Gordon Barr

An interesting thing that we’ve discovered, having sort of started this process, is we thought this would be a fairly well defined, finite list of things that we would find, list of sort of artworks and list of specific objects. And it’s just grown and grown and grown as we keep learning more and more and more. And what we’ve learned is that what what it says was there in the various official maps, the official guidebook and stuff, in a lot of cases, doesn’t match what was actually on the ground. The things that were designed to be temporary, in some cases, have remained to this day. Mhmm.

The things some of the objects which were specifically called out in the handbook as being planned to be permanent fixtures after the festival have gone. So what we’ve learned is that that we can’t believe anything that’s written down about what was going to happen and what was there. And we can literally only believe the evidence of what people tell us, the evidence that people give us from photographs, bits of film, footage, and all the rest of it, and trying to piece together what was actually there on the ground.

Kenny Brophy

That’s why archaeology is better than history.

Niall Murphy

Okey dokey, everyone. Welcome to If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk. For those of you listening at home, we’re inside the splendidly restored South Rotunda in Govan for this live recording. Now Glasgow City Heritage Trust did help out with the restoration of this building so this was a grant back in 2014 for roughly about £173,000 so it’s great to see it back in full working order and in sustainable use as well and for a really good purpose as well. So our panel of three are on an ambitious mission to unearth, document and digitally record the event that changed the way the world saw Glasgow and how Glasgow saw itself so we have urban prehistorian Kenny Brophy project leader Lex Lamb, and self styled holder of the official Garden Festival umbrella, Gordon Barr, which is just just just over here behind me.

But why here exactly? And it’s it’s because of the kind of the tremendous history of the rotunda, which I believe you all heard when you did your tour around the building but it’s fascinating to think that we’re basically sitting on top of what would have been the shaft into the underworld with all of these lifts in it that horses and carts and motor cars and pedestrians would go up and down in and is now used for conveying the water from Loch Katrin into the south side as well, which is which is quite quite something when you think about it. So the rotundas are obviously a a key part of Glasgow’s proud engineering history and and the the the promoters of these are actually the same promoters for the Glasgow subway, which is quite interesting. So different tunnels being built around the city at the same time. And what we are doing with today’s event is to celebrate an equally important post industrial success.

So first question then would be perhaps Gordon, Kenny, and Lex can help us imagine what this building looked like as a pop up Nardini’s ice cream parlour in that sunny summer of 1988. Over to you, chaps.

Gordon Barr: Shall I start off? I I have a very strong memory of being in this building in 1988. We used to come to the garden festival almost every weekend. My family was lucky enough to have a season ticket, so we came very regularly. And, we recently managed to discover a copy of the menu that was available for Nardini’s, which is for the people that are on the screen at the back there, and is also available on our website as well. And my very strong I have two strong memories of being in Nardini’s here.

You come into the building, it was a big open space with a gallery running around the back. I remember sitting at a table on the ground floor kind of looking up at this amazing ceiling from a much further distance than we’re able to admire it just now, and getting to order what was an amazing treat and an amazing excitement for me as a 10 year old boy, which was my first ever ice cream Coke float with Nardini’s ice cream put a lump of veggies ice cream put in a glass of Coca Cola, which went amazingly fizzed up, went all over the table. This was the most exciting drink to get as a 10 year old in the world. I I remember it to this very day. And it from the from the menu, we can see that it cost I can’t quite read them from this distance with my glasses on, but It was 1 pound 45.

I think something like that. Anyway, amazing experience. And my other memory of that visit to Nardini’s in here is that my father had told me about the histories of the rotundas before we came and how they had the the tunnels under the Clyde. And I was very disappointed when we came in. There was no obvious sign in the tunnels.

I remember going in and going to the toilet deliberately, because the toilets were downstairs from the rest of the cafe and poking at each of the doors in the hope that one of them would open and would get to view into the into the tunnels, which sadly didn’t happen. So on the one hand, there’s the excitement of the Coke float. On the other hand, there’s a disappointment of not being able to see the tunnels. But I think Nardini’s was very much one of several hubs of the festival, and I think it’s quite appropriate that as a such a landmark building that predated the festival was a really important part of the festival itself, but is and has remained afterwards in several different generations of use. So it’s really exciting to be back.

Lex Lamb

If you were to walk in that big door at the at the ground floor, you would see immaculate waitresses. You would see, depending what time of the day you were there, you would see a fashion show, possibly a string quartet. I would view this in a wider context of what the Garden Festival did of giving a little preview to Glasgow of things that have become commonplace since a kind of continental sophistication that hitherto we would have only experienced on holiday. Certainly, me as a 19 year old remember having a drink outside, a beer outside and a bratwurst outside was an incredibly exotic thing to do in Glasgow. Nardini’s is probably the epitome of that, I would say, in the rotunda.

If you look at the the incredible events program that was put on during the festival, which is basically 30 to 50 events per day over a 152 days, you’ll see that the ones that took place in this space tends to be the fashion shows, the string quartets, possibly some kind of cocktail piano thing going on. But it runs at a very a very a very high quality.

Kenny?

Kenny Brophy

I don’t remember at all.

Fay Young

So you were obviously here?

Kenny Brophy

Well, I think that my parents were packed lunch people. So then we just brought our own sandwiches and sat outside.

Lex Lamb

We went to the cafe instead.

Fay Young

So why was Nardini’s chosen?

Lex Lamb

I’m not sure. I’m not sure particularly, I think, just because of their reputation as as I cater, along through the west of Scotland. One thing I failed to notice there was the centrepiece. It’s difficult to visualize because we’re in the cupola, right at the top of the building and what we’re talking about was happening on a ground floor, plus a couple of kind of relatively temporary balconies. The centrepiece, again the sophistication, the elegance that I’m talking about, was a cast of sir Alfred Gilbert’s sculpture Eros, which originates obviously in the version in Piccadilly Circus, which we might have recently tracked down what happened to the garden festival one.

But again, it’s just a lovely centrepiece to that that picture of sunny Garden.

Gordon Barr

I think that’s a good point, though, about the fact that it’s the Glasgow Garden Festival, but there’s so much more going on at it than just gardens. It wasn’t just plants. It wasn’t just gardens. It was events. It was shopping.

It was restaurants. It was a chance to for Glasgow to show off itself to both to itself and the rest of the world, and that’s that’s what’s really quite exciting about it.

Lex Lamb

And when you’re thinking about the elegant sophistication despite the extremely ’80s wine list, which is all Piat D’or and Mateus Rose and etcetera, etcetera, Lambrusco, You’ve got to think about the context of around the same time in Glasgow you had Princess Square opening, the St. Enoch Centre. Yeah. The Tramway was just getting going with the the Mahabharata, stuff like that. I think there was there was a kind of little bit of a renaissance.

Niall Murphy

Very much. I think it really was a Renaissance and a real sense of optimism.

Lex Lamb

Yeah. And to go back to that that line which you quoted early on, Niall, about about an event that changed the way Glasgow is seen by the world and the way Glasgow sees itself. Those things were having an external and an internal effect in the way that Glasgow is, you know, all these cultural, fairly sophisticated, elegant things that were happening were all were all elements in in that effort to redefine Glasgow’s reputation and and kind of confidence I think that Glasgow had about itself. Yeah.

Fay Young

I I remember because I was living and working in Edinburgh, and just seeing seeing it from the Edinburgh, and just seeing seeing it from the Edinburgh, perspective, incredible buzz and and the the Glasgow Mile’s better, campaign, which Edinburgh is pretty rubbish at, slogans. And Glasgow has, you know, that miles better really resonated and and it did, it did buzz its way across to Edinburgh as well and and there was a great sense of what was going on.

Lex Lamb

I’d like to make the point that up to this point, the idea of a tourist in Glasgow was the punchline to a joke, you know. Whereas now, anyone who lives in Glasgow is, is, you know, it’s a completely different situation. Yeah.

Niall Murphy

I remember, I was at school in Edinburgh at the time and I’d applied to the Glasgow School of Art and actually ended up not going to Glasgow School of Art I went to the Macintosh through Architecture instead. And somebody in Edinburgh saying to me at the time, you are so lucky. Do you realise that that city is going through a Renaissance? And, of course, I, you know, I didn’t really know because I didn’t know Glasgow at all. But now looking back, you know, decades later, it really was going through Renaissance at the time.

Lex Lamb

I should see it. I I I don’t think it’s without controversy at the time. If you look at what, you know, there were alternative viewpoints on offer. I’d solicit Elizabeth King to get her angle on on the garden festival and I got an excellent very full 2 or 3 pages with footnotes response. Some of the points of which I would find quite difficult to challenge even in retrospect.

But something was going to have to change and Glasgow was at that point really looking for a way ahead, heading for a post industrial situation. And the garden festival wasn’t unique in that respect, but we, you know, presumably we could talk about the city of culture etcetera etcetera and all the other things I’ve just mentioned. But it was the pivotal event, I believe, of that renaissance.

Fay Young

So can I maybe ask you guys to introduce yourselves and explain, because you were all just youngsters in in 1988? I mean, I I was I was a lot older. So you had a very different perspective of this grand event that was was happening. So so why are you revisiting it now? What’s the lure?

Lex Lamb

From my perspective, I I really have no background in this kind of thing. I’ve always been interested in design spaces.

Fay Young

So this is this is Lex Lamb speaking for our listeners at home.

Lex Lamb

I went to the Garden Festival twice, and I wasn’t actually that bothered about it, which is odd. But you know, I always as a bolshi teenager, you know, I don’t have anything in my mind. Gordon, I think, I think,

Gordon Barr

Well, yes. So I’m Gordon, but as I say, I was 10 years old when the festival was on, which I think is probably the exact right age to experience it in almost every possible way with one key exception, which is one of the one of the most obvious and famous attractions at the Garden Festival was the Coca Cola roller coaster, which I was just too small in height to be allowed to ride. And I I was very nervous. I was a small a small chap from my age and some of my classmates from the same age, where will I get enough to ride?

And I’m still slightly bitter about that. So with that one exception, I was just the right age to to really appreciate the festival, possibly not the sitting outside drinking beer, Almond. But it it was the first time I had my own camera. So, I’ve got my photo album from the festival here, which I’ve kept all the years. And it’s one of these things that looking at these photographs is one of the things that sparked conversations that led to this whole project sort of getting started.

And it’s really interesting looking at the things that caught my eye to take a picture of when I only had 24 or 36 exposures to to focus on. And some of it’s really interesting art and sculpture. There’s a random goat. There’s there’s me meeting David Bellamy. There’s attending there’s attending, there’s attending one of the BBC recordings of something being live in in in the central pavilion.

And so it’s about all the different events, some of the different gardens and things as well, and some pictures of the roller coaster from afar. Ken?

Kenny Brophy

Yeah. Yeah. I’m Kenny Brophy. I’m an archaeologist. And I was 14 in the summer of the festival, and my parents had season tickets. But I really can’t remember much about it. Plus my dad’s lost all his photographs. So I don’t even have those things to prompt memories.

So I didn’t go on the roller coaster because I would have been too scared rather than too short.

Fay Young

Or too bolshi

Kenny Brophy

Yes. Well, yeah. And all I remember is I’ve got these 2, fake daily record front pages. One of them is about me signing for Hamilton Hackies for £1,000,000 and one of them one of them is about me scoring a goal for Scotland or something like that. So and so I’ve got those, but my parents kept the copy of the the the official program.

But other than that, I can’t remember anything about it. But for me actually, that’s the I mean, archaeology is full of things that no one remembers or that memories are false and fake and difficult. And so as an archaeologist, I’m really drawn to an event that happened relatively recently but already memories are fading and not necessarily that accurate. So actually for me, it’s a perfect archaeological project because we don’t know everything despite the fact it’s so recent and so well documented. So actually that, sort of forgetting that I’ve gone through in the process has really been useful in me rediscovering this as an as an archaeologist.

Lex Lamb:

I just I should just point out that, I did go on the Cola Roller

Gordon Barr

One out of three!

Lex Lamb

I’ve since met a person who claims to have, named the Coca Cola Roller, my now wife persuaded me to go on the Coca Cola, knowing that I was somebody who hated these kind of things. She said, this one’s all nice and shiny. It doesn’t look all rusty, and it’s not run by somebody you wouldn’t trust. And and I said, yeah, okay. Since then, I have spoken to people involved in the garden festival who’ve explained to me why they’ve never went on the Coca Cola Roll.

And because it’s still running, I can’t say any more about that.

Niall Murphy

I have to confess, I I went on the Coca Cola Roller Coaster. I did. Yes. Yeah. I was 16 at the time.

We had a school trip over from Edinburgh to Glasgow for it. So which my 3rd time I was ever in Glasgow. So, yeah, it was it was a really interesting experience. And it’s funny because my memories of that, I remember recycling the Main Street and how they were like the silhouettes of all the buildings a later architectural project in 2010 and being criticized by my boss for it. And it was like, that’s very nostalgic. And it was like, but that was the point. And so I remembered all of that. It kind of that lodged

Lex Lamb

The High Street thing with the outlines of the great built the great towers of Glasgow done in.

Niall Murphy

Yes. Yeah. It wasn’t it wasn’t that Glasgow thing. It was sort of a different place entirely, but I was playing on that kind of idea.

Lex Lamb

They ended up rotting in a warehouse in Hillington as far as I can imagine.

Niall Murphy

No. Really? That’s such a shame. They were really good fun. Yes.

Gordon Barr

I think that that’s a nice kind of segue into why we started this this project now called After the Garden Festival, because it sort of grew out of a few conversations on Twitter about what actually happened to all the stuff. Because there was a huge amount of things created for the festival, both objects and and sculptures and things like the the roller coaster itself or the the the buildings and things. And there was a lot of art and other materials borrowed and brought in temporarily. And then that was all for a temporary deliberately temporary, always designed to be a fixed period of time and then it all dissipated again. And that sort of sense of trying to figure out where did it all go, what happened to it was the sort of key kind of impetus that started us having conversations about, well, somebody must have a list of where it all went.

Lex Lamb

Okay. Richard Groom’s floating head was a trigger.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Kenny Brophy

So I did I did a couple of blog posts. So I blog about prehistoric sites and things in urban places. And so obviously the Garden Fest was not prehistoric, but there was elements of it that really interested me. And the first thing that really brought that home was when I stumbled across a picture in an old Clyde Bank webpage of this monstrous huge head perched up on the side of the Clyde and asked them, the person who posted the picture, what’s that? And he said, oh, I think it’s something to do with the garden festival.

