Glasgow’s Merchant City is a construct. Before the wave of post-1980s regeneration, nobody knew the city centre district by that name. With its new identity, it was branded as a destination for a fashionable crowd in search of boutiques, restaurants and wine bars.
The merchants themselves were already commemorated in the road signs: Ingram Street after tobacco lord Archibald Ingram; Buchanan Street after plantation owner Andrew Buchanan; Glassford Street after John Glassford, the most successful of the tobacco traders.
Merchant City advertising campaigns did not dwell on how these men built their wealth. That job has been taken on by writer and director Adura Onashile who, working with the National Theatre of Scotland, has built an app-based walking tour that compels us to remember.
Ghosts, a 70-minute journey through the 18th-century streets, is an evocation of those whose enslavement made the imposing architecture possible. They are absent from the city’s collective memory, yet their legacy is in the very stones.
Ghosts is Onashile’s bid to write them back into the story. “Who is going to record me? Who is going to remember?” asks actor Reuben Joseph playing a boy bought like an item of furniture before being exported to Glasgow. “Remember you are not alone,” says Lisa Livingstone as a woman talking to her unborn son as she sits in the bowels of a slave ship.
We listen to their words set against Niroshini Thambar’s brooding soundscapes and laid-back beats, while Susanna Murphy and Cristina Spiteri of Bright Side Studios give our cameraphones an augmented-reality upgrade. They superimpose an expanding map of Glasgow on to Hutchesons’ Hospital and make the Gallery of Modern Art, once the townhouse of slave trader William Cunninghame, appear to tumble to the ground. Gazing at the Clyde, we see a litany of forgotten names drift poignantly skywards.
Onashile’s script is poetic rather than dramatic, her stories generalised rather than specific. That can make the juxtaposition of buildings and narrative seem random, leaving us to make the historical connections for ourselves. But by skating through time, from the colonial era to today, she not only shows us the city afresh but also vividly demonstrates the continued cultural erasure of black lives.
Ghosts is at Merchant City, Glasgow, until 9 May.
