Glasgow Read Free

were on their uppers and there was a feeling that its future was bleak. It was in a dark, dank, menacing place which the rain, which seemed to start as soon as you reached Harthill, midpoint on the M8 between Edinburgh and Glasgow, did nothing to temper. The news was full of strikes and closures, empty order books and unemployment. The Clyde, which had been as noisy as a nursery, fell quiet as one yard after another shut its gates. The Tories, led by Margaret Thatcher, were in power and impervious to the protests of left-leaning Scots. (Consequently, when Thatcherdied in 2013 some Glaswegians regretted no statue had been erected to her so that they could tear it down, while others held street parties.) In 1981 I attended the launch for a novel at the Third Eye Centre – the predecessor of the Centre for Contemporary Arts – in Sauchiehall Street. The novel was Lanark by Alasdair Gray. In hindsight, it was one of those rare moments when a work of art is the agent for change. Ten years and more in the writing, it marked Gray’s debut. Part of Lanark is autobiographical, following its author’s upbringing in the 1930s and 1940s initially in a tenement in Bridgeton then in Riddrie, part of the first tier of what’s known as the three-tiered Addison Act. Unlike the two tiers that were to follow it, people were not piled on top of one another but were placed in low-density, semi-detached houses with gardens.
    Duncan Thaw, Gray’s hero, progresses through school to art college, where he encounters a fellow student called Kenneth McAlpin, who has a moustache – a sure sign of social superiority – and lives in Bearsden, which is as alien to Duncan as Marseilles. On a morning ramble he and McAlpin venture into Cowcaddens to do some drawing. At the top of a hill they look across the city.
    Travelling patches of sunlight went from ridge to ridge, making a hump of tenements gleam against the dark towers of the city chambers, silhouetting the cupolas of the Royal Infirmary against the tomb-glittering spine of the Necropolis. ‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ said McAlpin. ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?’ ‘Because nobody imagines living here,’ said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, ‘If you want to explain that I’ll certainly listen.’
    What follows is an impassioned analysis of why Glasgow is not comparable to great cultural centres such as Florence, Paris, London and New York, to all of which strangers can relate because they’ve ‘already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films’. In contrast, Glasgow is by and large invisible, existing only as a music-hall song – presumably the drunks’ anthem, ‘I belong to Glasgow’ – and a few bad novels, one of which is doubtless No Mean City . ‘What is Glasgow to most of us?’ asks Thaw/Gray. ‘A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That’s all. No, I’m wrong, there’s also the cinema and library.’
    The period in which this scene is set is the mid-1950s, when Glasgow was undoubtedly in the doldrums and suffering from what looked like terminal decay. What used to be the place which made anything that was required to carry you from cradle to grave was so no longer, as cheap goods from the Far East saturated the market and caused localcompanies to bring down the shutters. Thaw’s mission, and that of Gray, his creator, is through paint and print ‘to give Glasgow a more imaginative life’. The irony was that when Lanark appeared many of the sentiments expressed in its pages were interpreted as a comment on the city as it stood at that moment. And to a degree that was understandable. Glasgow had yet to export a positive identity; it was still mired in many observers’ minds in a macho past where brawn triumphed over brain. It was of course a highly misleading image,