So So it struck me it had a kind of a more type quality, a kind of Easter Island quality that I really found. It was it was megalithic. It was monumental. So I went down and photographed it from the other side of the Clyde from Yoker. And then I went after that to the scrapyard just behind in Erskine.

And after kind of negotiating my way into the scrapyard with these guys, I had no idea what I was talking about. I could already see this giant, the top of the head sticking above the back of an old orange bus that was kind of falling apart in the scrap yard. And I went round and it’s just this massive face facing out to the Clyde, covered in graffiti, lichen growing on it. And every so everyone who went past in the the Waverly on a boat in the Clyde would have saw this enormous monumental head looking at them. And so I did a bit of digging about and I found out it was a bit of art by Richard Groom called Floating Head, which had been a boat, and I found some pictures, did a blog post.

And then for some reason, the Scotsman picked up on it and did a wee story about it. And a while after that, and I don’t really think it was to do with my blog, his family got in touch with me because he died. And they wanted my photographs, and they wanted to try and revive it. And then it was moved from the scrap yard, and then the sculpture placement group had a project where it was refloated during the pandemic. So that was one prompt.

And then I did a blog post about the Antonine Gardens, which is a replica of the Roman bathhouse from Bear’s Den. Now that counts as urban free history because Romans were in Scotland, most people were Iron Age. So therefore that gets in under that label. So again, I was really fascinated with this replica of a bathhouse that was then removed brick by brick and replicated next to roundabout in Milngavie where it now stands and it’s now a lovely garden. It’s run by a local garden organization just across from Waitrose and Aldi’s.

So I blogged about these things and I tweeted about it and likes, got in touch, and then this kind of Twitter relationship emerged between us. And then before I even met Lex, because we started to talk about putting in a funding application, and then I started to wonder, is this some kind of scam?

Lex Lamb

You never told me that before

Kenny Brophy

Because I know. Well, so it’s like, who is this? I met this guy on Twitter.

Lex Lamb

It was, Kenny. It’s just very long scam.

Kenny Brophy

Yeah. He’s now asking me to provide information for a funding application. I am am I just enabling him to embezzle money from the Glasgow City Heritage Trust? And then I’m gonna be left holding the baby when he runs off, so

Lex Lamb

So remains remains to be seen.

Kenny Brophy

But then Yeah. Well, it’s it could just a bit it could be playing a very long game, but

Gordon Barr

We we have kept all the receipts. We have all the evidence. It’s all fine.

Kenny Brophy

Yeah. But you visited an excavation of mine and realized you were a real person. And it yeah. So so that was it was actually I mean, a lot of people, you know, criticize Twitter now and what it’s become. But actually, for me, it’s been an exciting place where I’ve made connections and networked and projects of Amers.

And this is probably this is the most exciting thing that’s happened through my time in Twitter. So, you know, I don’t think if I’d been tweeting about what I’ve been doing, you Lex may have never saw my blog post and then we may never have connected in that way. And I I sort of suspect you would have done this anyway because I got a feeling you already had a spreadsheet that was ready to go. No. But you know, I think I think that that was a really important connection of like minded individuals who kind of sought each other out on social media.

Fay Young

And you hadn’t met before.

Lex Lamb

No. No. No. No. No.

Kenny Brophy

No. It was just a But that

Lex Lamb

I think I didn’t know about your urban prehistory gig at the time. But that moment when you saw the floating head Yeah. You know, that’s that’s just fantastic. And I’m That’s just magic. That that that my greatest moment that way was rediscovering the Children of Glasgow Fountain, which, I’m trying to get my bearings, was

Yeah. Down towards towards the Science Center from here. Mhmm. Yeah. Thank you.

Some of you might remember it from its home after the Garden Gestival when it was located behind Kelvingrove Museum.

Niall Murphy

Yeah it was a really good fountain.

Lex Lamb

Yeah. Behind the museum and the Yeah. Do all kind of a 1950s sort of festival of Britain look about certain Very

Niall Murphy

Very beautiful figures on it, very beautiful kind of classical figures on it.

Lex Lamb

But I remember getting a tip-off from an organization which I can’t

Kenny Brophy

That was me. See. It was me.

Lex Lamb

Was it you?

Kenny Brophy: It was me. Yeah. I got I got a tip-off from someone who works for West Dumbartonshire Council that I’ve been working with on a completely different project looking at rock art. And he said to me, I was I was visiting a Glasgow park, depot the other day, and there was some Glasgow garden festival stuff there. So he told me where it was, and then I passed on a lake, said I’ll go to a look.

And so that was Yeah.

Lex Lamb

I took a couple of visits before I could find out where

Kenny Brophy: It was kind of suit

Lex Lamb: And then somebody said, oh, I’ll show you it’s around here. And oh, I felt like Howard Carter entering the tomb of Tutankhamun at that point. It was just it was astounding to see that. And sadly, it’s still there, you know.

Niall Murphy

Which is really sad. Who who told me it was taken down because somebody objected to the naked figures?

Lex Lamb

Supposedly, there was yes. But I think that might have been convenient. It was removed during the period of the refurbishment of Kelvingrove, and I think that that might have been a convenience. Right. Experience.

I wouldn’t like to say. I don’t wanna be held to my Yeah.

Kenny Brophy

And what’s worse are the are the flowers that when you look closely are actually World Bank of Scotland logos. Really? Right. We arranged around it. So nice

Lex Lamb: to see where we did produce a beautifully prepared document with all sorts of suggestions for RBS who have got our biggest state, obviously, in in through in Edinburgh, that they might want to get involved. But no, They suggested we look for funding and do something with it ourselves. So that that’s that one’s languishing, but if you were to ask me, and I know you haven’t, sorry, but, if you were to ask me what was my top favorite found garden festival object, it would it would undoubtedly be that.

Fay Young

Well, I think that calls for others to say what their favourites are.

Gordon Barr

Well, I think the interesting thing that we’ve discovered having sort of started this process is we thought this would be a fairly well defined, finite list of things that we would find. List of sort of artworks and list of specific objects. And it’s just grown and grown and grown as we keep learning more and more and more. And what we’ve learned is that what what it says was there in the various official maps, the official guidebook and stuff, in a lot of cases, doesn’t match what was actually on the ground. The things that were designed to be temporary, in some cases, have remained to this day. The things some of the objects which were specifically called out in the handbook as being planned to be permanent fixtures after the festival have gone. So what we’ve learned is that that we can’t believe anything that’s written down about what was going to happen or what was there. And we can richly only believe the evidence of what people tell us, the evidence that people give us from photographs, bits of film, footage, and all the rest of it, and trying to piece together what was actually there on the ground.

Kenny Brophy

That’s why archaeology is better than history.

Lex Lamb

It wasn’t the Bells Bridge was not the one that was going to be kept, for example. The Canton Basin Bridge or the British Steel Harbour Bridge, which went from where the Science Centre is now basically over to the Govan Graving Docks, was the one that was going to be preserved or hung on to.

Niall Murphy

And So there wasn’t going to be a link across the Clyde?

Lex Lamb

I guess they probably made the right decision.

Niall Murphy

Well, it’s funny that they’re talking about putting a bridge there now to connect and to Govan.

Lex Lamb

Yes. I know. But at the time, you know, those those intervening decades wouldn’t have been

Kenny Brophy

I suppose,

Niall Murphy

Because the Graving Docks would still have been in use at that point.

Lex Lamb

Yeah. And I was reading the other day somebody writing in about mid 90s, I think, saying why did they keep the Bell’s bridge? Nobody’s using it. You know, or do you want it’s required to make it take a temporary structure and make it permanent.

Niall Murphy

Yes. Because it took so long for the site to, you know, be regenerated afterwards. So going back a bit, obviously, you know, the Glasgow Garden Festival, it was the most successful of the 5 garden festivals. So you got this festival, 4, what, 3,000,000 people?

Lex Lamb

3.4. Sorry. 4.3. Yes.

Niall Murphy

Yes. Passing through it. So the biggest and most successful of them. What was the genesis of it? Why did it happen?

How did it come about? You tell us more about that?

Lex Lamb

Well, the final bid went in and was approved in ‘eighty four. I think some forward looking people partly I’m not sure at this point whether that was in SDA, the Scottish Development Agency or whether it was in the City Council or possibly a bit of both. I think claim to think it was the SDA and thought let’s go for this. Produce an excellent bid, got the right site. Originally, there was speculation about putting it in Kelvingrove or Glass Green or Bellahousten.

But as one of the lead designers once told me, if we’d done that, we wouldn’t have got it because what it was all about was regeneration. It wasn’t It wasn’t and although inspired by the German Bundestkatten, so movement of garden festivals, Unlike that German movement, it wasn’t about creating public parks, it was purely about regeneration of inner city areas. So you needed the right site, We had the right site. What makes Glasgow unique amongst the garden festivals, we had a history of great exhibitions obviously, and we seized upon that and tied it in, which is not the case with any of the other sites.

Niall Murphy

This would be the kind of exhibition number 5

Lex Lamb

in Glasgow. Exactly.

Niall Murphy

So 1888, 1901, 1911, 1938, and then 1988.

Lex Lamb

Yes. So, originally, the central committee or whoever was looking for a 1989 garden festival.

Niall Murphy

Right.

Lex Lamb

We put in the bids some bright spark thought, well, we had an exhibition in Kelvingrove 1888, we had an exhibition in Bellahouston in 38. It would be great to do it in 88.

Let’s bring it forward by a whole year. So, let’s bring it forward by a whole year, which I have plenty of people suffered because of that.

Gordon Barr

I imagine.

Lex Lamb

But it was probably worth it to tie it in to that tradition of big exhibitions which Glasgow already has, which as I said, it makes it stand away from the other UK Garden Festivals.

Niall Murphy

I suppose also timely as well because it gives you enough of a breather to 1990 and the European of the city of culture.

Lex Lamb

True. Yes. And we knew that we were going to be city of culture or we changed the name of it. We knew before the Garden Festival was, I think, 86 or something.

Niall Murphy

I thought it was 84, but I could be wrong. I just I remember, you know, having read back over it. It was kind of decision net with astonishment.

Lex Lamb

And I think that at some at the time, some people kind of viewed it as being a provocative sort of gesture on behalf of who was making that decision. But when when we were building up for the garden festival, we knew that the city of culture was coming up as well. So, there was a lot going on beyond the bounds of the Garden Festival site, huge though it was.

Niall Murphy

So, what comes first then? The filling in of Prince’s Dock and the Basin or the Garden Festival? How’s the timing of that?

Lex Lamb

Almost immediately. The other thing that happened almost as soon as the basin was filled in and the site was cleared was planting. Because from the cultural viewpoint, you wanted to have a lot of mature trees, mature shrubs in there. They needed to be established, as many years in advance as you could possibly do.

So if you look at aerial photographs of the site, as soon as you’ve got the docks filled in and the site leveled, then there’s actually very basic landscaping and young trees going in there, even when other bits were just like, you know, a sea of mud.

Fay Young

And and what was the ground like? Did they have to bring in

Lex Lamb

Well, yeah. When you think about it, when they filled in the docks, they ended up with a a flat surface, which was largely cobbled, obviously. So if you go to a festival park, for example, the the surviving part of the the land the landscape of the garden festival, it’s all quite hilly. The idea overall of landscape was to create a kind of highlands at the governed side, gradually tailing off towards the lowlands and then a seaside area. Okay.

Yeah. So you had your maritime area down, say, where the science center is now. And right up to Festival Park, you had you had your highland scenery landscape and scenery area. Not all of it, but a great proportion of it was was produced by a rather novel technique of dredging it up from Medev side for the granaries, where Glasgow Harbor is now. You had a team of dredgers dredging up the riverbed, taking it through the Clyde Tunnel, up governed roads, and dumping it all on this.

So a lot of the landscaping was was built up from that. And I’ve always wondered with Kenny’s future investigations, whether he’s going to find stuff that was actually on the riverbed of the Clyde.

Kenny Brophy

Given we know what’s been found here, it’s very likely there’s probably prehistoric stone tools that are in the kind of the hilly areas that are around the waterfall location. So I think that’s kind of inverted stratigraphy that’s been created by that process. So it’s definitely worth a little slot trench through that one of those slopes at some point.

Niall Murphy

So it wasn’t spoiled from tenement demolitions and kind of the comprehensive development areas.

Lex Lamb

You know, it’s funny. I was I was looking at the big picture downstairs earlier and I was thinking to myself, you know, I don’t I’m sure somebody’s told me, and I do not know what they actually filled the docks in. Uh-huh. I mean, there’s all that stuff about where the SEC is, that that dock was filled in with

Niall Murphy: Well, allegedly, with St Enoch Station and Hotel.

Lex Lamb

St Enoch Station, that was what it was. Yeah. And, I know that the the land from Battery Park in Greenock, where I’m from, was was created, reclaimed from the sea by digging the railway tunnel that was digging. It was always you tie in one infill thing with a Yeah.

But no, I I don’t, off the top of my head, know Okay. What the docks were actually filled in. But it’s an odd thought if you would walk through Festival Park, if you find it on a nice day, to think that, you know, 6, 10 foot or maybe even less under the ground is just cobbles. It’s an entirely artificial construction on top of an old dock.

Gordon Barr

That’s amazing. When you look at the old maps of the area from before the festival, when it was still lots of working docks, like the amazing aerial photograph in the entrance foyer downstairs here at the Rotunda, A huge proportion of the Garden Festival site was water. It was those 3 huge docks, almost all of which have now been filled were filled in to create the land for the festival or refilled it, if you like, because those docks obviously weren’t there originally. It was land that was reclaimed from water that was originally land. It’s different generations of use, but it’s it’s those different layers of of history and things that make it really fascinating.

Niall Murphy

So how then did the Scottish Development Agency how did they begin to kind of get talent in? How did they sit and plan out this huge festival? How did they go about that whole process? Because they had very short time periods to do.

Lex Lamb

An awful lot of adverts. And for some reason, they got all the best people. The Garden Festival hovered up an entire generation of Scottish talent in all sorts of areas, in design, landscape design particularly, in architecture, in performance and in all sorts of areas. A whole generation either began their careers or got a leg up from the garden festival, simply because you’re required to draw in so many people to make that work. Yes.

Fay Young

And they came from across Scotland?

