Annan’s Ship of Hope
Tom Morton
This week a gaggle of happy people gathered to launch the 2-year construction stage of Annan’s ambitious harbour regeneration project. It’s been a long time coming for those local folks who kicked it all off many years ago. Here’s the Architect’s take in the speech I gave.
A traditional launch for the construction phase
When I first came, here it was 5 years ago on a wet and windy November morning in the teeth of covid, and so it’s great to be here today, welcoming the start of two years of landscape regeneration, civil engineering and building renewal that is investing 15m pounds into the local economy, creating jobs and providing skills training.
This work will transform the building behind us into a heritage and learning centre, the quayside will be upgraded for visiting boats, here we will create a new riverside public space for people to gather. In the coming months we are going to build a dam, creating a tidal lagoon for swimming and boating, and we will install a bridge so people can walk across to the Merse where the former town dump will be restored for nature, with a boardwalk and bird hide. The entire development is designed to be fully accessible to people of diverse abilities and it is all designed to cope with high tides that will rise 3m above where you are standing.
Annan has such a vibrant past of trade, fishing, shipbuilding, of poetry, craft, and boiler-making. Much of that faded through the 20th century, and it has been wonderful to work with the community, Dumfries & Galloway Council and many other stakeholders to forge a new future of renewal for the 21st century.
Many of Scotland’s towns face multiple challenges of economic and environmental decline. Annan Harbour is showing how, with effective empowerment and patience, those processes can be reversed and better futures can be delivered - thriving futures with derelict buildings restored, forgotten places and stories shared with new generations, new jobs and skills for local people, nature restored and climate resilience embedded, opportunities for culture and enterprise turned from ideas into reality.
At Arc, we work with many communities and public bodies challenged by today’s circumstances. Inequality, damaged environments, demographic and economic change. These are the challenges of our times, and they are being met here at Annan Harbour.
Annan is one of Scotland’s five Climate Action Towns, and places like these and communities like this are at the front line in Scotlands transformative adaptation in how we will live on a damaged planet in the 21st century, when one in seven of our buildings will be at risk of flooding. So many of Scotland’s traditional settlements were located on rivers and coastlines because of trade and transport, and that makes us especially vulnerable to a changing climate. Here we have both a river and a coast with all the water of the Irish Sea is funnelled up the Solway by the westerly wind. Adapting this harbour for a thriving future of work, play and culture was a core mission for my design team.
Sharing craft skills and opportunities
This water was what brought Annan the wealth of trade and of fishing, and it connects us with all the other waters of the world, and all the other communities trying to cope with rising seas and a damaged natural world.
You know, they say that A.I. is the next big thing, and of course the challenge for us, as machines become better machines, is for us to become better humans. So on the train down I asked A.I. for a quote by Burns about Annan, because he was the exciseman here.
And maybe it is a genius thing, because it didn’t give me a quote by Burns about Annan, it gave me a quote by Annan about Burns. I don’t know how many of you remember Kofi Annan’s Inaugural Robert Burns Memorial Lecture, delivered at the United Nations Headquarters on 13 January 2004, when Annan used the occasion to celebrate Burns’s legacy and to link it to the U.N.’s mission of promoting brotherhood, tolerance, and coexistence among all peoples and the natural world.
In his speech, Kofi Annan noted that while his surname ‘Annan’ is linked to this Scottish town, his connection to Burns was philosophical, not genealogical. He said: “Let’s just say, as Burns himself would, that we are all brothers, the whole world o’er,”
For Annan, these lines held a guiding principle for global unity and an embedded humanity from a poet born into poverty, an advocate for peace, equality and social change, making his words especially relevant to the UN’s values, just as they are to this harbour project. That poem, A Man’s a Man For A’ That, was in a sense a cultural vessel of hope and equality that has sailed around the world from this part of Scotland.
Che Burns - street art at Annan Harbour
Our built realm is the space where we meet so many of our current challenges, climate change, economic instability, social inequality. These are not individual problems, they are linked threats need to be tackled together. And they need to be tackled in places like this where they all converge. And they can only be successfully overcome by a partnership like this between public, private and community sectors, where capacities, visions and resources are all shared.
That is a job of work, and places like Annan, and projects like this, are where those shared practices are being forged through community empowerment.
This project is a transformative one – it tells a forgotten harbour filled with derelict boats that its future is the laughter of people playing in water. It tells an isolated riverbank, abandoned with human waste, that we will build a bridge of connection and restore its natural realm. And it catches a tired and derelict warehouse before it collapses and offers it new strength and a vibrant future with a heritage centre and café to attracting visitors from around the world and sharing Annan’s culture. And it befriends a resilient and visionary community action group offering them a launch pad for community enterprise and social inclusion.
People think being an Architect is about building things, and we do, but its not just buildings we build, its partnerships, visions of better futures, and opportunities to deliver them.
A project led by local volunteers
Hundreds of people are building that bright future for annan harbour
Of course, all Architects really do is draw some pretty pictures and talk in a lot of meetings,. Other people really do all the heavy lifting – and we lead a talented and dedicated team of technical consultants – Harrison Stevens landscape architects, Narro associates civil & structural engineers, StudioArc exhibition designers, Harley Haddow services engineers, Community Enterprise business planners and Thomson Gray quantity surveyors, not to forget Cragg Management, the Project Managers.
And I want to give total respect to the project’s main contractor Cubby Construction, a local company who have brought a brilliant attitude, great technical experience, professional management, and a real can-do team mindset to what can sometimes be a complex process of turning vision into reality. The construction sector is currently facing a lot of challenges, not least the path to net zero and the circular economy, but we have the capability to deliver that transformation, if the necessary enabling frameworks are put in place. This project in Annan is piloting many of those pathways.
Arc has been blessed to work on this fantastic project.
Please do come back in 2 years and see Annan Harbour transformed.
The future of Annan Harbour
Tom Morton is lead consultant with Arc Architects on the Annan Harbour Regeneration Project. Tom also sits on the Scottish Government’s Flood Resilience Strategy Implementation Governance Group and Zero Waste Scotland’s Mission Board for the Circular Economy in Construction