INTRODUCTION
Glasgow Despite Them
AS MOUNTAINS CAN be seen as the supreme work of nature, so is the city the greatest work of human geology, the high point of social and cultural evolution. For the Greeks and Romans the polis was the social ideal and the citizen its representative. For the early and later Christians, Heaven was a city, and in the Renaissance the city-state embodied the humanistic strivings of the era. For the Victorians too, despite the development of rural romanticism, civic pride was a central driving force in their achievements.
A great city (the Germans use the term Weltstadt) is qualitatively different from a small one: a critical mass is needed to transform the parochial into the cosmopolitan - though other things are needed too. Not every big city is a Weltstadt, indeed most are not. A Weltstadt is one which has had a clear impact on world history, and where the main issues of its epoch - intellectual, social and political - have been posed. James Watt's invention here of the steam engine and the launching of the industrialisation and urbanisation of the Western world alone would make Glasgow a Weltstadt. But we should not forget that, though now small on the city scale, at the beginning of the 20th century, when it produced two British Prime Ministers (Bonar Law and Campbell-Bannerman), Glasgow was in the top ten metropolises in Europe. Over one million people then lived in the Second City of the Empire. The former Second City may now only be fourth in the United Kingdom after Birmingham and Manchester; but they were never world cities. Edinburgh, however, was - though that was back in the 18th century.
I appreciated Glasgow - though not uncritically - before it was Miles Better. I moved here over 40 years ago when it appeared as if the city was dying. Deindustrialisation had begun, as had depopulation. The city had a very negative image and even amongst its own population low civic esteem was prevalent. The buildings were still being indiscriminately flattened and I recall that there were only a handful of them being stone-cleaned and restored. The architecture (mainly in its Victorian expressions) fascinated me. The city's skyline against the ever-varying cloud patterns of its dominant southwesterlies created drama that constantly drew me onto the city street. I grew to appreciate the blue-black sky against the multistorey blocks of the Red Road, dawn emerging behind the Necropolis in winter, and Park Circus glowing on a summer's evening, as much as I did a Cuillin sunset, or morning on the winter plateau of the Cairngorms.
The culture of Glasgow also attracted me, and not just in the availability of theatre and art, things belatedly recognised when Glasgow became European City of Culture in 1990 and City of Architecture in 1999. Glasgow is probably the only place in Britain where, even imperfectly, there is a working-class cultural dominance, which constantly refers back to itself and its own history rather than to the rural hinterland of its origins, as the working-class culture of Aberdeen, for example, tends to do. This is not to exaggerate and elevate the consciousness of the Glasgow workers to something greater than it is or was, but still this is a city dominated by its working class and the history of their organisations and struggles. Often this is forgotten and sterrheid schmaltz is passed off as Glasgow working-class culture.
'The glory of Glasgow is in what the unknown working-class districts contain,' said James Hamilton Muir in Glasgow in 1901, written to mark the Empire Exhibition of that year, when the city was at its apogee. Although that book did not quite live up to its promise of revealing these glories, I take its comment as my starting point.
Walking Through Glasgow's Industrial Past looks at the development of some of the main working-class areas of Glasgow from their origins till the time when Glasgow was a world city, and follows their subsequent evolution. Most of these areas were independent communities, swallowed up by Glasgow's growth and to some extent left behind by its decline, and to the familiar pattern of inner-city decay. Most, too, still retain their local identities. I have chosen areas that have a story to tell in relation to the history of the Glasgow working class; its industries, struggles, organisations and notable personalities. In addition I am convinced that the social significance of areas like Govan, Bridgeton and Springburn, along with the other inner-city districts treated in this work, is in many cases matched by their little-known historical and architectural heritage.
The experience of urban rambling is sadly underrated, and mainly limited to the obvious tourist cities. This was not always the case: before 1950, exploration in our industrial cities was more widespread. In Glasgow, for example, there are many books from half a century ago and more, giving its inhabitants tips about, and guides to, places to walk. James Cowan's From Glasgow's Treasure Chest (1933) is an example of a genre that goes back at least to John Tweed's Guide to Glasgow and the Clyde of 1872. However, the rise of the motor car - and possibly the decline of civic pride in our industrial cities which have undergone painful transformation in the last half century as industry and population moved out - seemed to have all but killed off this tradition of urban walking, and writing about urban walking. With the urban renaissance going on around us in our increasingly post-industrial cities, including Glasgow, there are signs of a welcome reinvention of this tradition.
Glasgow, like many big cities, resembles a series of medium-sized towns, whose inhabitants overlap in the city centre, or in places such as football grounds. Even more so in the days when industries were identified with areas, and inhabitants of specific areas tended to work locally. This multiplicity of apparent parochialisms is overlain, however, with a very strong sense of city identity. Whether from Park-head or Partick, the ruling motto is 'Glasgow belongs to me' - and there are no no-go areas for the Glasgow working class. In Edinburgh, on the other hand, the city centre belongs to the middle classes and to the tourists, the working class remaining ghettoed in the outer districts. I recall being in Rogano's, one of Glasgow's top restaurants, when a punter entered, and, on discovering the establishment did not sell Tennents lager, left, but with the dismissive comment to the waiter that 'Ye could dae wi a band in here, son, tae liven things up'. The restaurant was at fault, not him.
Dr Johnson, when he visited Scotland in the mid-18th century, said that most Scots knew as little of the Highlands as they did of Borneo. The same might be said today about Glasgow, not only of Glasgow's increasing tourist traffic, but of many of its own inhabitants - especially its suburban ones. They may well be familiar with the West End, or the city centre and Merchant City, but with little else. The city limits are the new Borneo, ignored, or driven through at speed. Johnson also said of the Highlanders, 'All they have left is their language and their poverty,' and many might be tempted to repeat this of Govan or Bridgeton today. It was not true for the Highlanders 200 years ago, but Johnson's intellectual limitations prevented him seeing this, and neither is it true for the inhabitants of Glasgow's Victorian and Edwardian industrial areas today. TC Smout, a historian I admire, could print a photograph of Ibrox Stadium in 1921 in his Century of the Scottish People, and caption it 'Ibrox in its Urban Desert'. One would have to enquire what Smout knew of Govan when he wrote this. He was clearly ignorant of Govan's Gaelic Choir, its 250-yearold Govan Fair, or its unique collection of incised medieval sculpture in Govan Old Kirk. Govan, or Bridgeton, or Springburn - all these working-class areas had choirs, clubs, bands, societies and a richer cultural life, one would say without hesitation, than many a suburban development.
Finding this world can be adventurous. While much can be assimilated from reading, it is by wandering around on foot you get a feel for a place. Walter Benjamin wrote of his urban rambles in inter-war Paris that he was 'botanising the asphalt'. I see my urban walking as 'politicising the pavements'. There is an undeniable edge to walking in Glasgow because of the proximity of different social classes in certain borderlands. There are places where you can turn left or right from pub, shop, café - even a tenement close - and find yourself in a seemingly different world. In one direction you can be somewhere where apartments cost £500,000 and in another direction, within a few steps, nothing seems to cost more than £1. Redevelopment has created areas where the two worlds are intermingled, without apparently fusing, as for example in Calton. It is in areas like this that you realise the accuracy of what Baudelaire, a dedicated urban walker, said: 'What are the dangers of the forest and the prairie compared with the daily shocks and conflicts of civilisation?' In an age of increasing painting-by-numbers travel, the urban edge has a claim to being one of the remaining frontiers.
In most areas though, urban geography separates, rather than mingles, social classes. Walking about, you see how urban planners and consumer 'choice' have largely segregated working-class from middle-class areas by a series of rivers, canals,...