Lex Lamb

Yes. Yes. Entirely from across Scotland and in some cases beyond. Yeah. And not just to put the thing together.

I I would say one of one of the biggest heroes of the Garden Festival to me is is Michael Dale, the director of events, who was able to put on that, as I described, that’s 30 to 50 different events every single one of the 152 days, trained up a 1,000 unemployed people, gave them time off in an organization structure to do scotvek modules while they were working at the garden festival, set up a job seeking thing for them afterwards at the conclusion of that. 90 different countries were were providing events over the 152 days. It was a living thing. Mhmm. But you also had you had Gillespie, sort of fantastic and and going on to become an internationally successful landscaping firm.

It was very, very, them being lead designers of the garden festival was, I think, very important to them as a company. You just happened to have the best people. I think they were all very, very into it. Brian Evans, who you’ve known to some of you as the city urbanist, you know, has had a career. There’s he’s he’s designed the expansion of Moscow and stuff like that, and he’s done done some quite incredible things, said to me once that out of everything he’s done in his career, the garden festival is the only project where he felt that everybody around him was working at the absolute top of their game.

And if anyone saw somebody at the desk next to them doing something, they they thought, well, you could probably have another shot at that. You know, do you want to try that again? And you say, yeah. Okay. I will do.

Everybody was doing that. Yeah. And right across the board, the quality of what was going on there was was really, really special in retrospect. And in some ways, it’s one of the it’s one it’s one of the things about the Garden Festival I find difficult to explain. I can’t I can’t really work out why Yeah.

That was the case. But you look at what was done and and the time in which it was done, and it’s it’s it’s top rate. It’s really and the the whole the whole artworks program, the fact that you had some first rate international names and then contemporary art, all of that, you didn’t need to have that. But it did have that.

Gordon Barr

And I think that’s that’s kind of shown out by by just how well regarded it it still is in in living memory and how many people have have really strong both strong and positive memories of it. And looking at some of the statistics we’ve seen about the number of season tickets that were sold to effectively to to Glaswegians, to local people who came coming back again and again. So it’s not a thing just for tourists. It did bring a huge number of tourists and new people to the city, which was fantastic. But it was not just for tourists. It was for everyone. It was for Glasgow itself. And it really seemed to get that balance right in a way that some other events have struggled to

Lex Lamb

Totally agree.

Gordon Barr

To just be for tourists or just be for local people. Like, it seems to have really got that balance right in a way. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but but we had some some great stats about the number of season tickets they’d hoped to sell in the 6 months leading up to to the festival to kind of have a kind of breakeven number for that. And they outsold that maximum number in in just a few weeks and kept selling and kept selling. Like, 40% or something.

It was a huge number. If I remember one of my other memories of the first time we went to the Garden Festival with my father, him complaining to someone at the gate because we had to we had season tickets. We had to queue up to wait to get in. We were supposed to be priority tickets that get straight through. He said, why is there he said, what we’ve got he said, so does everybody else.

It was just huge numbers of people really, really bought into this in a positive way.

Lex Lamb

Michael Dell telling me that, that he’d he’d gone to his superiors at one point and said, look, early on and said, this is not gonna work unless the people that live immediately around it are totally on board with it. You can’t parachute this in. And had to put a very strong case in order to get the free season tickets that went out, basically, everywhere in g 51, I think. And he was right, you know, because you had the local area. It’s an urban thing.

You couldn’t do that and have a barbed wire fence around everybody else. You had to have those people on board. And and the same goes for the the way that for the recruitment policy, I think. You know? They they had no illusions that the the thing would not work if it was just something exotic located in the center of Glasgow.

It had to be integrated and become out of the community as well.

Niall Murphy

It had to belong to the close regions.

Fay Young

And I think we can all think of examples where that mistake is made in in other cities where it isn’t rooted and and embraced by by

Gordon Barr

I think it’s an easy thing to say you’re trying to achieve, but it’s a difficult thing to actually do and get that balance right. And I think if if we could distill exactly what it is that worked about it, you’d you’d be doing quite well as an events organizer, as a as a career.

Niall Murphy

How much did all this cost? And how was it funded?

Lex Lamb

Oh, how was it funded? Now that’s definitive answer to any of that, but there was quite a lot of wrangling about it. And there was quite a lot of asking for extra money at various points and things like that. And there was a stage of you’re not getting any more money kind of thing. But that was very much wrangled over at the time.

And there was a lot of efforts made, as you would imagine, to quantify what the economic benefit was versus investment in the whole thing. I think it’s quite interesting that nobody thinks about that now. I’m not saying these things aren’t material, they don’t matter. If we were to have another garden festival tomorrow, it doesn’t matter what the hell it costs because, you know, 10 years to 35 years, same old things, you know, it’s great. But in the long run, it’s not what it’s about.

I think that the outcomes are possibly less tangible than that. I actually saw a quote today from the colorful PR guy, Harry Diamond, that we mentioned earlier, saying not that, I think it was a few years after the festival, he is saying, I have to admit, I didn’t much care about the finance of the operation. That wasn’t my responsibility. My own feeling was that as long as it gave the people of Glasgow a new prize in their city, enhanced its image nationally and internationally, persuaded people that Glasgow was a good place to invest in, to visit as a tourist, or to live and work in and bring up one’s family, it was worth whatever had to be spent. And sorry.

It’s a way of brushing aside your question, but No.

Niall Murphy

No. But you’re absolutely spot on.

Gordon Barr

In terms of the core funding came from, sort of, UK government. It was part of a program to try and regenerate what were seen as failing in post industrial cities, which is why the the the garden festivals were in Liverpool, in Newcastle, in North Wales, in in Glasgow. And the other thing that that Glasgow did really well was bring in a lot of commercial income as well, and some of that was quite controversial at the time. We understand about what’s now seen as quite common kind of commercial public private partnerships to deliver big events. There was everything was sponsored.

You know, we heard the RBS fountain. All the different, if you know, different areas had different sponsors. Some of them were public body sponsors. A lot of them were were company sponsors as well, And that was another way of bringing income to pay for the whole thing. My favorite in terms of the sponsorship are the 5 tram stops, which were each sponsored by one of Scotland’s new towns.

And they each designed them themselves, and and each each had their own sort of character.

Lex Lamb

Like I was saying, some of the criticisms, from the time, which as I said looking back on, I find difficult to argue with some of them. But you couldn’t say that it wasn’t in the tradition of Glasgow’s great exhibitions to not have a commercial. You know, if you look at the 18/88 or 1901, whatever, exhibitions, they’re just like adverbs. They’re just, look, we make look, we make boilers. Look, we make, you know, we make shoes and what that’s all it is, most of it.

Yeah.

Niall Murphy

That was Crystal Palace. Was all about promoting trade in the industry. So

Lex Lamb

So in in in that light, I don’t think that the Garden Festival looks hideously commercial in the way that No. It might otherwise.

Niall Murphy

In terms of things like legacy though, I mean, that is a controversial thing. You know, it kept on coming up, the idea of why wasn’t it saved as a Tivoli Gardens for the city, and yet there had been this deal done in advance, which was part of the, you know, the money for it. The site was getting sold to Laing Homes, was it? Well, they already leased it

Kenny Brophy

Yes

Niall Murphy

Exactly. The Continental Company. So but in that sense, it’s interesting because when you look at what happened with the 2012 Olympic Games in London, where there’d been all this you know, a a degree of consciousness that you had all of these other games that happened in places like Athens, where you had the facilities that then nobody used thereafter. And so there was a lot of planning for the aftermath of it, and that seems to have been the case in Glasgow too. They really thought about what was going to happen afterwards.

Lex Lamb

Well, yeah. But a lot of what was I think what Lion said they were going to do, they didn’t do. Yes. They took its time. I’m not saying that in a conspiratorial way.

I think it might just be the way things turned out. It’s just the recession that really nice. It took a long time. I think the people involved in the design of the garden festival would point out justifiably that we got there in the long run. We’ve got our little media quarter.

We’ve got our, you know, you’ve got the BBC, you’ve got the Science Center, you’ve got the STV, etcetera, etcetera. That’s all there. It did take a long time to get there. And I I if you look back, at the press, maybe 90, 92 times like that, people had a lot of stamping of feet and saying what on earth is happening to this site, which was going to be a wonderful, you know, Where was the regeneration remit? Where is that being followed through?

It took a long time.

Gordon Barr

I think that is an important point, just to reiterate that the reason the money was there to do it was it was it was designed to be temporary. If there was any chance it was gonna be permanent, the money would not have it would not have happened.

And part of that, it was to do with the land deals and the structuring of the leasing and all the rest of it. And part of it was to do with it was kind of co financed by having effectively presold some of that land for the future redevelopment, some of which never happened. But there was that sense of what elements do we want to retain, both in terms of taking some of the the artworks and things and putting them elsewhere in the city and elsewhere in the country, so some of the things that have gone further afield. But, also, in terms of Festival Park, that corner of of the landscape was always designed to be retained as a new public park for the city. And there were other things as well.

So that it’s interesting because we’ve we’ve shown some photographs of displays at the festival of what was to come afterwards, including the big road and and and roundabout running past where the BBC is now, which seems seems to us a horrible intervention in terms of what was a lovely green space in our in our memories. But that but that historically was a very industrial area and previously was, you know, not ever accessible either. Yeah.

Lex Lamb

The plan for the area You lose

Gordon Barr

some, you lose some, but

Lex Lamb

was basically Pacific Drive where it is now and loads of housing. Not not any BBC, not any science, etcetera.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. I mean, my recollection, Festival Park just kinda kept on going along the Clyde. Yeah. I know we’re gonna be more and more of them, but it just didn’t materialize. And then it’s interesting because it’s like, you know, obviously, you get that great recession at the start of 1990s when things were very bad.

And then you get buildings like this, so you get the architectural language of Festival Court stops, and then you get this, which is complete noughties instead. But it does kind of bring it to a full stop.

Lex Lamb

Yes. I mean, Festival Park itself is a conundrum. I mean, that’s the 11 acres out of the 120 that were retained as part

Gordon Barr

of the deal. Park, the green space that’s still retained. There is also Festival Park, the housing that was built, confusing, with the very the identical name. So it is nomenclature wise, there’s a there’s a there’s a problem there. Yeah.

Lex Lamb

I don’t think there’s any question that the city has not done with Festival Park what it should have done. I mean, they they it was remodeled in about 1990. Didn’t really work out. I begin to suspect Ian White, who designed the landscaping there and did some of the best landscaping in the whole garden. Very good landscape architect.

Lex Lamb

It’s no longer with us, but I wonder if the drainage there was designed for perhaps more for a transient event than with one eye to being a permanent feature.

Kenny Brophy

I know

Lex Lamb

it had to be messed around with quite a bit when Pacific Drive took off the top trunk of landscape and scenery zone. But everything else that’s gone wrong with Festival Park, I’m afraid, is is could have been avoided, I think, really.

Niall Murphy

It’s a it’s an urban design problem, unfortunately, because everything turns its back on it. And it’s actually quite a potentially really charming little park. I mean, that fountain that we were talking about earlier, the cascading dam fountain that you’ve got photographs of Yeah. Which survives completely intact and is a lovely

Lex Lamb

space. And yet

Niall Murphy

none of it’s overlooked. It’s, you know, got industrial sheds down one side of it.

Kenny Brophy

It’s one of Glasgow’s great monuments.

Lex Lamb

Yeah. I don’t think

Kenny Brophy

I think I think it’s, you know, it’s a it’s a stunning thing, the waterfall, because it’s

Niall Murphy

It is.

Kenny Brophy:

It’s really easy. Structure is still there. You can still work out what it was, you know. If only they could turn it back on. But it’s really it’s really spectacular.

I mean, we tried to do some excavation in the the kind of pond bit at the bottom to see if there was anything that had been thrown or left in there, but we couldn’t because it was a new colony. The council wanted to preserve, so I wasn’t allowed in there to excavate. So there’s also that kind of it’s also got this kind of new ecological life as well that’s developed afterwards. But yeah, that monument, I mean I’m very keen to explore, trying to use that as a part of Archaeology Scotland’s adopt a monument scheme where they get community groups to actually adopt monuments of any period and then try and then look after it, tidy up, try and maintain it and then maybe even help people interpret and understand it. You know, finding the right community who’d be willing to do that would be really a really nice thing to do going forward.

And the archaeologists have gotten their interest because I don’t actually think they’ve got any monuments and they are in portfolio that are 20th century. So I think that’s something quite exciting to try and explore there. And so I think it’s it’s something that you know that should be much better known in Glasgow because it’s it’s there, you can see it, it’s grand, it’s spectacular, it’s amazing, so

Gordon Barr

And one of the things we hope to do in the next sort of stage of the project and we’ve just recently secured some additional funding from Glasgow City Heritage Trust. Thank you very much. To to do, first of all, some some additional archaeology, which Kenny will talk about in a minute, but also hopefully to look in a as as a very small first step to, trying to celebrate that legacy of of Festival Park, the green space park, is to have some interpretation. Actually tells you what was there. Because if you walk apart from the name Festival Park at the gate, there’s nothing to tell you what the where this landscape came from, what what the story of it is.

Yep. And there’s a huge new number of of of housing and and and flats built up roundabout. You can see them from here looking out. And then the new communities moving in that don’t know that that history of the area, I think that’s a great opportunity to bring in and create to to use that new community that’s developing and and engage them with the the heritage under their feet. Yeah.

That’s quite exciting.

Kenny Brophy

The council are quite keen to have a friends of group for that park because most Glasgow parks have got friends of groups and that hasn’t. So I think that’s something they’d quite like to do. So maybe this can be can catalyze that happening as well.

Fay Young

So they’re relatively simple things that you can do and and don’t cost a huge amount of of money.

Kenny Brophy

Yeah. Yeah. Even just some well placed QR codes Yes. Would be really nice.

Lex Lamb

Somebody got in touch the other day and said, oh, I I’ve just moved in a flat, you know, down there. Sorry. Yeah. Down there. And, oh, I’ve got these Just Matt,

Gordon Barr

what were you pointing in a podcast? That’s true. Pointing in stereo Towards the left speaker,

Lex Lamb

And by the way, I’ve got this, here’s some nice pictures of the garden festival. Are you interested in my as ever? Yes, we are. And I said, well, if you give us your pictures, I’ll tell you where your flat is built on top of. So I went to my handy ghoul overlay and I was able to see, I think she was just out of the walled garden and probably heading towards the dry meadow, something like that.

