Are We Listening? Children Speak, Prisoners Whisper, Buildings Remember
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
By Frazer Macdonald Hay
Last Friday unfolded as one of those unexpectedly resonant days, the kind marked by layered conversations with inspiring people, and the kind that ushers you into encounters you weren’t looking for yet somehow needed. Between two such meetings, I stepped into two very different exhibitions in Edinburgh. What I found were two worlds with threshold spaces full of meaning and intrigue, whose contrasts were electrifying: one filled with the imaginative power of children, the other with the fragile, urgent voices of political prisoners. Together they opened a space between hope and horror, between what children fiercely imagine and what adults can so violently destroy.
And moving between these two exhibitions, I was struck not only by their themes but also by the buildings containing them, reused structures layered with centuries of memory, architectural elders whose charisma, continuity, and accumulated meaning lent gravity to everything they hosted.
Talbot Rice Gallery: Children’s Rights in a Neoclassical Palimpsest
My day began at Talbot Rice Gallery, housed within the University of Edinburgh’s Old College. These rooms, neoclassical halls, carefully proportioned galleries, were once a 19th-century natural history museum, a place where Charles Darwin studied as a medical student. The building is a palimpsest of knowledge and inquiry; its histories still whisper beneath the painted walls.
The exhibition The Children Are Now gathered films, photography, installations, and interventions focusing on children’s rights, safety, identity, justice, and visibility. It asserted, with clarity and urgency, that children are not symbols of a distant future but active participants in the world we are making right now.
In a building once dedicated to classifying life and observing the natural world, these contemporary explorations of children’s rights felt amplified. The architecture lent intellectual lineage and seriousness to the work. The old museum, once a place that studied the world, now holds a mirror to our responsibility for the children who will inherit it.
Between the Old College and the Old Brewery: Walking Into the Shabby Spectacular
From Talbot Rice I walked to Summerhall, the sprawling former Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies (1916–2010), and before that, the site of a brewery dating back to 1704. Unlike the stateliness of Old College, Summerhall is gloriously unruly: tiled corridors, repurposed clinical rooms, improvised studio spaces, and pockets of organised chaos.
It is a pleasure to get lost in Summerhall, to wander with no expectations and discover, in its shabby, spectacular charm, a creative unpredictability that is essential to Edinburgh’s cultural fabric. These are not neutral rooms; they are saturated with memory. Their old layers remain visible, making them collaborators as much as venues.
Both Talbot Rice and Summerhall have been reread and re-inhabited. They have adapted to new cultural significance without shedding their histories. In doing so, they have become charismatic elders of Edinburgh’s built environment, buildings with personality, authority, and experience, capable of hosting the future while holding the past.
A Quiet Doorway: Children’s Parliament
As I drifted through Summerhall’s corridors, I stumbled upon the Children’s Parliament office, a friendly, colourful space acting as a living bridge to The Children Are Now exhibition. Their presence grounded everything I had been thinking about.
Established in 1996, the Children’s Parliament works to realise children’s human rights in Scotland, particularly for those seldom heard. Their methods are deeply creative, designed to meet children where they are, allowing them to participate through approaches that are accessible, enjoyable, and attuned to individual abilities.
Their values: Unfeart (speaking truth to power), Creative (finding new paths to make rights real), Kind, Fair, felt like a manifesto for the world we keep claiming to want but seldom build.
Seeing their office in an old veterinary school turned cultural node reaffirmed what I have observed this year in Ukraine, Nepal, and elsewhere: that young people are imaginative, frustrated, hopeful, furious, and resilient, and that they deserve far more than consultation. They deserve to participate in shaping peace, policy, and future worlds.
A Sudden Shift in a Fluorescent Corridor
A little further along, in one of Summerhall’s narrow, humming corridors, I encountered the exhibition VOICES SQUEEZING THROUGH THE BARS, drawings smuggled from prison cells in Belarus. These small works, created under extreme repression, captured fear, resistance, tenderness, and survival in miniature.
The shift, from children’s rights and creative empowerment to the testimonies of political prisoners, was abrupt and emotionally jarring. It opened a stark space between what children imagine and what adults destroy. The fragility of those drawings, pinned to a wall beneath harsh fluorescent light, was a reminder of how quickly rights can vanish and how hard they are to reclaim.
Placed inside a building layered with centuries of scientific care and research, the works felt even more poignant. The architecture itself seemed to bear witness.
Buildings as Performers, Not Backdrops
Walking between these exhibitions, I realised the architecture was not simply providing rooms. It was shaping meaning:
Talbot Rice, with its neoclassical gravity and scientific lineage, echoed the seriousness of children’s rights, giving the exhibition an intellectual and historical anchor.
Summerhall, with its unruly, improvisational, adaptive character, mirrored the creative resilience of both children’s activism and the subversive sketches from Belarus.
These buildings are not mere containers. They are memory-laden collaborators. They have lived many lives, adapted repeatedly, and accumulated layers of purpose. Their charisma and history lend depth that no new building could reproduce.
They are elders, architectural witnesses who hold the authority, experience, and dignity to host the future of humanity and its youth.
Leaving With a Sense of Continuity
By the end of the day, the theme was unmistakable: children and young people are central to every story about our collective future, whether that future is hopeful or precarious.
And Edinburgh’s reused buildings, these layered, storied, charismatic elders, are doing more than hosting art. They are modelling something essential: that continuity and change, memory and reinvention, old structures and new voices, can coexist and strengthen one another.
Walking out into the cold afternoon, I felt that the day had offered a quiet but powerful lesson:
Our future depends on our willingness to make space, generous, unfeart, creative, and fair space, for those arriving with their own truths to speak, and for the architectural elders who continue to shelter those truths with grace.
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