What Could Happen Here?
by Hope London
What Could Happen Here was created by Hope London, filmmaker Daniel Hughes and music producer Dean Munch for WHAT WE DO NOW, a regional arts project within the Culture Collective nationwide network coordinated by Creative Scotland. Artists, creative freelancers, communities and anchor organisations across Dumfries & Galloway worked together with local people to help shape the vision for regeneration of their town.
Gathering input from so many people in the town was crucial before I actually sat down to write a song that expressed their thoughts and aspirations. I loved singing it, but I loved it even more when people from Stranraer were able to add their voices and instruments to the recording. Thanks to all who participated and to my artist colleague Rory Laycock for co-creation of the Stranraer Colouring book, which was an essential part of the process.
Hope London
Stranraer has seen a lot of decline in recent decades and the Stranraer Millenium Centre’s project WHAT WE DO NOW invited local people to respond to the state of the town and imagine: what could happen here? Hope London and Rory Laycock created the Stranraer Colouring Book, which was used to capture responses from young people and older, and Dean Cargill produced Hope London's song What Could Happen Here?, featuring audio interviews with local people.
Hope approached me to collaborate on a music video for the song as part of the project, drawing form the colouring and written materials generated during the workshops that Hope led throughout the project, using templates she had illustrated with graphic designer Rory Laycock. The film prominently features the derelict George Hotel, a stark symbol of the town’s neglect, located right at its heart.
What Could Happen Here? music video on YouTube
The purpose of the film, we decided, was somewhere along the lines of giving rise to the voices of young people and what they want their town to be, as well as embarrassing whoever it is that is responsible for this gross neglect. We leaned into Dean Munch's “synth crisis” vibe of the “building, un-building” moments to create quite playful but also quite hideous collages of derelict bits of buildings, interwoven with the children's colouring in and notes on what the town’s buildings should be turned into. It was really important to me to let the humour and naïvety of their scribblings come through in playful collages, and to let them be what they are rather than trying to dress it up as something else, or unfairly over-represent that one kid who is “good at drawing”, instead prioritising a fair and unabridged representation of the children’s opinions (even if I wouldn’t want a McDonald’s myself!). Hope then created paper cut outs of different objects and shapes which we used to create the animated sections.
I was thinking a lot about when I was wee and doing colouring in books, people would always say "colour inside the lines!" and if you went outside the lines you had utterly failed the task. I think we've probably already collectively realised, as a society, that this is nonsense and you can express quite a lot by disregarding the lines. I wanted to carry that through to the format of the music video, and sometimes allow the inner workings of the video and how the imagery is layered to be visible—even if harshly—to create a sense of play and collage. Like when we reveal that the ocean waves are actually just being held by Hope's hands, and you can see the hard digital edge of the video cutting off, to introduce the new video material to the collages alongside scans from the colouring book, treating all the material with the same playful disregard for conventional boundaries.
Easily the best part of filming was Hope dancing in a green chroma key morph suit in her garage! We used these shots in the chorus where you see many dancing silhouette figures.
I found out later that year that the George Hotel had been selected for UK Government levelling up funding to be restored. I like to think we may have had a small part to play in that!
I was so glad to be asked to do this, and it was just lovely to connect with Dumfries and Galloway, which I feel is possibly the most under-rated, under-resourced and under-represented region of Scotland.
Collage of dirty alley, ruins of the George Hotel, and overlaid text written by a local which reads "WE NEED A RAIL LINK BETWEEN US & DUMFRIES & THE SOUTH PLEASE?"
In this still above, a local asks for a rail link between Stranraer and Dumfries to connect to the south. People in Dumfries and Galloway have been fighting for this for years. The rail line existed before but was closed in 1965 when Britain was busy destroying the country with motorways.
The line remains largely intact, though a small section of it has been built over with a new housing development. In January 2020 there was a lot of momentum at government level behind getting the railway reinstated, and this seemed to vanish in the pandemic that followed. Getting around D&G is very difficult without a car, and even with a car it is still very difficult because the roads are full of lorries coming from Northern Ireland via the Port of Cairnryan, which is right beside Stranraer. Reinstatement of the railway line would put a lot of that freight onto the railway and free up space on the roads, as well as offer new convenient passenger rail connections towns along the south coast to connect more easily to Dumfries, Stranraer, the north and the south.
This stands as another terrible casualty of our shortsightedness in the 1960s, along with the likes of Glasgow Trams and hundreds of other railway lines. I learned a lot working on this project, and it was really eye-opening to see how this decline in infrastructure affects regions like Dumfries and Galloway much more intensely.
The film was screened at Stranraer Millennium Centre at the end of the WHAT WE DO NOW project, before going on to Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Hawick.
The music video
Lead artist Hope London
Filmmaker Daniel Hughes
The song
Lead songwriter, lead vocals, co-producer Hope London
Lead producer, performer, co-songwriter Dean Munch
Bodhran Amanda Green
Cajon Drum Kevin Cheeseman
Guitar Michael Raw
Backing vocals and spoken word Pauline Baxter, Lianne Brown, Kevin Cheeseman, Ruth Connor, Aldi Cullearn, Cherry Dashper, Lara Donnelly, Jamie Graham, Allan Jenkins, Kayleigh, Fiona Mackay, Murdo Macleod, Catriona McGhie, Michael Raw, K C Regaspi, James Walsh
The wider project
Thanks to Better Lives Partnership, Support in Mind Scotland, Stranraer Millennium Centre.
Special thanks to Performance Collective Stranraer for lyrics development Andre Anderson, Sarah Rose Graber, Kimberley Marina Gray, Kiera Manson, Chelsie Nash, Kirsty Pickering, Grant Redmond, Jodie Robertson, Allan Taylor, Drew Taylor-Wilson, Stephen Will and Carolyn Yates
Colouring, comments and conversations Amelia Stapleton, Aleksandra, Alexa Forster, Caitlinn, Flo Cooper, Hannah, Rachel Drummond, Kaitlin Graham, C Martin, Nathan, Nicole Young, Thorin, Sophie Forster, Blair Graham, Ann Singleton, Idena Smith, Jamie Graham & Family, Harry Harbottle, Amanda Hayler, Eve Boss, Rachel Barr, Jason Copeland, Cameron Hunter, Katie Scott, Aiden Ferguson, Luke Hopkins, Alistair McGarva, Keavy Kennedy, Christopher McColm, Caitlinn McKie, Ryan Agnew, Karen O'Rourke, Megan Laurie, all the other staff and group members of Better Lives Partnership Stranraer, Diana Hamilton and students of Accessible Art, Custom House Pub, and anonymous folks.
With thanks to the comments and contributions of Allen Jenkins, Christina Johnson, Kelsey McWhirter and Romana Petrucci of the Stranraer Development Trust; Beth Piggott and volunteers of The Dandelion Project; Joe Gough, Christian Tillyer, Julie Sheehan, Emily Sheehan, Ann Hann, James and other group members at Wigtownshire Christmas Party 2021; young people at Millennium Centre Hallowe'en Party, 2021; Eleanor Steele, Steph Findleton and Jane at Stranraer Fete, 2021; Sarah-Jane Allsopp of Dumfries and Galloway Council; and the shopkeepers and taxi drivers of the Stranraer community who shared their thoughts so frankly during Hope and Rory's walkabouts around the town.
Special thanks to Stephen McCutcheon, Debbie Muir, Emily Stapleton, Billy bailey, KC Regaspi, Jamie Graham of the Stranraer Millennium Centre for their support throughout the project.
The project was commissioned by Stranraer Millennium Centre and The Stove, supported by Creative Scotland through the Culture Collective fund.