She said that’s great. I’ll I’ll I’ll take what you’ve I’ll put it up my wall.

Kenny Brophy

That could have been used in the marketing of those apartments because I mean, there’s so many houses built in Scotland now that are actually built on top of past uses of that landscape. I mean, it’s amazing how many people are built or have the house on top of an ancient burial ground. It’s not even like a horror film cliche, it’s true. Because you go to build a housing estate or a school, you find a Bronze Age Kiss Cemetery, you find human remains etcetera. So lots of people live in houses that were ancient burial grounds.

So I think actually we could do a lot more with trying to celebrate the heritage of a place where a new build house is constructed. And this would be an amazing opportunity to do that and actually say and use even, you know, have, street names that reflect what was there before and so on. You know, you could have a Coca Cola Rolla Drive.

Lex Lamb

I’m going to bear in mind that I mean, I don’t want to be gloomy, but there will be a time when none of this is within living memory.

Gordon Barr

And that’s why we’re trying to do it now.

Lex Lamb

That’s one of the key things because we’re still able to talk to a lot of the individuals that were involved in a way that we can’t for Glasgow’s previous exhibitions.

Niall Murphy

Yes. Absolutely. The street names for that new development, does anyone know? Do they refer back to the Glasgow Garden Festival?

Lex Lamb

Well, they refer to the docks, I think.

Niall Murphy

Right. Okay. So Glasgow is usually quite good at picking up things like that. So you’d hope. Okay.

Other legacy stuff then, how is it going in terms of tracking down other monuments? What are your best finds? How are you getting on with that?

Gordon Barr

Do you want to speak a little bit about the archaeology? Well, I guess In technical parks because we’ve not really touched on that.

Kenny Brophy

Yeah. I mean, I guess that the archaeology is part of that same process because the broader project has been trying to track down the material legacy of the festival and where is it now. So the other part of that is what’s actually stayed on the site, what’s still there. So that’s where the archaeology comes in handy because ultimately, there are some things that are still visible in Festival Park and also in other areas as well. There’s a big set of steps that were next to where the lock in was, and you can still see where that was on the ground as well.

There’s a kind of little stream and a waterfall. So that stuff’s all visible and the landscaping. But there’s also features that were in that bit of the landscape which are although you can’t see anymore, they still survive under the ground to an extent. So we know from geophysical survey that we did in 20 22 that the ditch that was created and they held the mini railway line, which ran around the whole circuit is still there. Because ultimately when they correct me if I’m wrong, Lex, but when they level the site, they did the kind of the they did the least effort things for the most part.

So why would they try and remove our underground ditch when you could just fill it back in again. So that ditch is still there. And we know that a lot of the the lock in still retains its original, the original decorative stone work that was there. There’s all of the stones at the bottom of the lock in that were put there just just to weigh down the huge thick carpet like textile layer, which was used to keep the water within the kind of internal system. So the archaeologist already revealed that there are both hidden and visible aspects in Festival Park.

And so that’s part of the legacy as well is this kind of physical material remnants and that’s something we’re going to explore further next month. But there are also, you know, we’ve done a few guided walking tours now and we’ve really started crawl over the whole of the site. And once you start to walk along the Clyde you can start to see fittings for electrical cables that were for lights on the kind of the fence down by the river. The what was the Stripy bollards? Yeah, the stripey bollards by the what’s the artist?

Lex Lamb

Daniel Burns.

Kenny Brophy

Yes, the black and white stripy bollards along there are all an artwork created for the festival.

Gordon Barr

So if you leave the building tonight and just walk down to the river, there’s a row of bollards down there that are painted black and white stripes, and that’s a garden festival artwork remaining in fits your part

Lex Lamb

of 1.

Gordon Barr

Yeah. Just literally less than one minute from this building as they say in the cinema adverts.

Kenny Brophy

Yeah. And if you and if you go across to the Canton Key area, which is over the other side of Pacific Key, and there’s some lying homes there that were actually built as show homes during the festival, go over to the wall behind those homes, which is actually an incredible palimpsest of Glasgow history because some of the wall has got ceramic tile, which is probably toilet blocks from 19th century factories. But then other bits of the wall have got little screws in them. And those screws held hanging baskets for the Glasgow Garden Festival. And we could match the way from the photographs.

Yes. So they’re still there. So I’ve had students, like, walking along this wall looking for screws on a wall. And it’s like you can see the ghost of where electrical cables were. There’s actually plastic bits of signs that are still there as well.

So there was also screws that held signs up that were labels, and one of them is still there that says red fuchsias spider?

Lex Lamb

Yeah. Spider fuchsia.

Kenny Brophy

Yeah. Yes. That’s there. And also down by the side of the down by the the Clyde, there’s also a little plaque for an artwork which Lex had spotted, which is still there. So there’s actually there’s actually a really amazing material physical legacy on the site, which is completely a mismatch with no information whatsoever for visitors.

So one of the things that we are doing is this year we’ll be carrying out a detailed digital survey of the whole site so that we can then have something like an app or a downloadable map where people can self guide and walk around the site and actually say, wow, there was a hanging basket there in 1988. And actually those kind of those tangible connections are really powerful because you know, that you you kind of think it’s all swept away and it’s gone, but there’s actually lots and lots of stuff left. And so that kind of really fine grain archaeological survey is going to be something that will be a real legacy going forward, I think.

Fay Young

So it’s knowing how to look

Kenny Brophy

at Yes. It’s kind of retraining yourself to actually really observe for the minutiae and actually think, why is there a screw there? And then start to think that’s really

Fay Young

There’s quite a lot about screws and nails in on your website. Yeah. Some of the things that you’re finding, you know, you do find a lot of nails.

Kenny Brophy

Yes. So in the trenches we’ve excavated in the lock in area, the reason why we put trenches there was because watery places are good receptacles for things. So we’re not going to find anything in the grass or lying about. But it could be that for instance, someone threw a coin into the water during the festival or when the festival was being dismantled, people threw in screws and bits and pieces.

So we opened those trenches, we did find quite a lot of coins which we then had conserved and tidied up by a metal conservator and quite a few of those coins dated to the 1970s. So there’s a possibility that those coins were thrown in there during the Glasgow Garden Festival. They may have ended up there later, but that’s part of the magic of archaeology is about wild speculation with a a sort of factual basis on it there somewhere.

Gordon Barr

So And at the other end of the scale was buildings like this, Again,  that are part of the legacy of the festival that they have the other sort of scale. And and other big scale things that survived that have gone elsewhere, things like the like the Coca Cola roller coaster, which does still exist down at Theme Park and is at Suffolk. I always call it Cape Kent, but it’s Suffolk. Suffolk. Or the Clydesdale Bank Tower, which I visited last year in Rhyl in North Wales.

It’s lost it doesn’t we can’t go up and down anymore, but it’s now just a beacon, but it’s still the cloud recognizing the Clydesdale Bank Tower. And even there, there’s nothing to tell you what where it originally came from, although it’s been there a lot longer than it was in Glasgow. But it it it’s finding there’s these things all over the the little, trains that run the railway around the site of miniature railway. Those engines still run at a theme park in Japan. You know, there’s a global diaspora of garden festival ness that we’ve been trying to track down, which is fascinating.

Lex Lamb

Thinking about this building again, this building was rehabilitated and refurbished for the Garden Festival, as was the Four Winds building, and a hydraulic power station down there. And in terms of what we’ve I mean, we are building up a really substantial digital archive of all this. I think we’ve got well over 3,000 photographs, hundreds of pages of documents, all basically acquired and scanned at the moment. So there’s that ongoing digital archive. Everything we can find in local authority archives that’s we’ve collated and indexed all access.

More than 17 hours now of interviews that I’ve conducted with various staff at all levels, if you like, which hopefully, thanks to the help we were receiving from the Heritage Trust, Keep plugging away. Transcribing, and and because I would really like to have this in a searchable format, because I keep thinking somebody told me something about whatever. So hopefully, all that will be there, for posterity apart from anything else because it’s such a pivotal event. And it was, I think, an important stage in us coming together as after the garden festival, an important stage was the realization that there was no central archive for this, and there was nobody recording this really, really important thing that happened in Glasgow. Could be controversial, but it was certainly colorful and it certainly had an impact in all sorts of ways.

Absolutely. But yet, no proper record of it.

Niall Murphy

So it’s falling into this kind of what you called earlier a memory hole?

Lex Lamb

Yes. I think it would have done otherwise.

Kenny Brophy

And it’s and it’s one of the reasons why the archaeology is part of the project because, when I there was quite a lot of media coverage of the first excavation, and I was asked constantly by journalists why is this archaeology? Why are you even doing this? Because aren’t there photographs? Aren’t there records that tell you what’s going on? So I think that it was it’s actually archaeology is a really good tool for understanding human interactions with the world from any period in time.

It doesn’t really matter when because we’ve got the same methodologies. I excavated the Garden Festival site in the same way I would excavate a prehistoric site. So there’s no difference there. So the advantage I’ve got here is that I can also look at photographs, plans, maps, talk to people, look at Lexi’s interviews, all the other stuff we’ve got together on the website. So the archaeologist filling in some of those gaps or down that memory hole because ultimately this is only 30 odd years ago and there is misremembering.

There are things that have not been documented. I mean, one that we talked earlier on, Gordon’s got us photograph of him as a 10 year old child standing beside 2 really big megalithic stones. And we’ve got no idea what that is. There’s no record any there’s no record anywhere in the official program, in any documentation. We don’t know where that is or why it’s there, who put it there.

Whether it was ever it was always meant to be there, whether there was an improvisation because it was a space, someone has a big standing stones and they thought they’d put them in there. You know that the most exciting example of that is that I knew about the Strathclyde Regional Council Roman Villa because I’ve been thinking about the archaeological the archaeological representation at the festival site. But next to that there was a full size replica of a gatehouse of the Antonine Wall. And there’s no mention of that anywhere in any of the literature about the festival. It doesn’t appear in the program.

There’s I can’t find any documentation about it. Lots of people have photographed it and it’s absolutely spectacular. And no one’s ever done a replica of any bit of the Antonine Wall in Scotland before and yet it was there in Glasgow for a summer of 1988. So there are these things that are just, you know, that there we can’t get to through traditional documentary means because so much of this was it wasn’t improvised but there was an element of that. And also people were just doing stuff really creatively and not necessarily blueprinting all and documenting all.

So I think that there’s the the archaeology is part of the solution for this memory hole, but also tracking down memories, photographs, and all of the archive we’ve been looking for as well.

Lex Lamb

I think the challenge, if you like, is that the event is so important that that and and so well remembered and so pivotal that it needs to be recorded, but yet it was a transient, temporary thing. It was one lovely summer for Glasgow, and that’s it.

Fay Young

There’s something incredibly romantic about that in a way, isn’t it?

Lex Lamb

You mean because it’s a fleeting thing.

Fay Young

Yes.

Lex Lamb

Yes. It’s not a big, funky stone building, and it’s not a, you know, something that leaves a massive trace in the landscape. But it’s

Gordon Barr

it’s left a massive trace in millions of people’s psyches.

Niall Murphy

Absolutely. 4.4.3000000 people saw this. And it has it. It has really it shifted perceptions of the city.

Fay Young

So That’s no small claim, is it, that it changed the world’s view of Glasgow?

Kenny Brophy

Yes. And that’s that’s why it’s mind boggling because I just assumed when we started this, right, I’ll just go and read the books about this. I’ll just go and read the academic papers that have been written, and there’s and there’s nothing. I mean, this person I can I don’t think there’s any academic paper written in any journal I can find I can access that mentions at all? It’s in a few gardening magazines and things like that.

So I was completely astounded there wasn’t someone who, you know, goes to the library and does research, that there was nothing like that at all. You know, that was so in a sense we were we were almost like creating the history as we were going along, which is really Yeah.

Lex Lamb

But it matters. And that’s the thing. And and I try and quantify why it matters. And the best I can do is because it shows what Glasgow is capable of in a in a really striking, unignorable way.

Niall Murphy

Absolutely. And so optimistic as well.

Lex Lamb

Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Niall Murphy

Very much.

Lex Lamb

And even that just in itself is to to my mind is is sufficient.

Niall Murphy

Yes.

Fay Young

It does raise that question that’s similar in, perhaps, in that it was such a transformative event. Could it happen again?

Gordon Barr

Well, we’re coming up to a year with an 8 in it soon.

Lex Lamb

Yes. There’s a there’s a planning for perennial perennial question, isn’t it?

Fay Young

And and I’m just wondering how we’re doing for time if we talk about that now or if or if it maybe feeds into

Lex Lamb

I’m happy to talk about Yeah.

Fay Young

Now. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Because it it it does seem a question worth asking or discussing.

Lex Lamb

It’s one that it always comes up. I think I’ve said to you before, Faith, that instinctively, the answer always comes out of me. No. No, of course not. But then when I stop and think about it, I think, well, why?

I think there’s the garden festival has happened in other parts of the world to this day, you know. And I go through all the reasons I can’t. And I think the best I can do is to think the more I’ve researched and learned about it, the more I realize how incredible it was that that happened at all. And it happened the way it did. And I think it would be easy to sort of be cynical about it, and think if I was lazy, I would feel myself thinking, well, you know, things are different now.

You know, there’s too many commercial pressures. People are looking out for themselves, and you know, it would be the dead hand of money would kill the whole thing, and you wouldn’t have the No. I mean, it does happen. And how’d you get that fairy dust? How’d you get that recipe from from the early 19 eighties, all those people together to do something like that. You had to have a hell of a lot of ducks lined up in a row for for the garden festival to happen. But the more I learn about it, the more surprising it seems that it all actually came together. And that I suppose it it’s that that makes me think that, no. You can do it again because it it was so remarkable that it actually happened.

Yeah. But that’s that’s not based now as in rational, personally.

Gordon Barr

Not sure about the about the future, but in terms of what keeps me interested in what we’re doing or have been doing the last couple of years is there’s there’s always more to learn. Know, as we think we’ve kind of got a got a handle on the scale and the scope of it, we find something new. A great cache of new ephemera got passed to Kenny just yesterday. Some of it’s on the table over there.

Gordon Barr: I’ve been

Kenny Brophy: on the audience.

