Beyond the grand façades, Bryony Cottam finds a Glasgow of hidden histories, political struggle and fiercely held local identity
As we approach The Barras, the sprawling market in Glasgow’s East End, Angie warns that we’ll have to fight our way through the crowds. ‘There’s a knack to it,’ she says, before turning and adding: ‘If ye’ve got any snotty tissues, pack them into yer pockets on top of yer valuables.’ I glance about at the unassuming faces of shoppers and stallholders, but push my hand firmly into my pocket over my phone – just in case.
Inside, the vast steel-framed warehouse is a nostalgic flashback to the covered market that stood in my own hometown until the late 1990s, when it was razed to make way for a Waitrose. The Barras, which has been a fixture of Glasgow’s industrial heartland since the 1920s, is still home to a jumble of stalls selling sweets, cheap clothes, plastic toys and household odds and ends – alongside a growing mix of eclectic modern goods, from speciality coffees and artisanal sourdough to dog clothing, taxidermy and rows of colourful vintage cowboy boots.
Enjoying this article? Check out our related reads…
Angie is 58 and has a crop of bleached-blonde hair, a husky laugh and swears a lot. She stops intermittently to point and laugh at a pair of lewd novelty socks, or to pat someone’s dog, giving us time to catch her up. We’d met moments earlier outside The People’s Palace, a grand Victorian sandstone museum on Glasgow Green. Opened in 1898, it had been dedicated by the former prime minister Lord Rosebery as a space ‘open to the people for ever and ever’. Today, it is closed indefinitely. It was a fitting starting point for the tour.
Despite it being a cold day in February – a lean month for tourism in Glasgow, Angie tells me – two other visitors had joined the afternoon tour. This wasn’t their first outing with Invisible Cities – a project that operates across a handful of British cities and trains people who have experienced homelessness or hardship to lead self-designed tours of their own neighbourhoods – and they’d been keen to book again.
I’d first visited Glasgow early in 2019, just as the first reports of a strange sickness were starting to break. It had been a classic first-time visit: organ recitals at the lofty Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, photos beneath The Homeless Jesus statue in Nelson Mandela Place; the cloisters of the neo-Gothic university and wandering between the weathered tombs of the medieval necropolis on the hill. Sightseeing was punctuated by high-end seafood restaurants, haggis pakoras and one too many White Russians. But this was a new layer of the city I’d not seen before.
Angie, who is frank about her own struggles, has dedicated her tour to the people of Glasgow. From The Barras we head west along Gallowgate to the Soul Food Sisters café, where a migrant women’s collective runs cooking workshops for the community, and the ‘Sarry Heid’ (‘or The Saracen’s Head, if yer posh’), a no-frills fixture on match day. We pass the Police Museum and several towering street murals before reaching the bronze Homeless Jesus on Nelson Mandela Place, where we try not to step in the messy remnants of someone’s heavy night out. Angie talks about the long-lasting impacts of the pandemic and the prohibitive costs of city-centre rent.
Near the north-west corner of George Square, which is enclosed within a wall of hoardings and traffic cones, we stop and look up at an elaborately decorated red-brick building. Angie points out details carved into the stone: a ship, a steam train and cannons, brickwork that resembles railway tracks leading up the façade, and the stone faces of several men. ‘Who are they?’ someone asks. ‘No got a clue!’ says Angie with a laugh.
By the time William Connal commissioned the building that still stands on the corner of George Square, Glasgow had already undergone one profound transformation. Connal’s Angie points out details carved into the stone: a ship, a steam train and cannons uncle, also named William Connal, had made his fortune in tea, tobacco and – most notably – sugar, shipped from plantations in Jamaica, Grenada and Trinidad. The spoils of empire had built Glasgow’s Merchant City and the opulent homes of its most successful traders, including Cunninghame Mansion (now Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art). But the American War of Independence and the eventual abolition of slavery had severed the old colonial trade routes.
Instead, the young Connal turned his attention to pig iron. This crude, carbon-rich iron – now far more efficiently produced thanks to Glaswegian engineer James Beaumont Neilson’s hot-blast process – is too brittle for use as a building material. But once all that carbon has been burned away, you’ve got the makings of cast iron and steel. Suddenly, the money wasn’t in importing exotic goods from across the Atlantic, but in resources that could be produced cheaply and easily right there in Scotland.
The 1860s saw a surge in railway and steamship production, and iron was needed for everything. By the early 1900s, one in five of the world’s ships was built on the Clyde. Glasgow became one of the richest cities in the world, and constructed museums, libraries, parks and a municipal public transport system. Glasgow Central Station was expanded to handle the city’s booming population.
Niall Murphy, director of Glasgow City Heritage Trust, explains that the city became a pioneer of municipal socialism, launching a large-scale, tax-funded urban renewal project through the Glasgow City Improvement Trust. ‘It was the first time in the UK that anyone had done anything like that. You had mayors from all of these different cities all over the world coming here to see how it’d been done.’
Glasgow Central, with its vast Edwardian booking hall and the Hielanman’s Umbrella – the landmark bridge that suspends the tracks high above Argyle Street – is Murphy’s favourite building in the city. In part, he adds, because it’s a ‘stealth station’: ‘You wouldn’t know that there was this enormous station there; it’s completely hidden behind a wall of buildings.’ But while architects like Murphy might fixate on the engineering behind Glasgow’s buildings, he believes that most people want to know about the human stories behind them. ‘And Glasgow’s not very good at telling its story.’
During a recent walking tour, which he often leads for the trust’s educational outreach programme, Murphy recalls hosting a group of visitors from Eastern Europe and the Baltics. They’d been blown away by the scale of Glasgow’s architecture. ‘“My god,” they’d said, “your city is so rich.” I’d had to tell them that yes, it may have been, once.’
By the mid-1900s, the massive fortunes built on tobacco and iron had long dried up, leaving behind a city built by immense wealth, but without the resources to maintain itself. Several landmarks, including The People’s Palace, have become casualties in the struggle to find funding to preserve and repair them. Three weeks after I left Glasgow, the Union Corner building burned down.
I stand on the cobbled side street opposite the building that once housed Cranston’s Cinema De Luxe. Its Beaux Arts-style façade is all that remains of the original building, most of which was destroyed by a fire in 1981. ‘In the 1920s, Glasgow had more cinema seats per head of population than anywhere else in Europe,’ says Katherine Mackinnon, a historian and one of three guides behind Radical Glasgow Tours. ‘This one followed the same trajectory as a lot of others: they start to look run-down, turn into a flea pit showing porno, before they usually become a bingo hall and eventually close down. And sometimes fall victim to a suspicious fire.’
Radical Glasgow Tours, which Mackinnon runs with writer and poet Henry Bell and community organiser David Lees, explores some of the overlooked and marginalised stories of the city. ‘It’s a way of reclaiming the city’s history from the histories that are inscribed in the actual built environment,’ says Mackinnon. ‘History looks different from the streets than it does from the pages of a book.’
