Scottish PEN Trustee Dave Manderson writes on the threat to the arts in Glasgow
December 2, 2024Scottish PEN Trustee Dave Manderson writes on the threat to the arts in Glasgow
To me, it started with the Art School, where the upsurge in the arts in Glasgow in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries began, and where it ended. When I was finishing my degree at St Andrews in the late 1970s, it was suddenly acceptable to write about the arts of my home, a city that wasn’t supposed to have any. So I did, handed in my essay and got a good mark for it. I’d become fascinated by the way ‘The Mack’ had evolved during its architectural development from a Scottish baronial castle to something modernist; from traditional to experimental, fluid and bold. The tutor’s comments at the bottom of my essay seemed almost excited, as if he wanted me to write more.
As a Glaswegian in Fife, I was careful to hide my real background. People from my place of birth were ‘cosmopolitan scum’, to use MacDiarmid’s phrase. (Fifers dropped the first word when they used that term.) St Andrews was a town where the locals could be locked up for doing what the students did with impunity. I could understand their hatred: this was their toon. But Glasgow was mine and I wanted to defend the crumbling old place, even though I didn’t truly ‘belong’ to it, as the old song says. Behind my shame of being from the west was another source of embarrassment: my fee-paying school background. This was unforgiveable at home and unwelcome even among other students. Was there anything at all to find myself in, to identify with, to be part of, in my background? I chose the Art School. I might not have the identity I wanted but the Art School did. Cool, elegant, internationally recognised, its architect suddenly renowned. And with his rediscovery, a whole old-new style in its wake. Art Nouveau was suddenly on every book cover, coffee cup, stained glass window, door, chair, even the tea-spoons. Glasgow was suddenly elegant, confident, a woman strolling with a parasol in a Japanese Garden, something I’d never seen before.
Fifty years later they burned the place down. Twice. Once in 2014 and the second time in 2018. The first time they only succeeded in destroying the delicate and irreplaceable library, a unique work of art. The second time they managed to destroy the whole thing. A fire broke out one night in a School exhibition and spread to the neighbouring O2 ABC building, also unreplaceable. (1) This time the whole lot blazed to the ground. My friend and the President of Scottish PEN at the time, Carl MacDougall, came in that night from his day’s work, opened the newspaper, saw the headline about the fire, said ‘No’ out loud and went to bed. It was the first time in his life, he told me later, that he’d been unable to face a day’s news.
The Glasgow School of Art on fire
The School of Art was priceless, as were its contents. But it was more valuable to Glasgow and the rest of the world as a symbol. What it stood for was proof that a city of industrial blight, a place of sometimes desperate impoverishment, could thrive. The city was a broken, brutal ruin. Crowds ran riot on Saturdays after the football, the streets full of thugs looking to prove their worth with broken bottles. Boys had their faces slashed, men their throats cut for wearing the wrong scarf. Women were beaten because their man’s team had lost. Art meant something real opposed to all this, something which improved the quality of the lives of its citizens, that offered hope. For days after the blaze, people were walking up the hill to Blythswood Square just to look at the shell of the building. Ordinary Glaswegians. They didn’t necessarily care about art but they cared about that structure. There was nothing left of it other than a few smoking timbers.
Back in the 70s, the re-finding of The Mack marked the beginning of Glasgow’s greatest artistic period. It was well-placed on its hill above Sauchiehall Street to oversee the city’s other venues. The McLellan Galleries, just round the corner from The Cosmo, later the GFT, was a huge space which, like today, was hardly used (apart from the fashionably expensively coffee places which now line what used to be its windows). I helped hang an exhibition there one of the few times the huge galleries inside were open, in 1986. ‘Five Glasgow Artists’ showed the work of Alasdair Gray, Alistair Taylor, Alan Fletcher, Carole Gibbons and John Connolly. Fletcher had died in an accident in 1958, but the others were there. (2) The event was a financial disaster. I walked back to my rented place that night, tired in every bone of my body and minus the fifteen quid I’d been promised. But it was worth it.
They smashed the O2 to dust the other day. Beside the gap in the street where it stood is Glasgow’s only true miracle, The Third Eye Centre. When it opened at first I used to call in just to stand there and marvel. (3) An entrance with a table with short story magazines on it, a hallway, a gallery, a café with a small stage. Sometimes I’d surreptitiously copy the addresses in the magazines to send stories to. It seemed amazing that a building could be given over to the arts and nothing else, here in this city of boiler houses. Today, the CCA is either closed or closing. I was in there a week ago and the café was open and people in the shop, but it’s all temporary. What sense does an arts centre make without an Art School?
