All you need to know and more
Gavin Stamp
THE BUILDINGS OF SCOTLAND: GLASGOW by Elizabeth Williamson, Anne Riches and Malcolm Higgs
Viking, f20, pp. 701
They used to appear at least once a year, but these days the publication of a
new `Pevsner' is an event worth celebrat- ing. I still think of these essential architectural guides by their founder's name, although the late eponymous Sir Nikolaus only covered England. And that still makes a difference. Pevsner may have had many faults — prejudice and the sins of omission above all — but he got on with the job and managed to cover every English county in his lifetime, so that his basic inventories, inspired by the Dehio guides to his native Germany, could be expanded and revised by others — now in the new enlarged format that the pub- lishers have tiresomely imposed to spoil the uniformity of the library shelf. But the Celtic Fringes have not been so fortunate. The completion of the Buildings of Ireland series is a pious hope and the Buildings of Wales a distant prospect. The Buildings of Scotland, however, seems a slightly more realistic proposition, which is as it should be as there is so much fine architecture in that part of the British Isles.
Hot on the heels of the excellent fat volume on Edinburgh comes an equally bulky tribute to what can no longer be regarded as the 'Second City', nicely timed to coincide with its year as European City of Culture, 1990. But, ungrateful as it may seem, it is necessary to ask whether this book was worth waiting for because Glas- gow has been already very well served with architectual guides. Above all there is The Architecture of Glasgow by Andor Gomme and David Walker, (Lund Humphries, £30, £14.95) one of the most handsome architecture books published in recent years, with magnificent dark and grainy photographs (typically, in the first edition only) which do full justice to the hard, sublime grandeur of the Victorian and Edwardian city. Pevsner himself contri- buted an introduction to the first edition of 1968 in which he described the book as `an eleventh-hour warning', for Glasgow was then in the throes of its lunatic utopian self-destructive mania from which it has since, largely, recovered.
But Gomme and Walker is both a portrait of a city and a reference book, not one to take around. On my first visit 22 years ago I carried a copy of Glasgow at a Glance by Andrew MacLaren Young and A. M. Doak. First published in 1965, this little paperback (Robert Hale, £4.95) re- mains the perfect model of an architectural guide, with basic information given about a couple of hundred buildings, each illus- trated with a small photograph which, together with clearly numbered maps, en- ables the newcomer to find his objectives. More recently, this most useful format has been expanded in Central Glasgow by Charles McKean, David Walker and Frank Arneil Walker. This forms part of a series of architectural guides edited. by Mr McKean and published by the Royal Incor- poration of Architects in Scotland. It is a series which, in truth, is an indictment of the dilatoriness of the Buildings of Scot- land project, for not only are the RIAS volumes appearing more frequently and already cover much more of the country, but they more closely approximate to Pevsner's original vision: portable, useful basic guides to buildings worth seeing.
So does the Viking volume have any- thing extra to offer? The answer is, of course, yes, for the editor of the Buildings of Scotland, Colin McWilliam, who died last year, made the volumes into valuable repositories of comprehensive rather than partial information. Glasgow is no excep- tion, for it contains a huge amount of research, much of which is not available anywhere else, in a readable and accessible form. There are no sins of omission here: that Stalinist censorship of buildings of unfashionable date or of immoral style of which Pevsner was often guilty. Almost everything worth looking at (as well as many things best avoided) gets in. The book is, in short, essential. It is still a guide, albeit a heavy one to carry. The material is sensibly organised and well indexed, while a particular boon is the provision of clearly drawn town plans covering each sector of the city — some- thing which early Pevsners needed and conspicuously lacked. It also improves on earlier volumes in other respects. The text is well and succinctly written, with none of those absurdly prolix descriptions of mediocre modern buildings which Pevsner or his brain-washed acolytes approved of on ideological grounds alone.
But, fortunately, the authors — all English, curiously enough — do have opinions and are not mere cataloguers. They do not like the new Scottish Exhibi- tion Centre: 'this large and unpreposses- sing shed sits in acres of tarmac car park. . .', nor another prominent monu- ment of the new commercial Glasgow promoted by the District Council, the St Enoch Centre: `Only its vastness, its novelty as the largest such structure in Europe. . . and its train-shed aesthetic.. . seem worth remarking on.' Even worse is the `gilt-glazed Britoil monster' which `squats in ungainly fashion on polished granite legs.' I am only sorry nothing rude is said about the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, a building of a repulsive orange-pink brick which is the principal officially sponsored insult to the grain and texture of the Glasgow grid plan. Indeed, close inspection of this volume shows that, for all the 'Glasgow's Miles Better' puffs, this great city has yet fully to recover its soul and that its planners have not yet really learned from their dreadful mistakes of recent decades.
Yet there is lots left, which is why even at its steep price this latest Pevsner must be bought (Middlesex, back in 1951, cost 3/6d.) It is not a slim volume: 700 pages devoted to but one city ought to convince both blind Scottish cynics as well as provin- cial untravelled Englishmen that Glasgow ought to be taken very seriously, even when all the hype of the Year of Culture is past. It is a city that can boast not only the works of those two celebrated independent geniuses, 'Greek' Thomson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, but also magnificent buildings by David Hamilton, Charles Wis- Ion, J. J. Burnet, James Salmon, James Miller and Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, to list a few more local heroes, as well as megalo- maniac examples of comprehensive re- development and road building that may be compared instructively with the achievements of the late President Ceausescu.
But there are also buildings in Scotland worth looking at outside Glasgow, and even outside Edinburgh, Lothian and Fife — the areas covered by the other three volumes published by Penguin. Unfortu- nately, the appearance of this Glasgow volume marks the end of the generous financial help given to the Buildings of Scotland by the National Trust for Scotland
and it is clear that the series has reached a moment of crisis. It must go on: to leave
Scotland only partially Pevsnerised would be a betrayal of the vision of the late Sir Nikolaus and of the high standards of the late Colin McWilliam. For how can Scot- tish nationalism be taken seriously if only the Buildings of England remains com- plete?
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