From Small Acorns…

We are proud to launch a truly special range of new merchandise coming to GWL in time to meet your Christmas giving (or receiving!) dreams, made from wood from the Glasgow Suffrage Oak.

The items will be limited editions, from chopping boards and coasters to book marks and keyrings, and there will be something for every price range, available in the GWL shop from Tuesday 13^th December, with online sales of any remaining items after the festive holidays.

Here is the Suffrage Oak story, in three chapters.

 (i)

The Suffrage Oak was planted on Kelvin Way in Glasgow’s West End by Louisa Lumsdenon behalf of Suffrage organisations on 20 April 1918, to commemorate the right to vote being granted to some women in February 1918, after decades of determined campaigning. On International Women’s Day 1995, the Women’s Committee of Glasgow City Council erected a plaque beside the tree which acknowledge its history.

(ii)

In 2015 Glasgow Women’s Library nominated the Suffrage Oak to be named Scotland’s Tree of the Year in an annual national competition run by the Woodland Trust. The Suffrage Oak won, and the award was presented to representatives from Glasgow Women’s Library at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh on 27 October 2015.

(iii)

In October 2017 the Suffrage Oak was badly damaged by Storm Ophelia, losing around 30% of its canopy and suffering a large tear to its trunk. To save the tree, and protect the public, Glasgow City Council Tree Surgeons worked to reduce its height and rebalance the canopy. The tree’s survival was touch and go. Glasgow Women’s Library requested the resulting oak off-cuts, left them to season, and vowed to make them into beautiful and enduring objects that would both celebrate Suffrage campaigners and support its own work as the UK’s sole Accredited Museum dedicated to women’s history.

Today, the Suffrage Oak is thriving once again on Kelvin Way. A positive symbol of resolve, hope, celebration and activism in the past, present and into the future.

We are thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with Glasgow School of Art graduate, Annie Graham (MLitt Sculpture), Winner of the 2021 Sustainability Degree Show Prize who has created this limited range of products that are inspired by and use wood from the Suffrage Oak. In Annie’s words,

‘I’m a self-taught woodworker and have a very playful approach to making. I’m heavily inspired by the mechanisms of wooden toys and love to dismantle stereotypes in woodwork and construction. In using such a significant material such as the Suffrage Oak I hope to stimulate a more mindful consideration of the not-so ‘neutral’ materiality of wood’.