Site of the old Curzon Cinema
At the far end of the street, now composed almost entirely of fast food shops, is the old Curzon Cinema, closed today, of course. It fell on hard times during the 1970s and became The Tatler, a dark, half-shut place that showed only porn. The Curzon is probably the setting for the opening of Lanark:
‘The Elite Café was entered by a staircase from the foyer of a cinema. A landing two thirds of the way up had a door into the cinema… but people going to the Elite climbed further…’ (4)
… while Galloway’s Tearoom, where Lanark overhears a conversation between two businessmen, was likely based on one of many such basement establishments that once lined the street:
‘“… You know the population is smaller than it used to be. Have you faced the fact that it gets smaller all the time?”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
There was a silence.’ (5)
Drawing of the Elite café, from the cover of MS Gen 1595/1/13 of
Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, held by the University of Glasgow Library
Glasgow’s ‘excess mortality’, otherwise known as the Glasgow Effect (6), was obvious to its artists and writers. The place was under attack from its City Fathers, and it is no accident that the lights along the new motorways remind Lanark of the arc lamps in hospital surgeries. Glasgow’s writers responded in angry terms to the alarming rise in the death rate, with the city centre’s population reduced to the elderly, the infirm and the young, while able-bodied skilled workers and their families were allocated houses in the New Towns. These writers considered their art ‘municipal’ in the sense that it served the common good, as well, of course, as creating a new standard of fiction. Mat Craig sits up late at night at his desk with Marx, Lenin and Zola on his shelves. (7) John Moseby stares across the river at the hills as if he can see himself from the far side. (8) The thoughtfulness, ambition and originality of these artistic responses to their times helped their writers break through and showed others what could be done. That impetus grew. With the City of Culture Year in 1990, it seemed that the arts could be tourism, economic regeneration, prosperity and happiness, making its people and its culture ‘Smiles Better’, and couldn’t disappear.
But it has. In less than two years, funding for the arts has gone. (9) The 2024 Aye Write festival was cancelled. The Creative Scotland Open Fund has closed. Poetry and performances are moving to cafés or online. Long-standing writing networks are debating their futures. The future of A Play A Pie and a Pint after a change of management and a complete change of staff at what used to be the Oran Mor, including the loss of its artistic director Morag Fullarton, remains to be seen. The future is more than bleak; it’s a desert. Only the SCAP organisation, run by Linda Jaxson in the city’s south side, offers any sign of life, and does this across the creative arts of dance, performance and music as well as literature. Everything else is one-off gigs in bookshops, an author launching her book in a library, an occasional University talk. The big stuff – the packed theatres, week-long gatherings and festivals on their own sites – are gone. At the same time, writers must be wary of new dangers: digital pile-ons, online houndings and the insidious creep of false allegations through the devices in our pockets.
Black Sheep Coffee, Sauchiehall St
The arts in Glasgow are under threat in a way they have never been before. All is not lost, however, when books like Invisible Schemes by John McGlade, appear. (10) McGlade has recreated Calvino’s Invisible Cities so that Khan is now the drug-dealing gangster McCann and Polo is Marky Boy, his blue-lipped courier. Marky brings back news from the outlying schemes of McCann’s empire. Schemes of Aesthetics are areas where the neon lights glare down on the streets and fizz perpetually on and off when night falls. Schemes of Coercion are where your way forward is constantly blocked by a great black Ball which trundles through primary schools and football matches while time slows to a stop. The Ball destroys everything and never sleeps, and McCann feels a sense of escape from his worries as he listens to Marky, knowing his empire is safe. This is Glasgow today and it makes perfect sense, the nightmarish lack of Hind’s social values and Gray’s magical allegories after twenty-five years of confused and confusing SNP government, especially the last two. Wonderful writing and deep betrayal: a ‘country’ where extremists tear out each other’s throats, organise themselves into ever-smaller groups and squabble over funding while they promote themselves. Their writing isn’t good but it says the right thing, and they’ll ruin your life if you don’t say it too. Schemes of Social Media, keeping us in our place. In such a world the end is not nigh but here, and writers must abandon caution and write what they are bursting to share; no more middle of the road, anodyne reminiscences masquerading as social realism; no more ‘dramatic and violent… novels’ that reinforce long-standing clichés; no more ‘true crime’ stories obsessed by drug abuse and gang warfare. (11) And especially, no more looking inside at ourselves. We’re part of the world, like it or not, and writing that means taking risks, ones that change us. We must publish and perish. There’s nothing else for it.
The shell of the old O2 ABC building
Notes