Baile a’Bhròn

Village of Mourning

Baile a’ Bhròn, exhibited in Balfron Tower, Poplar, London on the night of the Wolf Moon in January 2016, was the conclusion of the project started in 2012, when I had moved into the tower. Being Scottish and recently living in London I was struck by the amount of Scottish street names in the area as well as the names of Erno Goldfinger’s trio of buildings on the Brownfield estate - Balfron Tower, Carradale House, and Glenkerry House. My investigations lead me back to my home town of Inverness. Hugh McIntosh born not far from Inverness in 1786. Growing up in the recent aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, Macintosh allegedly didn’t complete school and instead left the area to find work as a navvy for the canals. McIntosh became a contractor and followed his colleague to London to work and live, moving into Poplar. McIntosh was a respected contractor and his family tomb is in St Matthias Old Church, Poplar.

Investigations also took me to the village of Balfron in Scotland in 2013. There I met with the Balfron Heritage Group who shared the legend of how the village had got its name. According to the legend, wolves came and stole the village children from their homes and so the village went into mourning. The word balfron is a derivative of the Scottish Gaelic words baile, meaning village, and a’ bhròn, meaning of the mourning.

The idea of a village of mourning resonated with the situation in Balfron Tower. Built in the mid 1960’s, the tower was meant to recreate the sense of community for the people who had been living side by side in the streets of east London before the Second World War. The majority of these streets and homes were devastated by bombing of the war. The architect Erno Goldfinger planned for each floor to be like a street, where neighbours could commune with each other and kids could play safely. Unfortunately it instead became a crime hotspot and the tenants felt isolated. By the time I moved in in 2012, it had been given a Grade 2 listing due to its brutalist design. Most of the tenants had been decanted out and the rest were waiting to be rehoused in the neighbouring Carradale House. The tower was predominantly full of property guardians and artists. It was part of the regeneration of east London where working class people are moved out of their locals whilst the refurbishments happen, never to be moved back in and often being offered housing many miles away form their friends and family.

The wolves from the village of Balfron legend became emblematic to what was happening in Balfron Tower, and I spent a day with The Wolf Conservation Trust in Reading. Meeting their wolves and learning about the Trust, their rescue efforts and their positive promotion of these predators. Outlawed over the centuries, and since the last wolf in the UK was allegedly killed in the 1890’s, the importance of the wolf’s impact on our ecological and environmental diversity the wild has been well documented. The protection and reintroduction of wolves in parts of the USA, Norway and potentially here in Scotland. Unlike the wolves in the legend, these rescued wolves at WCT were well fed and content.

Balfron Tower now sits empty having been refurbished and on the market.

The community. Welcome and unwelcoming.

The murder. The door being kicked in.

The threats and abuse.

The restrictions and the celebrations.

The book.

The exhibition.