Glasgow revived

Gavin Stamp

'pray,Sir, have you ever seen Brent- ford?' Samuel Johnson rudely inter- rupted when the economist Adam Smith was extolling the beauties of his home, Glasgow. The English remain complacently contemptuous of the cities of the north, but the conventional view of Glasgow is as ignorant as it is insulting. Glasgow is much more than the over-publicised slums of the Gorbals; it is an old and fine city, and one full of interest. Its surviving centre is now Primarily a creation of the 19th century and as a Victorian city Glasgow eclipses Man- chester, Leeds and Newcastle and is the equal of that other port, Liverpool. Glasgow is not like anywhere else. In its tibstantial legacy of 19th-century build- ings, civic, commercial and domestic, the City remained loyal to the Classical tradition — like Edinburgh, 'the Athens of the North'. But Glasgow is brown rather than grey and cannot boast a castle and an acropolis. Its peculiar character comes from its grid plan, unique in Britain, which was Possibly provided in the late 18th century by James Craig, the creator of Edinburgh New Town, and which, north of the Clyde, overlays sharply undulating land. The result Is a city centre more like those of the United States than Britain. The regularly spaced streets, lined with tall Edwardian commer- cial buildings and with sharp gradients leav- ing vistas ending up in grey sky, are reminis- cent of turn-of-the-century photographs of San Francisco. And this is appropriate, for the industrial and commercial vigour which created Victorian Glasgow was American both in its ruthlessness and in its magnificence: and these are qualities by no means extinct.

But, unlike Manchester or Chicago, Glasgow was not a new city, even though little survives today from before the 18th century. Defoe had described it as 'one of the cleanest, most beautiful, and best-built cities M Great Britain,' and there is one near-miraculous (for Scotland) survival from the Middle Ages: St Mungo's Cathedral, which stands on a remote but Splendid site to the north-east of the city centre. Splendid because the hill to the east Was made into Glasgow Necropolis, one of the most romantic Victorian cemeteries in Britain, on the top of which, on a squat, mis-proportioned column, John Knox gazes down on the church which he failed to destroy. Glasgow Cathedral deserves to be better known, and not only because it is the °illy complete mediaeval building in Scotland. It is a noble, austere and very regular structure in the 'Early English' style (sorry, Scotch, but that's the term), without the effeminacy of Salisbury.

The cathedral stands at the top end of the

ancient High Street; at the other end survive a few relics of the 17th century, like the Tron and Tolbooth steeples, and two early Georgian churches near Glasgow Green. The rest of the High Street became shabby and industrial as the city expanded to the west and south and many Glaswegians to- day do not know this oldest part of their ci- ty. There is a reason for this urban disloca- tion — and a villain, Glasgow University, which committed an act of unparallelled vandalism, even by the standards of Ox- bridge dons in the 1960s by selling its an- cient buildings to a railway company for a goods yard: a crime compounded by asking a knighted London architect to design the new Gothic Revival buildings on Gilmorehill rather than a local man.

The behaviour of the University, however, scarcely mars Glasgow's architec- tural history during the 19th century, when the city acquired a distinctive character. The commercial centre was rebuilt with both austere Greek Revival offices and warehouses and also a number of iron buildings, as advanced in their construction and architectural expression as the contem- porary warehouses of New York and Boston. At the same time substantial stone houses, terraces and tenements were built on more picturesque layouts to the west, around the new university buildings and the botanic gardens, in Hillhead and Kelvin- side. All this proud and substantial building reflected the wealth created in the city by its entrepreneurs: in commerce, heavy industry and, above all, shipbuilding. Glasgow made the ships which made the Empire, and it is still possible to cross to Asia across the Bosphorus on steam paddle steamers made in Glasgow before the Great War.

