All shadows are alive: Narratives of the drying green

All shadows are alive takes Edwin Morgan’s poem ‘Glasgow Green’ as a departure point to examine the decline of the drying green in working-class Glasgow. The last recorded use of the drying green to which Morgan refers was in the late 1970s, roughly coinciding with the final closures of public washhouses in the city, known as ‘steamies’. Latterly both sites have become what Lynn Abrams calls a ‘Scottish fascination’, their loss seen as a stand-in for the loss of a certain idea of community within Scottish urban life which had women and washing at its centre.