clocktowers and weathervanes on spires and turrets: including the golden cockerel of St. Ninian’s clocktower and the swinging gold and black pennant of the Corn Exchange (1860-3), which were all designed to show the direction of the wind, the main key in predicting the weather.

The first person I interviewed for the Migration, Heritage and Belonging project was Clare Fellas, whose grandfather came to England from Cyprus in 1928 to work in the hotel trade. She explained, “They had a piece of land in his home village, which had olive trees and lemon trees. But they weren’t able to make much of a living. So they came to the UK purely for economic reasons, to try and get a better life for themselves.” That phrase, “a better life” recurred over and over again in the interviews I carried out.

Many recent migrants to Great Yarmouth moved after the 2004 accession to the EU of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Solvenia, followed by Romania and Bulgaria in 2007 and Croatia in 2013. For those migrant people with limited spoken English, many initially seek employment such as cleaning work in the region’s many holiday caravan parks or working in the Bernard Matthews turkey processing facility in nearby Holton, Suffolk. Musician and community activist Pedro Cassimo, who moved to Norfolk from Portugal in 2008, explains, “That’s the first thing that an immigrant would look for – work. When they come for work, obviously they see where the easiest access is, because first the language is a barrier, so you need to go for something which they can work on and not speak much. People don’t come here just to sit down – that’s the reality – people want to grow up in life.”

People said they had moved to Great Yarmouth:
For a better life
For a better life
To try and get a better life
To make a better life
To try to have a best life
For a better education and life
To find good life and a good life for the future
To have a good life
To have a better life here
To give us a better future than the past

Some of the people I interviewed had left their country of origin in traumatic circumstances, and most had travelled to the UK believing there to be better educational and employment opportunities here. The expression, for a better life, has stayed with me in these pandemic times, when we have all been at home so much more, and had more time to reflect on what we’ve done and where we’re going.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once defined success as being able “to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition.” It is this last aspect that increasingly occupies my thoughts.

Moving allowed me to rethink the feeling of home, and to miss the feeling that I belonged. I realised I could get that feeling from places where people congregated: in streets and buildings, on piers and quaysides, in libraries, museums, cinemas and football grounds: a sort of psychic community of bodies, concentration, actions and atmospheres of the past. That was the feeling of being in the right place, a kind of premonition, like something is happening that happened before. I realised that this feeling of community is often unspoken. Often I have felt most at home amongst strangers, walking through a crowd of people speaking languages I don’t understand.