Lex Lamb: You

Gordon Barr: know, it’s with some stickers, some leaflets and things that that that people turn up and email us with photographs of a garden festival tea towel that they’ve kept, so they now live in Papua New Guinea. You know, there’s it’s it’s it’s again that that worldwide connection, but there’s always more to learn. And, I’m fascinated with the idea that of that difference between what was written about what was in the festival at the time and what was actually there and how much of that is true for Glasgow’s other exhibitions where we only have that written record to rely on? What else happened that we don’t know about? Because it there wasn’t a similar sort of, you know, in-depth recording done at the time when people were still alive to do that, which is really interesting thing.

So that’s why we we continue to say, if you have some old photographs at home, in the loft or wherever, or old sunny footage or whatever, do please dig it out. Let us see it. Even if you think it’s stuff we’ve already seen, it’s amazing what details we can pick out. The background of photographs, just a slightly different angle reveal reveals a whole different view of things that we’ve not seen before. There’s still loads more to learn.

So, you know, get in touch with us. Our website is www.glasgogardenfestival.org. Nice and memorable, URL, that one. Amazingly, it was available. But we’re really keen to to to learn more and to to to see more, and we’re really excited to see what other things continue to come out of to come out of the woodwork.

And there’s still more to learn. That’s the fun of it.

Lex Lamb

What if somebody in the early seventies was going about speaking to the people that were doing the 38 Empire exhibition. Mhmm. You know, our understanding of that would be

Niall Murphy

Very different. Yeah. Yeah. More nuanced. Absolutely.

Okay. Final question then. Fay

Niall Murphy

This is this is the loaded question, which we ask everybody who goes on our podcast. So can take it all in turn. What is your favourite building in Glasgow, and what would it tell you if it’s all good talk?

Lex Lamb

If you’re asking me which building, whose walls I would like to speak to me, it would Roman fort at on the Antonine wall, but that’s there’s no walls there. It could be a place. There was some tremendous stories to tell you. Feeling that the Anderson Centre, but that’s just that’s just a romantic attachment, really.

Gordon Barr

I always like the Anderson Centre as a child, giving up those those big, long, travelators. But I I think for me, a slightly less modern building, but we’d given we’re, just along the river for it, would be the Lyceum Cinema in Goven, with this amazing curved streamlined modern corner, which in in in the best tradition of of cinema design is a complete fake, and there’s nothing behind that facade. It’s just for show. When you look at in Google Maps and the the the the aerial views, you’ll see it’s just empty space in behind the actual cinema setback from the main street. And it’s such a great example of cinema architecture as the building’s own advertisement and being a little bit fake.

And it’s the best piece of cinema design in Scotland. And hopefully, that’s a build hopefully, that’s a building with a future ahead of it. Yes. We’ve got to see that.

Gordon Barr:

We’d we’d be keen to see that happen. So that would be the life saving government for me. Yeah. Kenny? I don’t think

Kenny Brophy

I’m allowed to say the town center in Cumbernauld.

Gordon Barr

It’s not Glasgow.

Niall Murphy

It’s a good diaspora.

Kenny Brophy

It could be a fantastic place to get lost. I challenge you to go there, and then look at the map as you go into the shopping center. Choose a shop to find and then try and find it using the map. It’s absolutely impossible because it’s like a three-dimensional map on multiple different layers, and I’ve challenged people to do this and we just cannot. Yeah.

But no. I I mean, I’m not I’m gonna cheat again, not really building, but the site house stone circle is is my favorite Glasgow structure, built by Duncan Luna in 1979 and rebuilt again in 2019. And that for me, that’s just an example of the enduring power of megaliths, of standing stones, of places of memorialization, of pagan worship, of astronomical observation, of place making of the new site hill. You know, so I think that Glasgow needs more stone circles.

Lex Lamb

Oh, and reconsidering, can I put a late shout in for the, the sculpture garden at the Hunterian? Uh-huh. That’s was on my favorite. I slightly compromised its brutalist duty now that they recladd the library, but it’s still one of the finest places in the city to be in a summer’s day. Mhmm.

Kenny Brophy

Well, I should have said the University in case anyone from works listening. But I think I covered Scott building, but oops.

Niall Murphy

Well, thank you very much. Should we open it to the floor for questions?

Speaker 6

Thank you so much. I was sort of reminisc first. I was in lucky to do the Coca Cola roller coaster twice. I was actually on this second last ever spin and it it was really so got to take us somewhere. Hopefully, there’s a big capture for for Speti prosthetic because it’s my idea.

But with modern technologies, do you think with AI and VR, you could ever recreate a lot of virtual reality Garden Festival?

Lex Lamb

I’ve wondered about that. It’s really complicated. I don’t see how it could be done. There’s no one big plan. There’s no one set of drawings.

There’s hundreds of different sites. Some of whom you’d be able to get hold of the drawings and reconstruct them. Others, no chance. And if you were on one of the few walks that we’ve done as a group, you would understand how difficult it is to you can stand, well just I’m getting my bearings again, but just down there somewhere and there’s nothing you can see to locate yourself in the Garden festival, and it would be lovely to have, you know, augmented reality type thing going on or whatever. But how you would get the data for that?

Kenny Brophy

I mean, I would I would I would counter that because you can have an augmented reality walk around Pompey. So if you can do that, which is a ruin, why can you not do it at the Glasgow Garden Festival? We’ve got much better documentation of the Glasgow Garden Festival, what it looked like we have on Pompeii.

Lex Lamb

Yeah. Pompeii is Pompeii. You just make this stuff up.

Kenny Brophy

Yeah. Well, like, there’s a commitment to that as well. But, you know, I’ve got I’ve got a colleague that, you know, that that what that’s what he does, his AI and VR stuff, you know, and he he thinks it can be done. So I think that we could we could have be in a position where you could be standing down there, and you could have a mobile phone or tablet, and then you could look and see the Coca Cola roller coaster in front of you. And I think that can be done.

And I think we can do that.

Lex Lamb

Sorry about my lack of ambition. The thing is Pompeii, nobody’s gonna come out of Pompeii and say you got that bit wrong.

Gordon Barr

Well, that’s the other one. That’s the joy of doing the walks, things. People come and tell us new stuff, all the time and tell us when we get stuff wrong, and that’s how we learn. I know they’ve done a little bit of that sort of thing with the some of the with the Empire exhibitions and 3 g modeling and things.

Lex Lamb

Of course. So

Gordon Barr

I think it’s something that that that certainly could be looked at in the future, where funding to allow it.

Kenny Brophy

Yeah. Yeah. We need a lot more It would be expensive. We need a lot more photographs, but you could with enough photographs, you could create a 3 d digital model of large elements of the the site.

Lex Lamb

I’d forgotten that the art school did the 38 exhibit, which proves me entirely wrong. Yeah. If you

Kenny Brophy: know we can quid, we can do it.

Gordon Barr

Yep.

Niall Murphy

Any other questions?

Speaker 7:

Would you put the garden festival or the city of culture as the main? Which one would you say had the biggest effect in the regeneration of Glasgow? In purely regeneration terms, it’s got to be the Garden Festival because of just because of the physical regeneration. The fact that the site was cleared and made ready for development. Yes, also the thought process of people coming to the place and looking at

Gordon Barr

That’s a good point.

Niall Murphy

I don’t know.

Gordon Barr

I think for me I think for me, there’s a slightly copper answer. I think it’s the 1 two punch of the 2 of them combined. I think it’s The Garden Festival 80 and then followed very quickly, relatively speaking, after the City of Culture kind of building on The Garden Festival’s success. And that combination of the 2 really lifts lifts the whole thing. Either one individually would have been fine, but I think having the 2 big events so close together, I think that’s the thing that was transformative.

Niall Murphy

Any other questions?

Katharine Neil

No. Okay. I think then we just say thank you so much to our hosts and to our guests, and thank you all for coming and also to Malin for having us.

Lex Lamb:

Yes. Thank you.

Katharine Neil

Glasgow City Heritage Trust is an independent charity and grant funder that promotes the understanding, appreciation, and conservation of Glasgow’s historic built environment. Do you want to know more? Have a look at our website atglasgowheritage.org.uk and follow us on social media at Glasgow Heritage. This podcast was produced by Inner Ear for Glasgow City Heritage Trust and is sponsored by Tunnocks.

Rachel Loughran

People do have quite a knee jerk reaction to Brutalist buildings for a whole variety of reasons. And one of them is that many people think they look quite ugly because they’re not ornate. They’re not decorative. And they’re going through Or maybe over the past 10 years, there’s been a a a real rekindling of interest in Brutalism and storing that as part of our heritage and thinking of some of these buildings as heritage items. And there’s many reasons why that’s an excellent thing and other reasons why that can be a little spurious, especially, you know, some of the large blocks that are being sold off for vast amounts of money way beyond the means of their original tenants in the 1960s and the early 70s.

So there there’s huge levels of debates around that and also the role of nostalgia within that too. Like, where does nostalgia come into it and and and is it a positive thing when we look at a building? Is it a negative thing? Is it somewhere in between? Do we have to be thinking about, like, why we’re nostalgic for a certain thing?

So it’s so fascinating.

Niall Murphy

Welcome to, today’s episode of If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk. And today, we are talking to, Rachel Loughran and Natalie Tweedie about Brutal Glasgow. So to provide you with a wee bit of background on this, both Rachel and Natalie are collaborating with Glasgow City Heritage Trust on an exhibition on Glasgow’s Brutalist Architecture, which is to be held later on this year. So as a curator, Rachel Loughran will be using the digital storytelling techniques she has developed with great success at the Alasdair Gray archive, and these will open doors to human memories. So buildings stir emotions, especially in Glasgow.

So, you know, we are obviously acutely conscious of that on the podcast. On the other hand, artist Natalie Tweedie is gathering personal stories from lively responses inspired by her popular images that she posts on social media. So the exhibition will dig deep into layers of Glasgow’s brutalist architecture exploring stories of those buildings which people either love or hate even when the buildings have been removed from the landscape. So welcome to both Rachel and Natalie.

Rachel Loughran

Hi. Thanks. Thanks so much for having us. It’s lovely to be here.

Niall Murphy

It’s lovely to have you here today. So, first off, to kind of give give us a bit more backstory to kind of how you both arrived at this point and kind of how you how you got interested in both of what what it is you do, you know, curating and also these fantastic images that you produce, Natalie. Can you give us both a bit of your backstory?

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. So, I studied textile design down at the Scottish College of Textiles way back, 1997 to 2001. And even back then, my final project involved, tower blocks, and a textile final show was based on architecture back then. So, I’ve had a lifelong interest in architecture, and particularly brutalist and sixties architecture.

I think recently, I was more accustomed to drawing and illustrating the Victorian architecture of Glasgow. So it was only last year that I turned my attention to Brutalist architecture in Glasgow, and it just it grew from there.

Rachel Loughran

I I’m a curator, and I specialise in in digital design and exhibits. I I did my MLit at the School of Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art, and that’s really where I became more involved in the curatorial side of things and and the digitisation and how those two things might work together. I do come from a literary background. My undergraduate was in English. I studied at the University of Cambridge.

After that, I worked in publishing, events, digital media. So it was really when I was at the School of Art. I met with Sorcha Dallas of the Alasdair Gray archive. And then I suppose it was me combining those two interests, the literary and then also the digital, the curation. As part of my degree show, I worked on the multimedia interactive multimedia show Gray Beyond the Horizon.

We I created an installation which recreated Gray’s studio, and the archive is also a recreation of the studio. So there’s something a little bit accidentally meta going on there. So I, I loaned the 2014 screen print print of Lanarks book jacket and and that was a collaboration with the Glasgow print studio.

Niall Murphy

Mhmm.

Rachel Loughran

As you can tell I’m seeing collaboration a lot because. That’s how I like to work. So working with lots of different joints and and nuts and bolts and trying to put them all together into something something quite cohesive. So in that particular show, the audience walked around this temporary recreation of Alasdair’s studio and explored aspects of the novel through scanning QR codes. It now has a permanent home up at the the Alasdair Gray archive.

And since then I’ve worked fairly extensively with the archive. We have a digital guide about Poor Things. And again, there’s been there’s been collaborative elements from then, a collaboration with the GFT and and the Oran Mor. So I guess I I’m always seeking for different people, to collaborate with and also, and then, you know, just being really excited about the the multiple stories that can come out of, a piece of art or a novel or an archive.

Niall Murphy

Okay. Great. So next question then. How did Brutal Glasgow come about? What what was the inspiration for the exhibition?

Rachel Loughran

The easy simple answer is Natalie, and Natalie’s work. But, so, you know, my my interest in in Glasgow’s built environment has I’ve always had a keen interest. And that is partly through the literature that I read a few. If you think about work in the 1960s seventies, Alasdair Gray’s work, Jim Kelman, Tom Leonard, you know, these are folk writing about place even when they’re not writing about place. And and that’s always been a a fascination for me so, but also just thinking about structure and and how that’s reflected in the built environment.

So you know one of my favorite views in Glasgow is up at the Cathkin Braes and you stand up there the winds often howling and it’s just you’re at this huge elevation this massive expanse you can look across these buildings and you just think how did it get like that? You know like why is this the way it is? And there’s so many diverse buildings architectural styles and one way of looking would be to think about them as markers of political processes. These are presented in brick and stone and of course for our purposes concrete but but when we look at these buildings, we also try and think of our own stories. Oh, that’s where I went to uni.

Oh, I can see that spire. And it’s the high elevation buildings that really catch our eye. Now some of these have narratives that have master narratives that have have become generally accepted, and then others have stories that we’d never know unless we had a personal experience to them. So what I’m interested in is in what Glasgow specific stories can be evoked from from arts images of brutalist architecture in a different way to to how they can be explored if you’re just looking at them with the naked eye or you have no experience with them or you do have experience with them. So I think a lot of our brutalist buildings especially in Glasgow have a bit of a master narrative attached to them and that is the narrative of failure.

And it’s not that we are not going to be exploring that to to a certain extent within the the exhibition. It certainly comes into it. But Brutalism is more than just concrete, and a building is more than just the materials that it’s made from. It’s a store for memories, for for stories, and different ways of thinking about our built environment. You know, there’s so many different layers that you can pull back from them.

It would be impossible to pull out all of them, but this show explores not just the overarching narrative that that people might be familiar with and so my interest is what Glasgow specific stories can be evoked from art images. So when people then look at these buildings more than the master narrative comes out or something different that they could potentially resonate with is brought to the fore.

