Pure Dead Brillyant
Glasgow
“A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.”
- William Henry Davies
As we flew north from Stansted, the ground got whiter and whiter, first with frost and then with snow. This was not just on the higher ground but in the valleys, too. When I arrived in Glasgow, a warning on the local radio said that anyone travelling in these weather conditions should take a shovel, blankets, sleeping bag, extra clothing (including a hat, scarf and gloves), 24-hour supply of food and drink, de-icer, rock salt, torch (with spare batteries), safety triangle, snow chains, tow rope, spare petrol, first aid kit and jump leads. I fear that I might have looked a bit of a tit on the number 77 bus into town.
I should point out that this is my very favourite bus route, the fact that it has precisely no competition at all for the title does help, but it’s still my favourite. First of all it takes you through Renfrew, a Royal Borough, the Cradle of the Stewarts, according to, well, according to everything you ever look at that has anything to do with Renfrew: every sign and public building and tourist guide. One of the Stewarts was on the bus with me for a while, I knew that he was a Stewart because he had the name tattooed on his neck. He was dressed entirely in sportswear but really didn’t look as though he needed to be. His only possible connection with sports being via a sixty-inch TV. He looked about forty, so was probably twenty-six, and walked with a stick; one of those aluminium ones that you get from the hospital. He had teeth like a mouthful of Sugar Puffs and didn’t look as though a balanced meal had been a feature of his life for some considerable time, if ever. He had joined the bus at the stop just by a shop called CASH 4 CLOTHES. I had visions of people emerging naked but clutching bundles of fivers. Stewart stayed on the bus past TAN TAN TAN, the spray tan centre, even though he really could have done with popping off at that point as he was the colour of a candle.
We trundled along past the low blocks of flats and parades of shops until, suddenly, the vista opened up to pleasant villas and Robertson Park. We didn’t go into the centre of Renfrew, which I’m told is very pleasant, instead we headed towards the Braehead Shopping Centre, which isn’t. This was Stewart’s destination, acres of soulless shopping in vast warehouses and places to eat with admittedly wonderful names such as the Tony Macaroni Italian restaurant, Hattie Chapati Indian takeaway, Lisa’s Pizzas and the Fenella Paella Tapas Bar, only some of which I’ve made up. Speaking of places to eat, I have seen plenty of 24-hour MacDonald’s restaurants, not from the inside, but I’ve seen them. This was the first, and to date only, place where I came across a 24-hour, drive-thru Krispy Kreme doughnut shop. How desperate can you be for a doughnut at 3:42 am? I like a cake but I’ve managed to live my whole life without this level of fried dough confection availability.
Then we disappeared into a tunnel under the Clyde and emerged into Thornwood and Partick with its little independent shops. I don’t want to mislead you into thinking that these are boutiques selling high-priced shortbread or prints of Highland cattle. These are shops occupying the ground floor of four-story tenement buildings and selling whatever they think people might need, often in strange combinations: handbags and gents’ haircuts in one, cakes and bike repairs in another. One of those long rows of shops where you can buy all sorts of things: a pizza; a carpet; some fireworks; or a bath. These shops stretch for about a mile before surprising you by disappearing and being replaced by the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery and the massive Kelvingrove Park.
On one visit to Glasgow I had asked a stranger in the street what I should see if I only had an hour in the city. He had said the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, thereby proving that you can trust strangers.
In 1888 there had been an International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry in Kelvingrove Park. It was opened by the Prince of Wales on the 8th May and ran until the November, by which time it was far too cold to be an exhibitionist. Most of the exhibitions were housed in temporary wooden structures but the 170-foot-high dome at the centre of the main building was constructed by covering an enormous iron frame with galvanised sheets. This description does little to explain the grandeur of the ornate cross between St Peters Basilica and the Taj Mahal which stood at the centre of the exhibition.
Over five million people visited the exhibitions as well as watching Highland games and football matches and riding in a captive hot air balloon. At the end of the exhibition one of the exhibitors, Doulton and Company (now Royal Doulton) presented Glasgow with a huge terracotta fountain, it was 46 feet high and had a diameter of 70 feet. It stayed in the park for a couple of years before moving to Glasgow Green and a position, more or less, where it still sits. It is, even now, the largest of its type anywhere in the world. The exhibition was massively successful and it made a huge profit, which was used to build the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery.
When you look at the outside of the museum today, it is obvious that the city was flush with cash when they commissioned it and, perhaps, still a little bit drunk.
“What is it you’re after?” The architect, John Simpson, not the one who reads the news, asked.
“Somethin’ big, somethin’ pure, dead brillyant.” The good people of Glasgow had told him.
“I’d like to use red sandstone for the outside.” John told them.
“Aye, we’ve got loads, you fill yer boots big man.” They replied.
“And I’m crazy for the Spanish baroque.” He might have said.
“You listen to whatever youse like while ye build it, son.”
“And I want towers and minarets and a huge organ in the middle.” John said, getting a bit wild-eyed by now.
They probably started to shoo him out of the room at about this point but he went ahead and built the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery and it is truly stunning both inside and out. Inside is all pale stone and tigers and Spitfires and armour and paintings. Really, it’s a grand place, take a stranger’s advice, visit it as soon as you can.