The wealth so created was not misspent or misused. Glaswegians may be tough but they are not mean. Following the passing of the City Improvement Act in 1866, Glasgow began to reform itself and, by the end of the century, was an internationally admired model of municipal government. The worst slums in the `backlands' behind the streets were cleared and new, solid stone tenement blocks built over the Clyde — it was these that were condemned themselves as slums a century later. In this work, and in the mak- ing of new streets, £4 million had been spent by the end of the century. At the same time, Glasgow's civic pride was well ex- pressed by the building of the City Chambers in George Square in the 1880s, -a magnificent, eclectic Classical pile with an astonishing marble staircase designed by William Young, a London Scot.

Nor were the personal fortunes made necessarily philistine. The Glasgow shipowners and traders bought, and bought well. They were buying French Impres- sionists long before the English and they patronised a remarkable local school of progressive painters in the 1880s and 1890s, the 'Glasgow Boys': Guthrie, Lavery, Henry, Hornel, Cameron. The results of this artistic enlightenment can be enjoyed today in the Kelvinside Art Gallery.

rr hese were Glasgow's great years, when IL painting, architecture and the decorative arts all flourished. But the most famous name associated with Glasgow is of course that of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mackintosh who, with his wife Margaret Macdonald and friends, the McNairs, formed the 'Spook School' (as Voysey call- ed them) of painters with their Symbolist- cum-art nouveau style, made Glasgow famous in Vienna, Berlin and Munich — everywhere, indeed, but in London, where Mackintosh's too contrived and badly made furniture was disapproved of.

Mackintosh is certainly Glasgow's greatest artist and one of two original geniuses in architecture who flourished there. The trouble today is that it is difficult to assess Mackintosh's real talent, for Glasgow is currently suffering from Mackintosh-mania, a cult which has graced every other wine bar and shop with Spook School graphics, has turned the School of Art into a tourist attraction and which has made the lucky owners of Mackintosh fur- niture lie low lest they are besieged by unin- vited Japanese and American architects.

Mackintosh's own sad career enhances this cult because, as his last years were spent in obscurity and poverty and illness away from Glasgow, and his designs were thought nothing of after his death in 1928, he becomes a paradigm of the misunderstood avant-garde. This is a pity, as the cult and the status given him by historians as a 'pioneer' of the Modern Movement tend to obscure his debt to his Glaswegian contemporaries and the nature of his own brilliant development of Scottish traditions. His talent is seen at its best, and most rugged, in the famous School of Art which rises above Sauchiehall Street, a building of great originality in which hard practicality was made supremely beautiful. This building, and the now disused Scotland Street School across the Clyde, seem to me to be much more impressive than his prissy, over-designed interiors that are again so much in vogue.

The other great original in Glasgow was half a century older than Mackintosh and still less celebrated than he deserves: Alex- ander Thompson, or 'Greek Thompson' as he was known because of his loyalty to austere, rational Classicism right into the 1870s when England had long fallen for the high romanticism of the Gothic Revival. Thompson designed houses, tenements, commercial buildings and churches; in them he displayed a debt to the German, Schinkel, by developing the trabeated Classical grid as a logical expression of modern warehouse and office buildings, sometimes using iron construction. Nobody else in Britain developed the Greek Revival quite so far or so imaginatively.

Thompson built much more than Mackintosh, yet comparatively little sur- vives. Twentieth-century Glasgow has not treated his work with respect. A recent biography of Thompson, by Ronald McFadzean, is appalling for its list of demolished Thompson buildings; most went in the 1960s, some as recently as 1973 and 1974. The most poignant symbol of what has happened to Glasgow is the mutilated ruin of Thompson's Caledonian Road church in the Gorbals, which was burnt out in 1965 and now stands forlorn in a muddy wilderness, overawed by tower blocks and vandalised, abandoned concrete prefabricated housing. But, even as it now is, it is still great architecture and a power- ful relic of what Glasgow once was. Another book, bsy Frank, Worsdall, The City that Disappeared: Glasgow's Demol- ished Architecture (1981), is a depressing catalogue of what else has been lost.