Niall Murphy

Okay. Over to you, Natalie.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. I think it’s it’s very similar. When I meet with people who, and this is online and in person, who are interested in my work and want to maybe buy a print, they’ll also tell me about the story, the connection that they have with that building. And that’s something that really kind of took me by surprise, that people have emotional connections to these buildings. These buildings are almost, you know, background characters and everybody’s life story.

You know, and Twitter is always a place of great debate. So I found that when I started to post the brutalist illustrations, I was getting a real, variety of comments, positive and negative. Mhmm. So, yeah, it’s it’s gonna be great to explore that in more depth.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. It’s been very fascinating, but I I know exactly what you mean. I remember, when I first started here, the guy walked in off the street one day and I don’t know how we got onto it, but we’re talking about the College of Building and Printing Yeah. Overlooking George Square and the visceral reaction from this guy who absolutely hated it and thought couldn’t understand why I thought it was a great building. And so it was just a complete pile of rubbish and, you know, completely spoiled George Square.

And I’m like, no. No. It’s a really interesting building. It’s got, you know, fantastic contribution to the skyline. It’s like a cross between the Pirelli Tower in Milan and the Unité d’habitation in Marseille.

And how could you not like it? And kind of explained that whole backstory to and it still wasn’t convinced by the end of it. It’s a complete waste of time. But but it was really good to kind of have that debate about it, and I thought that was that was that was that was really interesting.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. That that building is the one that sparks the most debate, I would say, on Twitter. You either love it or hate it. You know? Yeah.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. I’m I’m a talk total fanboy, but I think it’s a great building. Really good building.

Rachel Loughran

Yeah. People do have quite a knee jerk reaction to brutalist buildings Mhmm. For a whole variety of reasons. And one of them is that many people think they look quite ugly because they’re not ornate. They’re not decorative.

And they’re going through or maybe over the past 10 years, there’s been a a a real rekindling of interest in Brutalism and and Yeah.

Niall Murphy

Very much.

Rachel Loughran

Restoring that as part of our heritage and thinking of some of these buildings as heritage items. Yes. And there’s many reasons why that’s an excellent thing and other reasons why that can be a little spurious especially, you know, some of the large blocks that are being sold off for vast amounts of money way beyond the means of their original tenants, in the 1960s and the early seventies. So there there is huge levels of debates around that and also the role of nostalgia within that too. Like, where does nostalgia come into it?

And and and is it a positive thing when we look at a building? Is it a negative thing? Is it somewhere in between? Do we have to be thinking about, like, why we’re nostalgic for a certain thing? So it’s it’s it’s so fascinating, the people’s responses.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Very much. This is, Goldfingers front court.

Rachel Loughran

Yes. Yeah. Balfron and and Trellick as well.

Niall Murphy

And Trellick Tower as well in London, which are both, I think, really, really interesting buildings. But how they kind of take, you know, high rise typologies and kind of rework them and have a service tower off to the side. I find all that really, really fascinating. But it is it’s fascinating to kinda see the response to that and yet they are clearly highly desirable. Some people think they are and and it’s sad in some ways.

It’s quite nice that that Anniesland Tower is still, you know, council housing.

Rachel Loughran

Yes.

Niall Murphy

You know, people still live in that and are still able to appreciate things. I have to confess that I am not a fan of the Anniesland Tower, which probably makes me a bit unusual in Glasgow. But coming from coming from Hong Kong, which is skyscraper city par excellence, I do really like a tall building. And I don’t know. I just I prefer Goldfinger’s work.

Rachel Loughran

There is I I guess you could say there is some just on an aesthetic level, there is some similarity between the look of Trellick and or Balfron and the look of Anniesland Court. We have within the exhibition, we’ve got lots of guest writers, and our guest writer on on that particular building is is the brilliant Owen Hatherley who’s going to be talking about brutalism now, and, you know, what what sort of, images we evoke from that particular building and and also its role as a brutalist building that still chiefly operates under social housing. So it still has social housing tenants.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Absolutely. Which is a a a good thing. It still, you know, fulfills its original aspiration. Yeah.

So, okay, I suppose then we’d better kind of explain what is Brutalism. That might help clarify this first for some people because, I mean, the name itself is really obviously gives you a quite firm impression of what it might be, but its origins are quite the the origins of the name, there’s there’s subtleties to that because it’s, you know, from the French term, ‘beton brut’ which is to do with the the roughness and honesty of the texture of concrete. So and it was how Le Corbusier was using concrete and then other people obviously picked up on that too. And so it is it’s kind of the sculptural qualities of and the expression of of materials in an honest way, I think, is is probably where it comes from. And there are obviously some very interesting architects who work within that as an expression and a medium as well, which is great.

This is this is interesting for me because somebody earlier this week, I posted, an image of the BOAC building on, Buchanan Street. So I was I was thankful that somebody else has taken over the unit on the ground ground floor.

Rachel Loughran: Yeah.

Niall Murphy

I think All Saints had just moved out. So it was good to see that somebody else was moving in, so it’s still gonna be in use. But I was saying, you know, it was a brutalist gem and somebody was saying, well, is that Brutalism? And I was like, it’s definitely Brutalism. Yeah.

Because it’s the sculptural qualities and it’s like the honesty of the kind of copper cladding and all of that just wreaks Brutalism to me. But then I kinda think, god, am I wrong? But No. I don’t think I am.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. I’ve had that debate myself.

Rachel Loughran

It it is one of our buildings.

Niall Murphy

I know. We know.

Rachel Loughran

And I think, I mean, brutalism has become it’s quite an amorphous term. And also, you know, the the coinage of brutalism from Rayner Banham’s essay, 1955 essay, where he talks about the work of of Alison and and Peter Smith Smithson. And it’s also a bit of an in joke against the new humanism. So there’s lots of layers within that. But what interests me in terms of bringing this into to an exhibition space or thinking about Brutalism within an an exhibition space, Brutalism is about image.

It’s about memorability of the image. It’s one of its key tenants. Banham Rayner Banham outlines that in in his 1955 essay about Alison and and Peter Smithson who really were pioneers, of course, of of the new Brutalism of their particular, brand of of modernism. And before they’d finished their hand Stanton school, it was completed in 1954, They were collaborating with Nigel Henderson, artist photographer, who documented that school under construction. And so their exhibition, Parallel of Life and Art, in 1953, at the ICA in London was all about the photographic image and how it conveyed a set of and a series of meanings.

And those series of meanings were quite different to experience of being in that particular place of going to school or also another example of their work Robin Hood Gardens Estate. Thinking about what it’s actually like to live and exist in that place rather than just looking at it as an image. There’s something so key to that idea and Brutalism. Those two things go hand in hand. So it’s fascinating for me to think about that and then also to think about Natalie’s image and Natalie’s images and seeing them as separate from the buildings themselves but also connected but also connected to the stories, connected to the history, connected to a legacy of image making.

So it’s about playing with all these things and that sounds kinda serious but also there’s fun fun elements to it as well. Like people’s stories about these buildings are sad, funny, and also just everyday. Just normal people, like, living their lives. And Yes. I think, Natalie, earlier you spoke about the buildings being a minor character within that.

Now that’s fascinating in itself. How something that so shapes our movement and our day to day life whether we get in a lift, whether we if like me, you climb up 4 flights of stairs and you’re puffing and panting at the top or what whatever it is. If you can open your back window into a garden, like, all these things really make such an effect on our existence except they’re just so natural in what we do that, yep, these buildings, they’re just minor characters. We walk past them. We we move around.

Niall Murphy

You should take them for granted.

Rachel Loughran

Exactly.

Niall Murphy

They do they do form this backdrop to your life, which makes them to me really important. And I I I’m definitely interested in all the stories that you can tease out from that. And it’s funny, I tweaked this when I first got asked to do walking tours for Doors Open Day. This is way back in like 2020. I did one of the very first ones and I’d never done a walking tour before and was really terrified that I would suddenly be exposed as not being a Glaswegian.

And and, everyone would rumble me and it was like, oh, no. And, and, unfortunately, I took my Glaswegian other half with me and my mom who gave me all these lessons and you must turn around and you must talk to the people, not the buildings, Niall. And it’s like, yeah. Okay. But I realised as I was doing that that what really switched people on was the human stories behind the buildings.

And if you just did kind of this is, you know, this is kind of a, an Italian Renaissance building or something, people would just glaze over in about 5 seconds flat. And I’ve I realized that really quickly that if you needed to keep your audience, engage your audience, you had to have a human element to the whole thing. And that humour and things like that were really important, but it was definitely those human stories that people really appreciated about anything.

Rachel Loughran

Yeah. Good for me.

Niall Murphy

Okay. So more about Brutalism generally. What what do you think the kind of impact of Brutalism, you know, in Glasgow in particular? How did how did Glasgow respond to to Brutalism?

Natalie Tweedie:

That’s such a huge question.

Niall Murphy

I mean, there are obviously some very good brutal buildings here and some very good brutalist firms as well. Gillespie, Kidd and Coia.

Rachel Loughran

Mhmm. Yes.

Niall Murphy

Really interesting work.

Natalie Tweedie

Mhmm. Definitely. I get the same question when I presented this project, last year and conveniently illustrated 12 to fit a calendar, obviously. But, you know, is it Brutalism? Is it Modernism? And that can spark huge debate as well. For me, Brutalism is and this is why I love these buildings so much, and I would consider the BOAK building to be brutalist even though it’s not concrete constructed.

But it’s for me, Brutalism is is a vision of the future from the past. Mhmm. And that’s why I am fascinated by it and engaged with it. Is this kind of futuristic vision of Glasgow from the sixties seventies?

Rachel Loughran

Yeah. It is contentious, as Natalie was talking about earlier, these these knee jerk responses to Brutalism. So for some folk, Brutalism really is just a byword for ugly. For some, it’s concrete. For others, it’s iconic whether you agree with that or not.

I think for many Glaswegians, it is failure, though.

Niall Murphy

Yeah.

Rachel Loughran

And the story of the CDAs in the late fifties from sort of 1957 onwards, and the 1960s and seventies, and the sheer rate and speed that the Glasgow Corporation erected these buildings is absolutely phenomenal and totally transformed our landscape in such a short space of time. Myles Glendinning, in his section, he’s writing on the Gallowgate Twins. He he recounts a relatively untold story about the CDAs and and how the the word comprehensive, is maybe not quite the right one, within within the planning structure there. So he tells a story, and it’s it’s about municipal ambition and ethical conviction that that went into and so, Natalie, you spoke about that thinking about this idea of the future from the past. Well, Miles’ piece explores that, but from a personal account, he focuses on on the councilor David Gibson and and and why Gibson and the housing committee so wanted these buildings in the city centre so quickly, and it explains why they were built in a relatively short period of time, but also brings a human element to that because there was a huge ethical conviction to bring these buildings to give people new homes.

And Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that is so prominent or the failures or the the the so called failure the thought failure or the demise let’s just say of these buildings. So many that have been pulled down. It’s very hard to look at them and not correlate those later experiences of eighties nineties and and even that is very complex as as well.

You know, why didn’t these buildings work? Well, again it’s very complex and and there’s more to I just think there’s more to these buildings than than that one particular narrative. And and you’re right. Glasgow, Gillespie, Kid and Coia were were a Glasgow firm who have so many buildings. We have two of them in the in the show, which is Our Lady in Saint Francis School, which is no longer a school, but it’s still there.

It’s a listed building and then also the BOAC building as well.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Both really interesting building. Yeah. I think their their work is extremely interesting, but notorious for leaks as well, which was part part of the problem. I don’t know.

I mean, I think I think part of the problem is that it’s it’s what you’ve kind of summed up there. It was the scale. It was so much all at once. It was the sweeping away of the kind of the old neighbourhoods and all their connections. And then people are putting these new buildings, which are very pioneering.

And quite often when you do something like that, that kind of what I’d I’d call a great leap forward, it doesn’t always work. It doesn’t always gel. It doesn’t fix, and you get backlashes against it. And then sometimes something doesn’t work, and it becomes hugely controversial. So Hutchesontown E for instance.

Yeah. Those are really interesting buildings and kind of a sort of graphic sense when you look at the kind of the imagery of them. Really fascinating. But my understanding was it was a French, construction system from the south of France, and therefore, trying to apply that to a Glaswegian climate was possibly not a good idea. I mean, they were notorious for the dampness and mold inside them.

But when you kind of when I look at them with my architectural hat on, and I look at that kind of super graphic that runs all over it, they’re really cool. But they just they just didn’t work. So which is a problem. And then Basil Spence’s, Queen Elizabeth Square blocks, which are amazing, but also kind of deep deeply flawed. And I do now think it was a great mistake demolishing them.

I think if we could have looked to retrofit them somehow and tried to make them work, and maybe maybe they weren’t suitable for everybody, but there would have been, I’m sure, an audience who would have been interested in those buildings. They were really powerful pieces of urban sculpture.

Natalie Tweedi

Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard in the past that they were trying to create, with the Queen Elizabeth Square buildings, Gardens in the sky, which I think is such a hopeful idea. And I think a lot of the residents, when they did move, originally were so positive about the move. They’d moved from Tenemants , living, single ends into these houses with space and, you know, you know, on two levels with outdoor access.

But, yeah, the location, and the height of these buildings, in the south side of Glasgow, with the rain lashing off you, it’s maybe just, at, you know, a point of the wrong location as well.

Niall Murphy

Possibly. I just think it was it was probably the technology wasn’t quite there yet.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah.

Niall Murphy

And and I think we’ve kind of ended up paying the price for that. And the funny thing is that it’s like other countries, you know, which have had great, public housing, you know, programs. There’s sort of places like Singapore and Hong Kong. You know, they learned all the lessons from our failures here, and they’ve done it so much better. And you you look at that kind of current generation of buildings, which are incredibly ambitious.

And the whole gardens in the sky thing, some of a huge I I guess they’re getting to the point where you call them archaeologists in, in in Singapore, and they really do have gardens in the sky. They’re incredibly impressive, but they understand that kind of need to get you know, you have to have a amenity space. You have to have these it’s not just housing. You have to have all of the other stuff that you need as a backpack to get the housing and a community to properly evolve. So they really do understand that.

It’s a complete different way of thinking.

Rachel Loughran

Absolutely. And because of glass, the the great need and great urgency to relocate people from tenements, then a lot of a lot of that was shortcuts and people didn’t get access, to to the amenities that they needed. And then of course concrete concrete is not a new material, but it was new to be used to that level and and scale at the time. Yeah. And it does stain and it can look very ugly with the staining on it.