One of my favourite paintings in the whole place is A View of Glasgow and the Cathedral painted around 1841 by John Houston (not the film director) and I promised that if I ever had another hour free in Glasgow, I’d go and see where he painted that view. For now I headed out of the museum and down Sauchiehall Street, it’s a mile and a half long and at this end is wide and tree-lined with imposing white buildings either side but, as it reaches the city centre, it becomes a street pretty much like any other shopping street in any other city these days with dozens of coffee shops and chain retailers, albeit with rather more sandstone if you care to glance up above the ground floor.
Glasgow does not get the press it deserves. It grew up around shipbuilding and heavy industry and so had all of the conditions that that entailed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Then it suffered from the decline of those industries in the decades that followed the end of the Second World War. That meant that the city was known for hard-working and hard-drinking men with largely impenetrable accents bringing up families without too much spare cash available and then for unemployment and no cash at all. At least that’s the view from a distance with just the TV and the newspapers as a guide. Nothing could be further from the truth, it is far more attractive and welcoming than you might imagine.
It is a place built on a grand scale with wide shopping streets lined with beautiful sandstone buildings, here in Glasgow a large proportion of what we see today was built during its Victorian heyday as the Second City of the Empire. As Mark Mason points out in Move Along, Please, the city is built on a grid system, giving it an American feel. That’s true and it often doubles as an American city in movies as bringing bits of Glasgow to a halt is easier than popping back to 1950’s New York and filming there. If you watch the ticker tape parade in the fifth Indiana Jones film, for instance, you’re watching Glasgow. The red and blonde sandstone of the buildings in the city centre lay hidden under the black soot of industry for much of their life but they are now clean and bright.
Glasgow today is a place of pavement cafes and sparkling shop fronts. H.V Morton said that the streets were full of light and life and I can’t disagree with him despite the fact that Glasgow has had some rough times since he visited in the 1920s, In Search of Scotland. If signs of less prosperous times have been wiped from the buildings, they are still evident in some of the people clearly sleeping rough in the city. Many of them with dead, staring eyes and limbs lost to addiction. The real hard-drinking may have had its day but there are still plenty of people outside pubs with those same eyes, pulling deeply on hand-rolled cigarettes before heading back in for another drink.
Today, though, Buchanan Street is shining honey coloured stone and deep red Victorian splendour with columns, porticos and verdigrised cupolas above its modern shop fronts. It’s one of the main shopping streets in the city and you’d be hard pushed to find a better one anywhere. If you turn off at the police box that makes you wonder if Dr Who is in town, you’ll soon find the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art which has the huge advantage of being free and the massive disadvantage of still managing to be over-priced.
I have to admit, right from the start, that I don’t get modern art. I do like art, I’ve been moved to tears by some of Constable’s watercolours and Bernini's The Rape of Proserpina in the Galleria Borghese in Rome literally took my breath away. It’s just modern art that I really don’t get. What’s it supposed to be?
It may not come as a surprise, then, to learn that my visit to the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art was underwhelming. I accept that this is most likely a sign that I am an ill-educated philistine, that much I knew to be true before I walked in, but it lures you in with its massive classical columns and pretence that it might have some proper art inside. It doesn’t.
I think that art should look like something and that that something should not be a dirty protest in an abandoned charity shop. Perhaps I am being a little unfair because one, what shall we call it, one exhibit, was racks of clothes and it did make me stop and wonder about who owned those clothes. What might their life be like? Perhaps that was the point of the art or perhaps I’d just wandered into the cloakroom, I’m really not sure.
Without ever venturing into a gallery, the streets of Glasgow offer stunning art. Murals on walls and the sides of buildings: there’s a huge tiger on a wall near to the Portland Street Suspension Bridge and several celebrities, including Spike Milligan on the Clutha Vaults pub. Another great one is a thirty-five foot high re-creation of a Jack Vettriano portrait of Billy Connolly on Dixon Street. I can’t be the only person who, thanks to a Billy Connolly joke, can’t read the word “jojoba” without doing it in his voice. My favourite mural of all is of a man holding a robin on his finger which appeared early in 2016, painted by the artist Sam Bates, known as Smug. He uses spray cans but creates art which has the realism of a photograph but the heart and soul of a painting. I like what he paints because I like art to look like what it’s supposed to be, rather than a cloakroom.
Back on Buchanan Street – named after tobacco merchant Andrew Buchanan of Dumpellier, Lord Provost of Glasgow from 1740 to 1742 – I came across one of Glasgow’s many buskers; this one was something different to your run of the mill busker, though. Alec, late of the Royal Highland Fusiliers, played the clarinet. In fact, he did far more than play it, he caressed it and convinced it to sing. Stranger on the Shore may be a bit of a cliché for clarinettists but – I’m sorry about this Acker - never has it sounded sweeter or more mellow than when Alec played it just for me on the corner of Buchanan and Argyle Streets.
Next week, for my paid subscribers, more about Glasgow and its buskers plus we’ll find out what links JFK, Winston Churchill and Frank Sinatra. We’ll visit the People’s Palace, Barrowlands and find out if it is still possible to get John Houston’s view of the city.
Loved this entire article!