We don’t need permission to take the future of Aberdeen into our own hands and make it the city it deserves to be, writes Colin Farquhar.
I’m sitting in the boardroom of an old oil and gas office in Westhill – Taqa House, the former home of the Abu Dhabi National Energy Company. It is a shell.
Glass and suspended ceilings, four storeys high, commanding views over Wester and Easter Ord, toward South Deeside – 42,000 square feet of emptiness.
The hope is that this can be the home of a new artists’ community in Aberdeen, where people can practise and exhibit their work, potentially to the public, and be inspired by fellow artists, creating networks and grassroots collectives.
Taqa House – or Pavilion 1, as we have been calling it – doesn’t strike you as the most accommodating place for artists when you first see it. It’s a huge building, and quite imposing.
From inside the building, you look north into what feels like an energy retail park. The TotalEnergies and Subsea 7 offices are just along the B9119. But, to the south, the building looks over green grass, fields and farms, to the hills.
You can reimagine the space, especially when you never saw what it once was – a bustling office environment. All that glass floods the rooms with light. You can watch the sun dip behind the horizon.
For me – someone who spent so much time in a cinema, with very little external light to speak of – at the right time of day, Pavilion 1 is almost heavenly.
Artists come to view the building and I walk them round, showing them the rooms and the views, the cupboards and the walls. When I hear their plans for the space, what they can do and create, I imagine it as a gallery, or a school, or a workshop. Full of people and life and stuff that amuses and shocks and talks to you.
We can recreate and improve our Aberdeen
The project is part of a new job I started, just before the turn of the year, with Outer Spaces. We take former commercial properties – offices or retail spaces, for example – and give them to people who can make them brighter, and who can create bright work to take out into the world.
The role has made me think more broadly about how we can recreate our city, our Aberdeen, and make it better, particularly after a number of knocks for the region over the past few months.
We’ve failed to be designated a green freeport, losing out to Cromarty Firth and Forth Ports. A bold question this may be, but does it matter? What would being designated a freeport do for our struggling city centre? How would it see those shops, sat empty for some time now, filled? There has to be another way.
Regardless of what our governments do, regardless of slights and knocks, we must get on with the job of making Aberdeen a more vital and welcoming place to live. Regardless of the absence of freeports, or Eurovision, or even a thriving local high street – an issue which is not unique to us – our local economy is still strong.
Let us focus on a positive. Before the New Year, Union Terrace Gardens underwent what was termed a “soft reopening”; barriers delicately removed under the cover of darkness, the park pushed back into the city, reconnecting us. The question is, in the future, will it bustle? Can a brushed-up urban space drag people back into the city centre?
This coming weekend will see the gardens illuminated by Spectra 2023 – another transformation, after the longer-term renovation. It will look beautiful, I’m sure, and we’ll at last have had the grand opening that is worthy of the space.
Let art make our lives brighter
What other things can we reimagine, softly or not, around what we sadly perceive as a formerly beautiful city centre, instead of just a beautiful one? I think of the empty John Lewis building at the head of George Street. I think of an empty former police headquarters. I think of a certain empty, but loved, cinema.
We must stop ourselves from going through the same slightly banal conversations about Aberdeen in 2023, and actually make some progress
Can we redevelop and reconnect with communities in our city? Can we take the empty and unloved bits of our city, and across Scotland, and change them, so they are once again relevant to the people around them?
What can an unused office building or shopfront become? It can become vibrant. It can become sustainable. It can contribute hugely to the wellbeing of those around it.
We must stop ourselves from going through the same slightly banal conversations about Aberdeen in 2023, and actually make some progress. The emergency summit just before the turn of the year produced 51 ideas for the city centre – lots of them are sensible and positive.
In Westhill, an empty oil and gas building will soon be filled once again. There will be photographers and painters, sculptors and dancers, makers and manipulators.
Why not let them have the rest, too, even if only for a short time? Let art make our lives brighter for a while.
Colin Farquhar is former head of cinema operations for Belmont Filmhouse in Aberdeen
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