What went wrong? At some point in this century Glasgow lost its peculiar sense of identity. Since the Great War its history has been depressing. The heavy industry on the Clyde naturally suffered badly in the Depression; the city began to decay, but it was still essentially intact in 1956 when J. M. Reid published an excellent little book on the city. The author ended with a warning that 'there are plenty of influences abroad in the world that could destroy it:

not only those which threaten an utterly devastating sort of war but subtler ones which tend to make it lean not on its own courage and self-confidence, but on other people.' This warning was not heeded. A dominant Labour council accepted the stereotype of outsiders that Glasgow was just the Gorbals and planned to expunge the city's dark, capitalistic past and build a bright new future. The story is an all too familiar one: Newcastle, Liverpool, Brad- ford, Manchester . .

Ring roads and new roads ripped through the city while vast areas of old housing were simply bulldozed. A hundred thousand dwellings were demolished; many were real slums, many were certainly not. They were replaced in the 1950s and 1960s by high-rise public housing — tower blocks which today ring the centre of the centre like a besieging army. They are seen at their worst in the Gorbals, where almost every trace of old streets has been eliminated. The tabula rasa desired by Le Corbusier has been achieved, but the towers do not rise above green parkland which was their theoretical justification; they stand above a desolate urban negation. And this was achieved with the help of two Scots-who became knighted architects: Sir Robert Matthew and Sir Basil Spence, who designed some of the towers.

The city planning department maintains today that the high-rise housing has not proved to be the problem it is in other cities. Some towers near the city centre have a waiting list. Possibly Glaswegians were able to cope with the towers as they were us- ed to living in the four- or five-storey Vic- torian tenements, unlike the unfortunate proletariat in English cities, but the unloved grimness of many of the housing estates is clear to see and, as elsewhere, socialism has created a great and visible divide between the middle and working classes. In the 19th century both lived in what was essentially the same type of building; today the middle classes live in houses while so many of the working classes live in towers. And two- thirds of the housing in Glasgow is council- owned. It must be stressed that the mistakes in public housing were not peculiar to Glasgow, but Glasgow went higher than elsewhere — to 24 and 30 storeys, and the Red Road flats were the tallest in Europe. Glasgow now has the melancholy distinc- tion of having the grimmest public housing .outside Eastern Europe.

This terrible period is now over. As elsewhere, public attitudes changed in the 1970s and a shortage of money put paid to further destructive schemes. The demoli- tions have stopped; road plans remain on paper — though they have still done their worst by blighting whole areas in advance. In the Woodside area in the mid-1970s, the city responded to local pressure and initiated a rehabilitation scheme which has encouraged restoration work elsewhere. Plans for filling in the gaps in the city centre — the desert north of Queen Street Station and the site of the fine and stupidly demolished St Enoch Hotel and station — are more reassuring than they would have been a decade ago. The standard of new building is much improved. The knighted architects have passed on.

Glasgow now seems to have recovered its pride, its spirit, its individuality, and the city looks much better than it did a few years back. It can now be seen that central Glasgow survived the 1960s in better shape than might have been feared. Indeed, the city centre can now boast a larger and more intact concentration of 19th-centurY buildings than any other city in Britain. Most old buildings are no longer neglected but are being restored, converted and clean- ed. Black is giving way to grey and brown. (But please do not clean the ancient stones of the cathedral. Now the air is free of smoke, it is being slowly washed by the rain.) Buchanan Street and Sauchiehall Street have been made pedestrian shopPing precincts. An encouraging number of books on Glasgow's history and buildings are now on sale (but the best, Architecture of Glasgow by Andor Gomme and David Walker [1968], with splendid photographs, is now out of print). All this demonstrates a change of heart. It also shows a canny realism. Glasgow has massive unemployment and the heavy In- dustries which made its Victorian fortunes will never return. If the city is to survive, must exploit its resources and find new sources of income. Glasgow's resources are its buildings and its art collections, so the city is actively promoting conferences and tourism.

