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The old mill chimney stack still towers over the high street in Lochee, a Dundee neighbourhood once world renowned for its jute industry.
This “village within a city”, as locals describe it, came to global attention again last month when Elon Musk amplified anti-immigrant misinformation about an incident allegedly involving a 12-year-old girl who was charged with being in possession of offensive weapons.
Scotland’s first minister John Swinney accused the multibillionaire X owner of undermining community cohesion after he shared widely circulated video footage of the incident. Later, police also confirmed that a man and a woman had been charged.
A month later, Lochee locals are still processing the reverberations: ‘Dundee girl’ was declared a hero by far-right influencers, including Tommy Robinson, with memes depicting her as Braveheart, while mainstream media called the area “Scotland’s Bronx”, highlighting “tower blocks stuffed with addicts and migrants”.
What the hot takes and hatchet jobs didn’t explain is that this online frenzy concluded a summer of tragedy for Lochee – one in which community spirit, rather than division, has shone through.
In a brutal killing of the kind rarely seen in the area, Dr Fortune Gomo, 39, a scientist from Zimbabwe who graduated from Dundee University, was found fatally injured in the street in early July. And later that month a popular teenager and ice hockey champion who grew up there, Gary Kelly, fell to his death while on holiday in Ibiza.
“It’s been a really sad time for Lochee but it’s also shown it at its best,” says Heather Henry, chair of Love Lochee community group. “For all the tragedy and the negative press, there’s an amazing community spirit. And we’ve seen that over the past month, all the love that has poured out for those poor families.”
Henry dismisses Musk in a word: “Clickbait. People have said: ‘This is not who we are.’ But you have to come here to see it.”
Because what has likewise escaped global attention are the dogged efforts by volunteers, many of them women, to take on Lochee’s undeniable challenges at street level. The colourful murals that brighten up the lanes off the high street were commissioned by Henry’s group. Kayley, who grew up in Lochee and is shopping here with her mum, says she loves them but wants something done about the sky-high rents that have resulted in empty units where once were thriving independent businesses.
At the top of the hill, a group of street drinkers huddle on a bench, but Kayley says local efforts – which include a new drop-in centre for addicts – have improved antisocial behaviour from drug users, and is full of praise for the community hub across the road.
Councillor Siobhan Tolland offers a brisk tour of community endeavours – the library offering a warm space to visit for a cuppa in winter, a food bank that is struggling to keep up with demand, the community garden with its laden apple tree: “There’s a lot of poverty in Lochee and it’s not an easy life, but [after Musk] there was a sense of ‘don’t put us down’.”
While police said that Dr Gomo’s attack was not believed to be racially motivated, her death prompted women from all communities to speak more openly about a recent shift in mood on the streets across Dundee.
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At Dundee International Women’s Centre, both service users and staff report an increase in aggressive looks, tuts and racist comments, coming from children as well as adults.
Project leader Asma Hussein works with local colleges educating young people about hate and misinformation, and describes students sharing rumours of immigrants “coming over here and raping our girls”. She plans to use ‘Dundee girl’ as a case study: “Everyone looked at the weapons, not what was going on behind it.”
And the aggression isn’t reserved for recent migrants. Back on the high street, the Polish owner of a vintage clothing shop, Joanne Wodkowska, who has lived in Scotland for 17 years, tells how her shop was attacked by kids throwing eggs and using anti-Polish slurs last year. Earlier this year, a white Scottish customer walked out of the shop telling her: “I’m not buying clothes from someone who doesn’t speak English”.
Last Saturday, an anti-immigration protest organised on the other side of Dundee attracted a few hundred demonstrators, as well as counter-protesters, but passed off with no worse than angry chanting and egg-throwing.
In Lochee, there’s a genuine desire, says Tolland, to focus on inclusivity after the events of the summer. “Lochee is a place of immigration, from the Irish who settled here to work in the mills to the New Scots who came this century.
“Some of us had a real fear that Elon Musk might spark some violence here, and it’s testimony to the people of Lochee that they didn’t take the bait. They should be proud they resisted.”
