Glasgow Read Free Page B

Festival, however, was located not in a park but on a 100-acre site in what had been Prince’s Dock on the south bank of the Clyde. Nearly four and a half million people attended its attractions. Two years thereafter came Glasgow’s reign as European City of Culture, the third such place, after Athens and Florence no less, to hold that title. Even ten years earlier that would have been – pace Gray’s Lanark – unthinkable and to many observers, especially residents of Edinburgh, the ‘Festival City’, it still was. Though some criticised the organisers for paying too little attention to Glasgow’s indigenous art and artists, there is no doubt that its tenure as City of Culture raised its profile and radically altered attitudes towards it. ‘Glasgow used to be perceived as a violent post-industrial city and now it is celebrated as a creative and cultural centre of European importance,’ was the judgement of Robert Palmer, who orchestrated the year-long programme of events. His assertion is borne out by many studies which have all shown that Glasgow 1990 had a dramatic impact in building city confidence. Moreover, had it not happened it is unlikely that the 2014 Commonwealth Games would have been given to Glasgow.
    But the resilience of an unsavoury image – however misrepresentative – ought not to be underestimated. Nor is there any point in drawing curtains on a past that was undoubtedly grim. Countless impoverished Glaswegians lived in squalid, overcrowded, insanitary conditions and were as a consequence thrust into behaviour which we now deemantisocial. Infant mortality rates were on a par with those in the Third World and any men who reached three score and ten years, as the psalmist insisted was the norm, must have been fitness fanatics or have led very careful and prosperous lives. Districts like the Gorbals and Townhead were barely fit for human habitation and those who had the wherewithal escaped as fast as they could.
    One such was Ralph Glasser. The son of immigrant Jews from Russia, Glasser grew up in the Gorbals between the wars. After years of night study, he won a scholarship to Oxford, to take up which he had to cycle hundreds of miles. When I met him many years later, he looked what he was: an eminent scholar and author, a psychologist and an economist. But as he spoke I could tell by his accent immediately where he came from. In his book Growing Up in the Gorbals , an unvarnished account of his childhood first published in 1986, Glasser relates how he left school when he was about eleven to work in a garment factory. His ‘only true home’ was the Mitchell Library, which allowed him to read the gamut of literature or philosophy and to dream of a brighter future. Yet as his career developed, and as he travelled around the world, he knew that while he might have ‘escaped’ the Gorbals and Glasgow, he was not free of them, and never would be. As a young man he was desperate to leave but as he grew older he began to appreciate the ‘presiding genius’ of his birthplace and that to have thought of it as a ‘malign influence’ was wrong.
    In any case, on revisiting the city, Glasser soon discovered that it had changed utterly. In A Gorbals Legacy (2000), he wrote,
    Now, even the physical Gorbals I knew has been destroyed, including much of the old street plan. When I go back it is almost impossible to identify the ground where former landmarks stood – Gorbals Cross and the darkly sculptured monument named after it, bearing under a clock the City of Glasgow arms and the motto ‘Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word’, and stone benches on its walls where men in mufflers and cloth caps gathered on Saturday mornings to smoke and talk about the world; Cumberland Street railway bridge with its broad arches, workshop caverns for upholsterers, metal workers, machine shops; and the old Main Street library. On a visit