“What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, a park, a golf course, some pubs and connecting streets?” This famous question, posed by the great Scottish writer and artist Alasdair Gray, captures something essential about how we see, or fail to see, the cities we inhabit. Gray died in December 2019, just a day after his 85th birthday, but his legacy continues to invite us to reimagine Glasgow in the most extraordinary ways.
Born in Riddrie in 1934, Gray never wanted to leave Glasgow. His seminal novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books, which took him 30 years to complete, moves through time and space but never really leaves Glasgow. In one unforgettable passage, Gray’s protagonist Duncan Thaw and his friend MacAlpine stand on a windy hillside (thought to be Garnethill) and discuss why Glasgow remains so invisible to its own inhabitants. “If a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively,” MacAlpine says. Gray spent his lifetime ensuring that Glasgow would never be invisible again.
Preserving a Creative Legacy
Walking into the archive is like stepping into Gray’s creative mind. His green chair, his desk salvaged from a street, shelves made from old floorboards; these aren’t museum pieces behind glass. They’re arranged exactly as they were in his home, surrounded by his books, artworks in various states of completion, and the everyday objects that fuelled his imagination. For many visitors, it’s a revelation. Gray wasn’t working in some grand studio with unlimited resources: he was creating extraordinary worlds from ordinary things.
When Gray died, his vast archive of manuscripts, artwork, sketches, and personal objects faced an uncertain future. Enter Sorcha Dallas, a curator and gallery owner who had worked alongside Gray for 13 years. In an extraordinary feat of determination, Dallas managed to secure the entire archive – moving it to the Whisky Bond just three months after Gray’s death and a day before the March 2020 lockdown. What emerged from this rescue mission is now the Alasdair Gray Archive, a living, breathing space that invites visitors into Gray’s front room at Marchmont Terrace.
Art for Everyone
What makes Gray’s work so powerful is its radical democracy. His murals across Glasgow (at Òran Mór, the SPT Hillhead station, and the Ubiquitous Chip) don’t require you to walk into a gallery to experience them. They’re out there in the world for everyone to see. And crucially, everyone appears in them. In the Òran Mór mural, you’ll find management staff standing alongside builders, bar staff, and cleaners. Everyone is given equal status and equal importance.
Gray’s City Recorder series, created for the People’s Palace in 1977, captured this same spirit. He drew councillors and politicians alongside factory workers, artists, and unemployed people. He was mapping and recording Glasgow during a period of profound change: the comprehensive development areas, the motorways that cut through neighbourhoods, the disappearing tenements. In doing so, he was preserving stories that might otherwise vanish entirely, giving permanence to lives and places that the city was actively erasing.
Networks and Influence
One of the most important things the archive is doing is moving away from the idea of Gray as a lone genius. He was part of a remarkable network of Scottish writers and artists such as Liz Lochhead, James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Bernard MacLaverty, who influenced and supported each other. But the archive is also telling the stories of the people behind the scenes: his wife Morag, who created the safety and comfort he needed to create; and Agnes Owens, a remarkable writer who came to writing late in life after working cleaning jobs and raising seven children.
Gray’s support for Owens was extraordinary. He drew covers for all her books, helped her find an agent, and even paid to have her drafts typed up for publishers – all while struggling to pay his own rent. Last month the Agnes Owens Archive opened alongside the Alasdair Gray Archive, recognising her as part of the same creative continuum. It’s a powerful statement: great art doesn’t emerge in isolation.
A City Reimagined
Gray’s vision for Glasgow, and for Scotland more broadly, was captured in a quote now carved into the Scottish Parliament building: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” It’s an adapted line from Canadian poet Dennis Lee, but it perfectly encapsulates Gray’s unflinching optimism and his belief that how we imagine our cities shapes how we live in them.
The archive is working to embed Gray’s vision into Glasgow’s future. Through commissions with writers and artists, through Gray Day celebrations, and through digital projects that root his work into the city’s streets, the archive is ensuring that Gray’s reimagining of Glasgow continues to inspire new generations.
Discover More
If this conversation has sparked your curiosity about Alasdair Gray, his Glasgow, and the remarkable story of how his archive came to be, you can hear the full conversation between Sorcha Dallas and GCHT Director, Niall Murphy, on our podcast If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk. Listen here, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can find out more about the Archive or arrange a visit on their website and social media. It’s a free space open for everyone because that’s what Gray believed in: art, imagination and the stories of our cities should belong to all of us.