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but it persisted and proved remarkably durable. Tourists were few and many of those who did come arrived with their prejudices as part of their luggage.
    One welcome counterpoint to the prevailing view was offered in 1983 by the acerbic American novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, whom few tourist boards would adopt as a copywriter. Ostensibly following Britain’s coastline, he alighted in Glasgow after sojourning in Troubles-torn Belfast, an experience he was relieved to put behind him. In contrast, Theroux, much to his surprise, found Glasgow ‘peaceful, even pretty’. ‘The slums were gone, the buildings washed of their soot; the city looked dignified – no barricades, no scorchings. Well, I had just struggled ashore from that island of antiquated passions.’ Coincidentally, 1983 proved to be an annus mirabilis for the city, for it was in that year that the ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ campaign was launched. Inspired by ‘I ♥ New York’, dreamed up six years earlier to encourage tourists to visit the Big Apple, which had become a muggers’ playground, it was initially greeted with scepticism by many wags who asked, ‘Miles better than what?’ What Glasgow has never lacked, however, are people to hymn it and the slights and criticisms were brushed off with the contempt a heifer shows to ticks. The slogan soon entered the bloodstream and there was a discernible improvement in the mood of the natives and a measurable influx of visitors keen to see what all the fuss was about.
    High on the list of the attractions they wanted to visit was the Burrell Collection, which opened the same year. It had been amassed by Sir William Burrell, scion of a family whose business was in shipping. When his father, also named William, died, William Junior and his brother George took over. Through astute buying and selling of their merchant fleets, the brothers amassed considerable fortunes. When in 1916 they finally disposed of their assets, Sir William was able to devote himself to building up his art collection, filling his Berwickshire castle with an extraordinary collection of paintings, sculptures, ceramics, carpets, tapestries, glassware, needlework and artefacts from around the globe. In the 1930s, he decided that he would like it all to be housed under one roof held in public ownership. It is said that he first offered it to the Tate Gallery, London, but it spurned the opportunity for lack of space. In 1944, Burrell handed it over to Glasgow.But worried about the damaging effects of the former Dear Green Place’s polluted air on his precious objects he quixotically stipulated that it must be housed on a site not less than sixteen miles from Wellington’s statue – the one invariably decorated with a traffic cone – in Royal Exchange Square, and not more than four miles from Killearn, Stirlingshire. In 1963, five years after their benefactor’s death, the Burrell trustees agreed to allow the collection to be housed in a building within the Pollok estate, a mere three miles south of the city centre. An international competition was announced to find architects to design a building specifically to contain Burrell’s gallimaufry. It was finally opened by the Queen in 1983 to a thunderclap of applause.
    The Burrell was a signal that Glasgow was emerging from its begrimed past. Another was the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988. The words ‘garden’ and ‘Glasgow’, like ‘cuisine’ and ‘Mexico’, had rarely been spied in the same sentence. Yet again this was a travesty of the truth, for where else is called the Dear Green Place? Indeed, Glasgow has what might be termed an embarrassment of parks and gardens, including Kelvingrove Park, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hosted three major exhibitions, and the Botanic Gardens, among whose treasures is a fine collection of exotic orchids. The Garden