rr hree recent artistic ventures justifY 1 optimism and suggest a future for Glasgow as a cultural centre. The first was establishing a home for Scottish Opera. Edinburgh has been host to its Festival every year since 1947 but still has found neither the money nor the will to build an opera house; Glasgow has. The Theatre Royal, a late Victorian theatre by C. J. Phipps, was bought from Scottish Televi- sion and the building restored and con- verted by Derek Sugden of Arup Associates. Not only was this a model restoration, it was a model project financially. Of the £3 million eventually required, one-third came from the Government and two-thirds was raised from business and private individuals. Glaswegians are not mean. The Theatre Royal reopened in 1975 and has been a huge success; only the high operating costs re- main a problem for Scottish Opera. Fur- thermore, the establishment of Scottish Opera here has revitalised an area on the northern edge of the city centre. Next door stands Cowcaddens Church, a Renaissance style building of 1872 which closes the vista up Hope Street. This disused and once doomed building is to be restored as 3 studio theatre for Scottish Opera. And now the Royal Scottish Academy of Music is to errect a new building on a nearby site. BY the mid-1990s, this area may be the cultural heart of Glasgow.

Secondly, there was the opening of the new Hunterian Museum in 1980 to displaY the art collections owned by the UniversitY of Glasgow. True to form, the University threatened to sell its marvellous Whistlers to pay for this building, but now they and much work by Mackintosh can at last be seen by the public. I only wish that the building was rather better: it looks like an annexe to the towering, lumpish textured concrete university library designed by the same architects, William Whitfield Partners of London. Part of the museum is a shrine to the Mackintosh cult and one about which I have further reservations. Mackintosh liv- ed nearby in a house at the end of a terrace. Its remarkable contents were given in 1945 to and the house bought by the University in 1945. Needless to say the University demolished it in 1963, ostensibly as necessitated by their development plans but the site remains empty. The interiors have been reconstructed, not wholly faithfully, in an annexe to the new Hunterian, so that Mackintosh's windows now appear in con- crete walls and the front door of the house is seven feet above the ground — with no steps. But 1 suppose this coy travesty is bet- ter than nothing.

Then, last but not least, there is the Bur- rell Collection. Sir William Burrell was a Glasgow shipowner and a great collector who had an eye for real quality as well as for a bargain. In 1944 he presented his astonishingly rich collection of paintings, tapestries and objets d'art to the city but kept adding to the eight thousand odd items until he died in 1958 at the age of 96. Only after his death could the difficulties of his bequest be resolved and a museum built on °Pen land near Pollock House given to the City in 1967. In 1972 a competition was held for the design of the new museum building: a competition which, for once, produced an eminently satisfactory result. It was won by outsiders: Barry Gasson and John Meunie. In the event it was Gasson who took on the Job and his building has now been finished at a cost of £20 million — rather more than the £450,000 left by Burrell in 1944. Half of this money is coming from the Govern- ment.

The Burrell Museum is quite unlike any other museum building in Britain: a large, irregular barn of red sandstone and glass. The internal spaces are varied but simple Without being stark, and well adapted for display. Glass walls look out to trees and grass, yet central Glasgow and the Gorbals are only three miles away. In the large cen- tral hall proudly stands the Warwick Vase, recently bought by the Burrell Trustees. Burrell was a collector rare in Britain in this century but more common in the United

tates; the design and scale of the museum building seem to reflect that fact. The building of such a museum in these s8traitened times is a remarkable event. The

urrell Museum is unusual and prodigious !Doth in conception and ambition, but that Is typical of Glasgow. When it opens in Oc- tober and when many of Burrell's long hid- den treasures are open to the public, a visit so this great city will be obligatory for any Se this aesthete. Edinburgh had better Watch out.