But and and also I think predominantly the Brutalist buildings we think of in Glasgow are social housing high rise flats but Brutalism is very very diverse and those buildings ended up with a very bad reputation Yeah. For crime. And also during the Thatcherite era, a step away from the idea of public housing being a positive thing. Yeah. I think I still

Niall Murphy: think that’s really tragic.

Rachel Loughran

I really do. Absolutely. Yeah. I absolutely agree. And suddenly, the idea that you lived in one of these flats put you into a social group that was was not aspirational, which is Yeah.

Is just so demeaning. And there are also other Brutalist buildings such as, you know, Chamberlain Powell and Bond’s Barbican Estate. There’s, Denys Lasdun National Theatre. There’s Basil Spence’s Coventry Cathedral. You know, these are hugely hugely diverse or, the Cardross, of course, by Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, which is is now derelict.

So the diversity of of Brutalist buildings is is also huge but Glasgow seems, you know, we’re we are fixated on on the tower block and and in the UK more widely the idea of the tower block is either, you know, very riche skyscraper who’s competing to be the tallest building in Central London or it’s oh these towers towers of terror And then, you know, I guess we’re somewhere in between now where folk are going, oh, well, you know, there’s so some of the towers of terror and others are, you know, wonderful places where, they they have a concierge at the front and, you know, it’s the the end of Portobello Road. So Yeah. Yes. We’ll pay a lot of money to to be in this icon.

Niall Murphy

Yes. Absolutely. What do you think explains kind of the the new interest in all of this? Do you think it is kind of sort of future nostalgia as it were, to quote Dua Lipa? Sorry.

I can’t resist that one.

Rachel Loughran

Well, I think I think some kind of nostalgia, is inevitable. Yeah. Some sort of of nostalgia is potentially inevitable with any building era that people are priced out of buying. So Yeah. You know, maybe the slightly cynical stance on it is that in order for a building to become popular, there needs to be, some kind of coterie around it allowing that to happen and that tends to be the people that are going to make a decent amount of profit out of it.

Niall Murphy

Possibly. I think it’s also time as well. That time after a while, you begin to appreciate why somebody had done something a particular way. So I mean, looking back, I’m looking at when I was at the art school, there was the Newbery Tower directly opposite the back, which has obviously now disappeared with the rebuilding hadn’t been constructed. But that and that was that was Keppie Architects who also did the Bourdon building, which, I still have mixed feelings about the Bourdon building.

Possibly because it was a really tough course being there, but I I think looking back in it and the kind of it was really windswept at the base of it. And the corduroy concrete, I remember feeling it was really rough and quite unpleasant. But now I look back on it, and I think actually that was a really good building. And it perhaps, and I recall discussing this with some of the, the team in care piece who had worked on those buildings. Their problem was that because of everything that happened in 1970s with the oil crisis, the spike in inflation on the back of that, They just didn’t have the money to kind of produce it as kind of polished as we would perhaps now want to do it.

And so that explains some of the issues with it. But it was still when you look at the whole diagram of how that works, you’ve got kind of Louis Khan, served spaces, and service spaces, and the expression of that, that was actually a pretty good building.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. I like the Bourdon. I think I got a a new appreciation for these buildings when I start to illustrate them because I start to really see it, you know, I I don’t come from an architecture background. So I really get a true appreciation when I’m having to illustrate it. The nearly killed me, when it was illustrated.

It’s the work of a madman, I would say. It’s so complex, but I think it’s always gonna have a tough gig. It’s it’s across from, you know, Charles Rennie Mackintosh masterpiece. Right.

Niall Murphy

You get quite a few of of the Mac from it.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. What

Niall Murphy

you’re used to at least.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. So, you know, it’s you you couldn’t get more of a contrast

Rachel Loughran

Yeah.

Natalie Tweedie

On opposite sides of the street. But, yeah, it’s a bizarre build and it’s like a massive

Niall Murphy

It’s like an aircraft carrier. Yeah. Stuck in stuck in a hilltop, which is actually perfect for that era of kind of, super studio and, you know, things extending. It’s it’s got a real, who’s like JG Ballard. Great kind of JG Ballardian feel to it.

Definitely. So which I quite actually quite like now, which is funny.

Rachel Loughran

Well, it’s a space that form and function do actually meet and and have a real purpose to them instead in terms of, yes, you have those huge lengthy studios that are are designed for collaborative work, or certainly shared spaces within that building that is made possible by its, by its form. So, so certainly it certainly keeps to to some of the tenants of of the original tenants of Brutalist. But, of course, it’s a bit of a pick and mix when you look at Brutalist buildings like we’ve it’s very high but there’s not a lot a lot of light and space around it if it’s crowded in the city centre or and So it’s yeah. A bit bit of a pick and mix, an architectural pick and mix.

Niall Murphy

Yes. Absolutely. Okay. Moving on to next question then. Why did you want to collaborate with GCHT?

Natalie Tweedie

Well, for me, I mean, Rachel will be the best person to talk about this, but, yeah, it just seems like the natural place, the natural setting to showcase Glasgow’s Brutalist heritage.

Rachel Loughran

I agree with Natalie. I think partnering with with the Heritage Trust is a huge part of what can make this this very collaborative show a success. Like, not only will people be able to see it at Doors Open Days in September, which will just encourage more people to access it, to to look at the show, maybe they wouldn’t have heard of it otherwise, but then also there’s there’s key aims that are are shared within this project and with the Heritage Trust that make a very good partnership. The whole focus of the show is is about people’s engagement with their historic environment, which is also their present environment as well, which is quite exciting to me. And I’m thinking about using buildings, people, for for people to create a sense of of place so that they can be part of some kind of legacy making building machine.

What what I’d really love is is for folk to to come into this show and as they then make their way around the city and look at these buildings in situ is to think about and even better if to share some of the stories that Brutal Glasgow tries to tell then they become very much part of that that legacy building process that Glasgow City Heritage Trust is focused on. You know, and, of course, we have this sort of knowledge share between the trust and and ourselves. And if folk then look at any other building within their environment to think, I wonder what’s behind that. Like, I know maybe I can look into the architecture a little bit more, but there’s gonna be a story behind that. So hopefully, it will engage people or will give people renewed interest in in buildings they might walk past.

I mean I cannot tell you how many times I walked past the BOAC building without looking at it and it’s fabulous. It’s a spaceship essentially on Buchanan Street. It’s an amazing building and it was one of the first buildings I think I saw that Natalie had had illustrated and what fascinated me about it was how green it looks in Natalie’s picture really reflecting that copper. When you look at it you you see the sheens of copper through it, but it’s also has quite a dark this blacky, browny sort of, lots of different hues in there. And it’s quite shiny of when the light when the light is on it.

So and and the idea that Natalie was building or creating her buildings from composite images. So images from long periods of history, different angles, and then trying to to and very successfully creating a single image that reflects bits of that. To me, I I thought, ah, this is this is interesting in and of itself that there’s a multi there’s a sort of composite making of stuff. And actually every building is this, like, making of stuff, and it was quite cool how that was reflected in the in the artwork as well. And and I see any collaboration like that as well.

There’s a bit you can take from every single partnership. There’s a building of network there. There’s, and then something concrete, made at the end, you know. I’m really trying to avoid avoid that. I I see concrete every day in my life right now.

And it’s not concrete at all. That’s the thing. That’s a wonderful thing.

Niall Murphy

Abs absolutely. Yeah. I I love that building because it’s it’s the white heat of technology. It’s that seeing that the interior is all which has sadly been lost, when it was original. It’s funny.

I call it BOAC, but boy, I suppose. Yeah. Absolutely. I can see why you both say that. So I don’t know.

That’s because I I think I actually flew on BOAC, which probably gives away my age. It’s when you see that interior and the idea that the kind of the angling of the the the ceiling was to do with, Concorde taking off and a very steep angle of Concorde taking off because it has to get, you know, way up into the stratosphere before you can have a sonic boom. I just think it’s such a nice touch. I think it’s really, really interesting building. I mean,

Rachel Loughran

You can just imagine somebody at board meeting like, I have an amazing idea.

Niall Murphy

Abs Absolutely. So I think it’s great. I think it’s also I mean, it is ironic that it’s ended up being the darkest building in the street because everything else got stone cleaned afterwards. And it was meant to be contextualized and kind of, you know, fitting in with the street and it’s ended up, you know, sticking out. But I actually don’t mind that because part of Buchanan Street’s character is it’s a whole series of buildings, which will make you you’ve got the homogeneity of the stone.

And there is quite a large degree of classical architecture in there. But it all still hangs together really well. It’s got it’s got really good parataxis, which is a great great term. It’s got the whole street kind of speaks somehow, and it’s just Mhmm. Yeah.

It’s nice nice and convincing. And so I really like how it how it represents that particular era in that street. I think it’s great. I think it does it really, really well. It’s a great building.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. It’s my favourite building in Glasgow. It’s amazing when you speak to people though that they they don’t they don’t remember seeing it. You have to Yeah. Give them directions to it.

And I think it’s because from an angle, it follows the same rhythm as the building next to it. Yeah. But it’s completely the polar opposite. It’s Yeah. You know, like Rachel says, it’s like an alien spaceship just landed Yeah.

In between, these Victorian buildings.

Niall Murphy

It’s like it’s it literally was camouflage originally, and now it’s standing out Yeah. Which is which is quite funny. It’s a it’s a really, really interesting building. The flip side to that whole question is why did we agree to this collaboration? And I I think it’s one, I love your artwork, Natalie.

And I love your sensibility, Rachel. And also because Brutalism I just think because it’s kind of got that contentiousness about it, because it’s something that’s kind of undergoing through this whole kind of critical reevaluation and people are beginning to connect to it more, I think it’s a really interesting and under recorded facet of Glasgow’s, architectural history and legacy that we need to kind of have a have a proper look at and have kind of critical reevaluation of. So I think it’d be really interesting to be able to do that, to get encourage people to talk about it and realize what what’s important or possibly not important to them.

Rachel Loughran

Yeah. I I think that’s right. And that that is another element of the show that, that we will be working on on on social channels to get people to to feedback their responses. And and there are ways in order to incorporate that in the show by doing sort of live feeds and updated feeds on it. And so I’d like this to be as wide and collaborative, as as possible.

And I’m absolutely fascinated to hear people’s responses not only to the to the artworks and and how they may differ or be similar to the buildings themselves, but the content because there’s only so many stories you can tell and each is curated by, or or written by a guest writer, and so each is curated to tell a very particular story, but there’s loads that we won’t be able to tell. And that’s where other folk can come in and and give their own views whether that’s an architect from an architectural perspective or social perspective or a lived experience perspective. And these are all the little building blocks that are going to to to enrich the show, and that’s again, like, why I think the the partnership between the Heritage Trust and and, ourselves is is really vital in that.

Niall Murphy

Abs absolutely. What about what about you, Natalie? What do you want to get out of the exhibition?

Natalie Tweedie

Well, it’s it’s a huge honour to be able to showcase my work, for a project which I felt so passionately about. What Rachel said about hearing those additional stories from people, people’s connections to the buildings, I never tire of that, and, that’s what I’m looking forward to.

Niall Murphy

Good. So what what about the kind of the build buildings themselves, and how did you go about selecting them for the exhibition?

Natalie Tweedie

Well, a lot of the buildings, I picked because to me, they’re aesthetically appealing. There’s got to be something there for me to that’s visually appealing, to be able to to start to illustrate them. I did conduct a poll on Twitter to find out, you know, I’m going to be doing another drawing next month. What would you like me to draw? And I got loads of interest from that.

So that was great from a research point of view. But, yeah, they’ve got to be visually appealing to me to get my interest. Like the MET Tower, the Glasgow College of Building Print is just fascinating to draw. You know, and there isn’t a lot of because of the position of it in Glasgow City Centre, you don’t really get that front on photograph of it. It’s always from an angle.

So, I do like the challenge of illustrating the building as a whole from a perspective that you wouldn’t normally see from the street. Sure. And obviously, that challenge of taking something that people perceive to be quite ugly and brutal and concrete and gray, and to really transform that into something that somebody else would consider a beautiful image and to really highlight with artistic license, obviously, you know, the the the differences in the materials and the building quality. So for instance, the black, it’s copper clad. It maybe isn’t as as green, and as as, you know, coppery in in real life, but I I take those elements and try and exaggerate them.

Niall Murphy

Mhmm. How do you how’d you go about drawing them?

Natalie Tweedie

So I draw everything on an iPad.

Niall Murphy

Right. Okay.

Natalie Tweedie

So I don’t do sketches. I’ll a lot of the time, I’ll use, Google Maps

Niall Murphy

Right.

Natalie Tweedie

And then Google Street View to get different angles, particularly for the, because you can go back in time on Google Maps. So you can, you know, and you can travel up and down the street. Now the was particularly, challenging to draw because there isn’t, you know, a kind of composite photograph of that. It’s always in sections, and it’s always down that streetscape or look it up to Scott Street. So it’s really, really difficult to get a proper photograph of it.

But, yeah, Google Maps traveling up and down these photograph streets to try and basically look at the building and then map it all out on on iPad.

Niall Murphy

That’s fascinating. The way that you draw them, it’s very flat, very graphic. So it’s really interesting. I didn’t know about your textiles background. So that’s really interesting to kind of because I can see the connection between the two now.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. I mean, I think when I look at the buildings and I look at the, the different materials that are used in the buildings, I love drawing concrete. I love drawing the texture of concrete, the colour of concrete. You know, it’s a strange hobby to have, but I really enjoy it. And I love being able to depict, like, particularly for the college building, all those different windows.

You know, how do you how do you draw something like that and make it look visually appealing and interesting and not just a series of, you know, 200 windows. So it’s it’s picking out the textures. It’s picking out colours and and contrasting that against stone work and concrete.

Niall Murphy

Mhmm.

Natalie Tweedie

But, yeah, I think my textiles background is key to every, illustration, you know, featured on this exhibition.

Niall Murphy

Mhmm. It’s just it’s a really there’s a really interesting quality to them, and it’s kind of like it’s sort of like a bit like a screen print. It’s very don’t take this the wrong way. It’s very sort of 1950s . It’s kind of got a little bit of kind of the, of what was the great post war exhibition in London.

