This work explores the heritage of the “herring girls” to propose a new landscape led masterplan. Underpinned by extensive original research , the project surfaces the heritage of the herring girls, a group of migrant women labourers who worked gutting and pickling herring between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Every year, the herring girls would travel thousands of miles down the East Coast of the UK following the migration route of the herring. As a working-class women’s history, the herring girls story has not been well told.

Focusing on Wick, the first port town along the herring route in the Scottish Highlands, this work seeks to use the heritage of these women to propose a new masterplan for the town. Through developing a strategy that celebrates the history of these women’s collective living, working and sharing of domestic labour, the project centres around three key programmatic goals – a communal dining canteen, a shared laundry yard, and spaces for shared childcare. Using an original spatial strategy, these spaces have been designed through engaging with the lost words of the herring girls that speak of their process of gutting, packing, scooping and boring.