Baron Taylor's Street - The Beginning...

by Fin Macrae, 18 Jun 2008

Things have been mad busy with lots of things recently and DUFI has been on a steep learning curve while we deal with the challenges of working in the public art world.
We thought we would give a bit more background to our work on the Baron Taylor Street Project (henceforth referred to as BTS).

A brief description of BTS…

Believed to be one of the four original streets of Inverness, it was known as the Black Vennel in the Middle Ages but then became Baron Taylor’s Lane. To quote someone very close to this project “Who the hell was Baron Taylor?!” John Taylor was a lawyer in the early to mid 18th century and he owned a lot of the properties in the lane. He “acquired” a superiority with the title of Baron and the street came to be named after him. Eventually in the 1930’s it became Baron Taylor’s Street.

Today BTS is a busy pedestrian thoroughfare linking the Old Town to the Eastgate Centre. Running from Church Street in the West to Academy Street in the East it is roughly split in the middle by Lombard Street and Drummond Street. It has smaller stores in the area that include health food, tailors, fashion, charity stores, fast food and the odd pub and bookies. A bit of a microcosm of Inverness we guess…

Our main concern was to have a series of interlinking works that would unify the whole of the street to create a strong identity for BTS but at the same time make it obviously a part of the much larger Inverness Streetscape Programme. With this in mind we have carried the same visual language, from the rest of the Streetscape into BTS. However, rather then sticking to it rigidly, and limiting the development of BTS, we have allowed the aesthetic to evolve with the concept for the BTS project.

Water in all its forms has been the basis for our work in the old town. Inverness is intrinsically linked with water, from its geographical setting (the River Ness, Loch Ness, the Caledonian Canal and also the Moray Firth) to its name (‘Inver’ = river meeting the sea, ‘Ness’ = headland projecting from coastline into sea). On top of that there is good old Highland weather. Inverness is truly linked with water!

Running down the middle of this street is a drainage channel, and this has become the key to our whole design idea for the street.

The overall theme for the Arts programme in Inverness is of Inverness being a city in the country and we see the drains as being part of this process. The drains carry the precipitation away back to the environment after washing the city clean of its grime, its memories and dreams.

DUFI is working in conjunction with Cauldeen Primary School in Inverness to come up with text works for the channel and that has been a lot of fun. The way this has happened has been part of the organic process that we seem to be caught up in…more about that another time.

Oh, and one last thing – we lied about the title!
Will write about that another time too. The creative process seems to be a lot easier for us to do practically than write about. I guess that’s something else DUFI will have to learn too.