Govanhill Baths Archive

Govanhill Baths Archive is a unique archive documenting the bath’s history over the past hundred years, from its use as a municipal swimming baths and wash house, the occupation of the building and the development of the Govanhill Baths Community Trust.

During the Requiem residency at The Deep End in Govanhill, musician Lainey Dempsey  and artist Rachael Flynn explored how Irish women who migrated to Scotland might be remembered through archival traces, oral histories, and living cultural practices. Across the week, they gathered names, addresses, and fragments of women’s lives from census records and local accounts, building a picture of experiences often absent from formal histories. An open studio invited visitors to share their own stories and contribute to the growing collection of memories and materials. 

 

As ideas accumulated, several creative strands developed. Both artists brought their prior ongoing practices into the space. For Lainey this involved building on her ongoing research for the traditional song project ‘Letle Telt’ which explores the untold stories and songs of women from Scottish history.  The project began in 2022 and resulted in the release of an album of unaccompanied songs both traditional and newly composed.  A booklet containing information on the included women was created as well as a website launched where songs, stories and research could be accessed (www.laineyd.org).  The work lead to regular visits to Inishowen on the Donegal peninsula where unaccompanied traditional singing is thriving and where the community feel a strong connection to Scotland and particularly Glasgow.  This connection is evident in many of the Donegal songs and Lainey was inspired to research her own Irish ancestry, particularly the matriarchal line as part of her collaboration with Rachael on this new iteration of Requiem.   

  

For Rachael, this meant returning to work centred on her paternal grandmother, Agnes, who migrated alone from Donegal to Glasgow at fifteen. Much of Flynn’s practice examines women’s migration between Ireland and Scotland – particularly the emotional, embodied, and intergenerational impacts carried across time. Earlier work, Requiem for Stephen, drew on Agnes’s recurring dream of walking each night from her childhood home through a midnight landscape, a ritual shaped by guilt, distance, and memory. Rachael had previously reimagined this dream-walk by filming herself moving through the Donegal landscape at sunset, creating a layered viewpoint that slipped between her experience and Agnes’s imagined one. 

Document showing route of walk of through Govanhill on 8th August 2025

 

Mid-week, the artists sought a shared way of bringing their practices together. They projected the original Donegal landscape footage onto the tenement building in Paisley where Agnes later lived, livestreaming this projection back into the residency space. As this unfolded, Lainey responded by singing Highland Fairy Lullaby, a folk song voiced through a mother searching for a missing child – its themes of loss and longing connecting closely with the project. Footage of this response was recorded as a developing strand of the collaborative work. 

 

Throughout the week, the artists continued searching through archives and census records, adding contributed stories from studio visitors. From this they created an initial collection of women’s names and addresses from the surrounding streets. They then transposed the route of Agnes’s dream-walk onto Govanhill, creating a new path that connected these women’s addresses into a single act of remembrance. 

Video Loop of women’s names displayed in gallery space on evening of collective gathering on 9th August 2025

On the final night of the residency week, they performed this walk. Rachael wore the original camera rig to capture both her and Lainey’s perspective, while a close friend filmed them from a distance. The artists walked largely in silence, with Lainey singing fragments of Highland Fairy Lullaby when moved to do so. The contrast between the rural silence of Donegal and the night-time soundscape of a Glasgow neighbourhood created a new dialogue between places, histories, and the women remembered along the way. Pausing at each address, they acknowledged the women in situ, linking archival research with embodied performance and returning memory to the streets where these lives unfolded. 

Video shown on evening of collective gathering on 9th August 2025 showing excerpts of artistic work and responses made during the residency week, including footage from the evening walk through Govanhill on the 8th August 2025 

At the public gathering on the Saturday evening, the artists shared what had emerged: projected visuals, live performance, and discussions with the community. A video loop displayed the collected names and details of the women from the walk. Lainey performed songs, also joined by Emma Pollock, who had visited earlier in the week to share her own connection to the themes. Around the room were objects contributed by attendees – old dressmaker’s scissors, letters, certificates, a grandmother’s face oil bottle, a sod of peat, a small antique vase – each adding a personal layer to the developing archive. The artists also screened early edits of the walk and footage from the mid-week Paisley projection. 

 

Soundpiece – Expecting You All the Time. Lainey Dempsey has taken excerpts from collaborator Rachael Flynn’s own family letters to create a soundscape of far-off voices and gentle whispers evoking the distance and the intimacy felt when loved ones have emigrated. The Irish Sea can be heard as ‘white noise’.  A water mass that both connects and separates. 

The residency concluded with a shared intention to continue developing the project in partnership with Govanhill Baths and the local community. The work engaged deeply with intangible cultural heritage – embodied memory carried through walking; oral traditions and storytelling; and echoes of folk song and intergenerational remembrance. As Paula Larkin, Archive & Heritage Manager for the Baths, noted: ‘Requiem has been so important in highlighting the experience of Irish women in Govanhill. This project is an exemplar of how to creatively record, interpret and make accessible the lived experiences of Irish women, so often undocumented, but vital in the understanding of the Irish diaspora in Govanhill/Glasgow/Scotland. We will support the project going forward, as part of our Irish History Group.’ 

Montage documentation of collective gathering event on the 9th of August 2025

This project was part of the Irish Roots programme at Govanhill International Festival & Carnival 2025 and supported by Glasgow 850. 

 

Find out more about Govanhill Baths Archive.