Welcome to the New Northings Site

NORTHINGS is devoted to the arts and culture in the Highlands & Islands of Scotland. Our aims are to provide high-quality coverage of the arts, and to facilitate an on-line community dedicated to debate, discussion and nurturing the artistic health of the area.

The new website, launched in November 2010, will provide us with a greatly enhanced platform to achieve these aims. Northings began life as an on-line journal in 2003 (we took on the Northings name in 2005), carrying news, reviews, interviews and features on the work of artists in all media based in the region, artists from the region now working elsewhere, and visiting companies and events.

We look forward to hosting a much greater degree of participation on the site

Until now Northings has been hosted on the HI-Arts website, and remains part of the HI-Arts family of websites. The journal has always been editorially independent of HI-Arts, however, and opinions and views expressed are strictly those of the writers of the articles or reviews, and not of the organisation.

Our new website will emphasis that independence, and the switch to an enhanced WordPress structure will greatly increase our opportunities to develop the on-line community which has always been a key element in our mission, but one which limitations in technology have allowed only limited fulfillment.

Northings will continue to carry commissioned features and reviews from our team of contributors, but we look forward to hosting a much greater degree of participation on the site, not only though the facility to comment on material, but also the Community area – members, groups, forums and blogs – on the new Northings.com.

The new Northings.com website

But why Northings? As anyone who reads maps will know, a northing is the name given to the second half of a UK grid reference (the first bit is an easting). A trawl through various dictionaries produced some more definitions, including these:

• The difference in latitude between two positions as a result of a movement to the north.
• Progress toward the north.

Buried within the name is the appropriate implication of ‘North-things’, while the idea of “progress toward the north” not only signaled our focus on the northern part of Scotland when viewed as a whole, but also recognised the fact that our ‘home’ area actually stretches quite far south.

Northings has come a long way since our launch in June 2003, but these latest developments represent the biggest and most exciting series of changes we have yet made, and offer a huge opportunity to expand our service on diverse fronts, and for you to get involved. We look forward to the continued development of the site, and the containing flourishing of the arts in the Highlands & Islands.

Kenny Mathieson
Commissioning Editor