Patrick Geddes – a man ahead of his time
September 2004
Patrick Geddes: scientist, educator, town planner,and cultural champion – but today in Ballater, he is almost forgotten.
by Mindy Grewar
September 2004
“The world is mainly a vast leaf-colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass, and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests. This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves. By leaves we live.”
The words above are of a man, born in rural 19th-century Ballater, who became an international giant and seeded hope for the future. Sir Patrick Geddes – scientist, educator, town planner, cultural champion – was compared to da Vinci and admired by Einstein.
Today in Ballater he’s nearly forgotten. But the situation is improving, thanks to Sheila Potter and her son Tom, distant relations of Geddes, and Kenny Munro, an East Lothian artist inspired by the man. They rallied other interested Deesiders and laid plans to celebrate Geddes’ life on his 150th birthday on 2 October. For five years now the Ballater Geddes Project 2004 has been exploring his ideas and applying them to Ballater’s needs.
Patrick Geddes’s humble origins did not suggest his eventual stature. His father was a regular soldier, Alexander Geddes (1808-1899), and his mother was Janet Stivenson (Stevenson) (1816-1898).
Alexander, a Gaelic-speaking Highlander, was orphaned when he was eight, then lived with his brother, herding sheep, and going to school in winter. A kirk elder, he served in Ballater as a sergeant major in the Black Watch. Patrick, born in 1854, was the last of five children, and his parents moved to Perth when he was three. Their cottage, Mount Tabor, can be seen on the east side of Kinnoull Hill, on the outskirts of Perth.
Patrick attended Perth Academy, then at 20 went to London to attend the Royal School of Mines. Here he was mentored by the influential biologist Thomas Huxley, a supporter of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Patrick’s research on protozoa soon attracted attention. “I have read several of your biological papers with very great interest,” Darwin wrote, “and I have formed, if you will permit me to say so, a high opinion of your abilities.”
At 25, Patrick was asked to set up a zoological station at Stonehaven for Aberdeen University. Local newspapers reported that community leaders and their wives enjoyed visits to the hut on the beach, a highlight of which was the curiosities floating in specimen jars.
Patrick later joined a scientific expedition to Mexico, but suffered an illness there which temporarily blinded him. Prevented from using a microscope, he returned home to focus on a rather larger creature, mankind.
“Geddes’ great achievement has been the making of a bridge between Biology and Social Science,” wrote his biographer Lewis Mumford. His idea now seems simple: just like plants and other animals, people thrive in healthy conditions. Patrick considered how people could improve these conditions and in so doing, established town planning.
By now with a wife and young family, Patrick was living in poor accommodation in the centre of Edinburgh. He designed new housing, organising neighbours to build gardens and renovate houses. Today one of his most comprehensive projects, the Ramsay Gardens flats just below Edinburgh Castle, graces every postcard of the city’s Royal Mile.
Working to his mottos, ‘By creating, we think’ and ‘By living, we learn’, Patrick integrated work by city craftsmen. He established the Outlook Tower, with a Camera Obscura, now a tourist attraction, and displays about the city, country, continent, and world arranged in widening circles, thus developing tenants’ knowledge of their environment.
Patrick lectured on biology at Dundee and Edinburgh Universities, and associated with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, John Duncan, Sir J.C. Bose, Hugh MacDiarmid and Rabindranath Tagore.
“I have heard much praise from my friends concerning Mr Geddes’s work and personality,” Albert Einstein commented. “All who know him admire and honour him highly.”
In such company Patrick recognized a flowering of creativity and dubbed the later 19th century the Scottish Renaissance, publishing its highlights in The Evergreen: A Northern Almanac. He toured the United States, Europe, Israel and India to lecture, exhibit, and design towns. His ideas were novel: cities must be planned with respect to their surrounding villages, he said, in a ‘conurbation’. Industrial development, if left unchecked, would damage the air, water and land upon which all life relies. Little wonder that today’s environmentalists consider Patrick a prophet of land stewardship and sustainable activity.
By the time he died in 1932 Patrick had written about economics, sociology, history, art, museums, exhibitions, politics, literature, agriculture, gardening, geology, religion, philosophy, education, geography, science, astronomy, biology, planning, printing, mathematics, navigation, travel, public health, housing, music, and poetry. Weeks before his death he accepted a knighthood.
“Geddes was… what Leonardo (da Vinci) had been 400 years before: a prodigy in physical endurance, range of interests, and imaginative powers,” concluded another biographer, Philip Boardman.
A small exhibition in 2000 re-introduced Geddes, touring Aberdeenshire libraries before returning to Ballater for permanent display in the school. A new street in a low-cost housing scheme was named Sir Patrick Geddes Way, reflecting his campaign for housing to suit all.The group urged Aberdeenshire Council to improve footpaths and provide a bus shelter for school pupils; a grant from Scottish Natural Heritage and the Saltire Society paid for Geddes displays on the shelter walls.
Funding is being sought for a camera obscura / outlook tower, in the form of digital images taken from a Deeside hill. The images would be transmitted live to Ballater’s tourist centre and to the website.
In August, the group unveiled the Geddes Walkway, funded by SNH, which is marked with information plaques and children’s drawings atop posts carved by Strathdon artist Gavin Smith. They also launched an exhibition, ‘Geddes Today’, at Ballater’s Old Royal Station, which runs until October 2.
Kenny Munro and other artists are working on an environmental arts project with schools in Finzean, Ballater and India. On October 2, school children parade their creations and Ballater enjoys a much-anticipated birthday party.
Mindy Grewar is a member of the Ballater Geddes Group and an arts development officer for Aberdeenshire Council, based in Stonehaven. She learned of Patrick Geddes while researching art history at Indiana University, where she found a copy of Evergreen in the library.
This is an article from the September 2004 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.