Easterhouse Living Archive

The Easterhouse Living Archive is an ongoing community project to unearth, preserve and engage with the working class histories and struggles of Easterhouse. Based at Platform our archive is much more than a thing of history but rather a constant project of utopian thinking. We hope our 5 objects demonstrate the variety and scope of our project, from traditional archiving and research to our innovative creative practice.  If the question is Whose History is it Anyway?  Our answer must be History is ours and we make it!

 

Easterhouse Stained Glass Window – Whose Scheme is it anyway? 

 

A mutual passion  for working-class history, archives and sharing stories led to the Easterhouse Living Archive group first being formed. We have spent months talking, writing, researching, drawing, cutting and leading to create a lasting tribute to the community, in this the year of our city’s 850th anniversary. The imagery displayed in the window is a collage of archival material, original artwork and personal experience.  It brings together fascinating elements from the history of Easterhouse and Glasgow North East to ask the question: “Whose scheme is it anyway?” 

 

The stained glass window was handmade by the Esterhouse Living Archive Group with the professional support of artist Keira McLean and the team at RDW Glass in the East End. 

 

Whose is it anyway: an Easterhouse Living Archive production (Platform, 2025) ed. Joey Simons – Publication 

 

Our publication “Whose is it anyway?” edited by artist Joey Simons is a companion piece to our Easterhouse Stained Glass window.  The materials collected in the publication have been written, illustrated, selected, donated, discussed and montaged in the course of conversations and workshops that have taken place at Platform , Easterhouse Library, the Mitchell Library and RDW Glass. 

 

 

Let Us Act for Ourselves: selected works of Freddy Anderson (Platform, 2020)

ed. Joey Simons – Publication  

 

Freddy Anderson (1922 – 2001), born in County Monaghan, was a poet, dramatist, novelist, orator, political activist, lifelong socialist and an important Easterhouse resident. He played a crucial role in the life of the community through his role in the Easterhouse Festival Society, the Easterhouse Summer Festival Drama Company, the Garthamlock News and the Easterhouse Voice newspaper.  

 

Let Us Act for Ourselves: selected works of Freddy Anderson, edited by Joey Simons, with introductions by Paul Anderson and the actor Gary Lewis, provides a selection of his prose, plays and poetry, with materials gathered through the support of Freddy’s friends, comrades and the local community, alongside research in the Scottish Theatre Archive, the Political Song Collection and the Freddy Anderson Archive at GCU. 

 

 

Scheming: a response to Jimmy Cauty’s L-13 MdZ ESTATE tour  (Platform, 2022),

ed. Joey Simons with contributions from Cathy McCormack and Jim Ferguson 

 

In 2021, the artist Jimmy Cauty presented his installation L-13 MdZ ESTATE at Platform, Easterhouse: a dystopian model village experience featuring four abandoned concrete tower blocks housed in a 40ft shipping container. The publication Scheming was commissioned in response, featuring an overview of Glasgow housing history and a curated selection of Easterhouse archival imagery and material relating to the exhibition’’s four tower blocks (residential Live-Work-Die units, a multistorey high security children’s prison, a high-rise care home for the old, dying and the dead, and a spiritual centre for neo-pagan misbehaviour). 

 

We also worked with Cathy McCormack to transcribe and publish her ‘Evening Calls’, a hilarious take on her community’s struggle to overcome damp housing, fuel poverty and stigmatization, originally broadcast on STV in 1993.  

 

The publication featured this image from the Easterhouse Festival Society report Five Years On (1982) .  

 

Display of materials from the Cathy McCormack Archive at Platform, Easterhouse for 

Mining Seams and Drawing Wells: a living archive for Easterhouse, Year of Stories 2022 exhibition  

 

For the Year of Stories 2022, artists Keira McLean and Joey Simons co-produced a series of creative workshops, events, publications and exhibitions with the local community at Platform and Easterhouse Library. Mining Seams and Drawing Wells used the concept of a ‘living archive’ to connect the area’s ancient history with its development as a mining village and housing scheme in the 19th and 20th centuries.  

 

As part of the exhibition, we worked with the Glasgow Women’s Library to display materials from the archive of the legendary Easterhouse anti-poverty and housing campaigner Cathy McCormack, a friend and comrade who sadly passed away in August 2022. 

 

Find out more about Easterhouse Living Archive.