Natalie Tweedie

Oh, the Festival of Britain.

Niall Murphy

Festival of Britain. Sorry. But, you know, it’s got that kind of, yeah, it’s got a really interesting quality to it, which I really appreciate.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. That’s great to hear because that’s what I try and aspire to in my illustration is that kind of mid century feel of those, you know, sixties illustrations. Yeah. I try and, pull that that influence in that era into my illustration, so that’s that’s good to know.

Niall Murphy

No. It’s well, it has connected with me. So which buildings have you kind of ended up going for and and and why?

Rachel Loughran

So after I approached Natalie, I sort of approached Natalie with a very simple question of have you ever thought about exhibiting your work? And, and so then when when I had sort of positive response from that, I looked through the Brutalist buildings that Natalie has in her portfolio. And the next thing was was was thinking about okay so where could somebody tangibly move through in space as they connect these buildings and how how could I use each of these buildings to tell a little bit more of the story of Brutalism in Glasgow, a little bit more of the brutal Glasgow story and how could we possibly do that in a in a kind of timeline. So when folk arrive at the gallery space in in on Bell Street at the at the Heritage Trust, you know, they’ll be going on this virtual journey around Glasgow and throughout that they’ll be going on a timeline as well. So on the walls, you’ll see our our eight buildings and there, Annieslands Court, the Pontecorvo building.

We get to that’s in the west end. We get to the city centre. We’ve got the Bourdon the Pontecorvo.

Niall Murphy

Yes. Which is sadly being demolished.

Rachel Loughran

I has been It has been

Niall Murphy

Great great Basil Spence building and I regret never having been in the, Paternoster lift. Yeah. I’ve always wanted to try a Paternoster lift just to see what I like.

Rachel Loughran

No. I I never went inside that building either, but I watched its, you know, slow slow demise.

Niall Murphy

I know. Yeah. It’s a great great shame actually. I mean, because it was just so like a kind of 1960s computer punch card in terms of elevation, which I thought was intriguing.

Rachel Loughran

And again, it was it was designed very specifically for its purpose. It was part of the great sort of brutalist campus, how we can, how we can build campus buildings cheap, affordably, but also very functionally. And so, it it had quite bad staining and and, you know, this this, again, will be covered in the show in the show, why didn’t it work, what worked about it, why it was significant at the time, and also its relationship to the other buildings within the campus as well was was quite quite vital. So that’s one of our our west end buildings. And so then again thinking about how you might walk to the next one or our next set are in the city center.

There there’s 4 of them. We have the Bourdon, the Savoy, the BOAC, and then and then the Met Tower. Then we go out long over to the east end and we have Our Lady and Saint Francis School and the wonderful Gillespie Kidd and Coia building and then the Gallowgate twins or Gallowgate towers right at the end of that. So you can either travel around the exhibition starting at the Gallowgate twins and then you would travel through Glasgow from east to west, that would be from 1957 to present day, always of course looking across various timelines within that but really just to give people a sense of what was happening in in in a social sense and a political sense at that time. And so we think about how that year has a relationship with the building.

Or you can travel the other way where you’d be starting at Anniesland court in the present day and you travel backwards in time. And it doesn’t matter which way you do it. Each building has curated content and that’s contributions from guest writers, stories from folk with personal relationships to the buildings, video, audio content all in this interactive format. The other thing you can do is pop into the heritage trust and take a postcard. And if you scan that at home, then you can navigate the show online.

Niall Murphy

That’s really fascinating. I mean, when I knew that we were doing this, one of the things I did, because I was out in that neck of the woods anyway on a site visit, is I went and had a look at Anniesland and was like, I am going to reevaluate my opinions of this because I think I’m being unfair. And actually, Anniesland court is really interesting. I think my beef with it is more it’s the base. It’s how it hits the ground that, kind of Anniesland Cross.

But I don’t think that’s part of the original building. So I think that’s a separate thing that’s been added onto the original building. But I don’t really know because I don’t know how you’d tease it all apart. But it looks like 1980s were.

Natalie Tweedie

It was funny when I was illustrating that building when it got to the bottom floor, I thought, what do I do here? Because from the street, you know, you’ve just got that kind of extra brick section, which is kind of added onto it. And I thought that was a real challenge as to how to finish off the ground floor. So, yeah, wee bit of artistic license was used in that section.

Niall Murphy

It’s really odd at the base because when you go around the back, it’s got this kind of very, seesaw, like, you know, roof on it, but it’s totally incongruous. It’s like Yeah. That must be 1980s . It can’t possibly be original. But I just don’t know.

I’m not sure. I don’t know enough about it.

Natalie Tweedie

I couldn’t find any original photographs of that section. Otherwise, I would have reverted back to the original plans.

Rachel Loughran

Well, I am sort of knee deep in archive work at the moment. So, I I can’t make any promises, but I’m I’m hoping there will be some original photos of the building in there. And, yeah, it was also refurbished in in 2006 fairly extensively. Right. And if I’ve got my if I’ve got my dates correct.

One thing I think fascinating about that building though is it’s sort of in this weird no man’s land. Like, you’re not quite in Rishi West End. You’re not in, like, suburban West End. You’re not at Bearsden yet. You’ve just gone through the tunnel.

You’re you’re sort of kind of close to the hospital. You’re you’re you’re kind of everywhere in that crossing, and it it feels like it does feel like a a crossing space, like a space that doesn’t necessarily have and feel free to disagree with me, and I’m sure there’ll be folk that that that do, especially maybe folk that live there. But it doesn’t feel, as an outsider, like its own place. It feels like it’s in the middle of places. And I’ve never been up to the top of it, but I’m going to try and rectify that soon.

Niall Murphy

That’s been up with doors open day before in the past.

Rachel Loughran

That’s right. That’s right.

Niall Murphy

So, yeah, I must I must try and do that too at some point because I would be genuinely interested.

Rachel Loughran

Because what do you see from up there? It was amazing. Absolutely amazing. But also just, like, whatever floor you’re on, you’re gonna get an incredible angle. And I’m wondering if you’re up the top there, you feel like you’re in a a wee bit of a no man’s land or you actually feel like in the centre of this world around you.

I’m not sure. I’m I’m interested.

Niall Murphy

Completely different experience from ground level. Yeah. Ground level around there is really strange because it’s like you’ve got kind of, to the east with, the huge red sandstone tenements. It’s like full throated just prior to the First World War Glasgow where they’re obviously really going for it, then you kind of leap across to the west and it’s 1920s , a really interesting 1920s , kind of city architects department tenement complex with balconies, which is pretty enlightened. And then the other side of it is, like, pure suburban.

Then you’ve got the rug rugby pictures. What is it? Glasgow Academy’s rugby pictures? Oh, I don’t know. It’s one of the public schools rugby pictures on it’s high school.

Yeah.

Rachel Loughran

I think so.

Niall Murphy

On the other side. And so the whole thing kind of spatially doesn’t really hold together at all. It’s totally disparate. And as a cross, it’s it’s probably close goes weird as a cross because it just doesn’t gel.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. It’s that terrible traffic junction as well. Half the time you’re just trying to figure out what lane you should be in to look at the aft I was trying

Niall Murphy: to walk across it and it was a bit uh-uh. I know because I was trying to get decent photographs of the cross as well. I was, like, walking up the traffic island at the center of it and, like, acutely conscious that I shouldn’t have been there. All these people going past you in a car at speed kind of looking at you. What’s what’s this idiot doing?

Just trying to get a decent photograph. Sorry about that. Yeah. Fast it’s a fascinating place. Okay.

Going back to kind of, you know, the personal aspects of this and what were your kind of personal responses to these buildings? And, you know, how how did they connect to you?

Natalie Tweedie

Oh, such a huge question,

One thing that I enjoyed about this project, and it wasn’t something I was conscious of at the start of it was cataloguing or, depicting buildings which are no longer there, buildings which are now demolished somewhere like Graphical House, you know, with that fantastic signage on the outside. Always loved it. Just from a purely aesthetic point of view, Love the signage, love the building, but obviously no longer there. So something which I didn’t say out to do, but something that I really value now is being able to depict our catalog buildings like Pontecorvo, like the Gallowgate Twins, like Graphical House. It’s a record of buildings which are no longer in Glasgow.

So

Niall Murphy

What about you, Rachel?

Rachel Loughran

I was just thinking about that, Niall. I was in terms of a personal connection with each of these buildings. I actually don’t have a personal connection in a very straightforward way. I went to the art school. I did my masters at the art school, but I wasn’t really in the Bourdon building much at all.

Mhmm. So what has interest me throughout this research process is learning more about the buildings and then developing meaning from there. And so my process of working is also hopefully a little bit like the process of experiencing the exhibition just from a slightly different angle, thinking about these buildings from a different perspective, discovering things I didn’t know about them, trying to put that together in a cohesive timeline, trying to take people round Glasgow, showing them that there is a certain route that they can follow or they can diverge if they want. Like, even though it it’s in a timeline, you can jump to whatever building you want. If you you’re gonna be able to understand the exhibition if you come in and you look at the the Bourdon first because you have a connection to it or if you only wanna read about the about Anniesland Court, the story is there for you.

So it’s more about accumulating knowledge and accumulating interest in in each of these buildings and buildings that I didn’t really know anything about originally. So, Our Lady in Saint Francis is a building. I’m from the south side, and I think it’s like it’s one of these things, isn’t it? But in Glasgow, we all know the West End. We know Byres Road of the West End anyway.

Beyond that, if you’re not from there, are you really gonna travel out there? The same with the East End. I have no reason really to go to the East End in my life and nor do most people that are from the south side. Why would I travel to the East End unless I had somebody there? And the way that we tend to socialise and and interact with others, we are staying in our our little enclaves.

So it’s been also nice in some sense just allowing the city to open up a little bit more. And I spoke earlier about looking at the Cathkin Braes and thinking, you know, trying to point out these buildings. And then later on when I’m driving around Glasgow either to do a recce of these buildings or just driving about Glasgow thinking hang on that’s that building that I’ve seen from this angle and if I stand at the top of Queen’s Park I can see it from a different angle. When I’m in my flat I can sort of see other bits of it. So the whole excitement about these buildings for me is that they are little fact finding, entities that that that allow me to see things totally differently.

And hopefully, other people will have that that same experience.

Niall Murphy

Absolutely. I completely appreciate. I mean, that’s kind of the way that you kind of get to know and to understand the city. And I would say that my Glasgow my Glasgow experience in , obviously, I didn’t didn’t come from Glasgow. And when I was at the art school, I was living in the West End.

So I knew the West End, kind of the route from the West End into the art school and kind of roughly the area around the art school most of that time. But when I finally made the decision, having been back to Hong Kong, worked in Berlin for a while, that I was gonna stay here. And then I finally decided I was gonna get to know the city. It’s things like that discovering aspects of the city that that had been really kind of quite enjoyable and discovering whole areas that I didn’t know. And lockdown was great for that as well, just going for really long walks around the city and getting out into the east end because I really didn’t know the east end.

And that I really, really appreciated. So and I did for a while work on, there was a church way out in the east end, Shettleston New Church, which is way out Shettleson Road. And so having worked on that and having to have to get out there to appreciate it was funny because at that time, and this is way pre COVID, they were demolishing the 2 twins in the Gallowgate. And they were literally it was like they had this big kinda contraption around both of them that kind of ate the concrete, and they got basically, you know, they it was like seeing them disappear down to ground level with this enormous contraption around them. That was quite something.

But at the same time, once you kind of walk out, along the Gallowgate, and I’m doing doing this through lockdown, and you appreciate just what a huge rupture all of that is in the city fabric as well. That must have been this phenomenal street and kind of, you know, late Victorian, Edwardian times up to the 1st World War and up up probably until the sort of late 1960s when the comprehensive development areas start appearing. And it’s kind of

completely lost its cohesiveness. And it’s trying to see how could you piece that together and how those towers fitted into that context. But at the same time, it’s also something that really fascinates me about Glasgow because it’s not kind of in the same way that Edinburgh, you have kind of these two cities that were built side by side in kind of the old town and the new town.

In Glasgow, it’s all layered up on top of each other. And I keep talking about that in this podcast, but I really like that aspect of Glasgow. It’s kinda you get these really kind of weird butts spliced together kind of you jump from being in a Victorian city to being in this hyperfuturistic city and and, you know, like the Anderston Centre. You come out of the grid and you’re in this completely different part of the city, and yet you’re literally just 2 minutes walk from one to the other. I really like those aspects of Glasgow.

It’s just such a a fascinating place as a consequence, and it makes me warm to it a lot.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s at the heart of my work as well. It’s a huge affection for Glasgow. So why not document these buildings? Why only focus on, you know, the the Victorian architecture?

Why not celebrate these buildings as well?

Niall Murphy

Absolutely. I appreciate with both of you both being away from Glasgow. You’ve come back. Is that part of your kind of whole experience?

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. I mean, at the centre of all my work is a huge affection for Glasgow, and that’s something that’s only grown since, speaking to people that that buy my work is that shared affection, for Glasgow. Yeah. I lived in London after I graduated. I only managed about 18 months, and it really made me appreciate Glasgow.

That’s all I can say.

Rachel Loughran

I think when you live away and I’ve lived on and off in London since 2009 for long stretches of time and shorter stretches of time. I mean, I’m actually sitting in London right now. Rather than my own flat in Mount Florida which is a tenement built in 1900. There is something about being away from the place that you’re from and the place that you identify with and that being intensified by it. And maybe that sparks a different kind of interest in what these buildings are and why you because for me there is a sense of homecoming when I see those buildings.

Even now when I’m I’m in Glasgow a good chunk of my year. So with every single building there’s a sense of like this is my home. This is where I’m from. And also the fact that I do think I do think there has been so many changes, let’s just say, you know, within the last 50, 60 years within or 70 years within within Glasgow’s architectural landscape that the people and the architecture and the stories about them and also the way we feel about ourselves are very is very much reflected within that. You can see that in art.

You can see that in literature. You can see that in the way people talk about the place that they’re from. If you think about Glasgow’s Victorian architecture, it has its its own own stories to tell about part of that story is obviously Glasgow’s complicity with the the slave trade

Natalie Tweedie

Mhmm.

Rachel Loughran

And then also Glasgow’s civic pride. It’s about the identity of the Clyde side. It’s about red Clyde side. It’s about so many different layers of our of our history. And also, when you speak to people who are not from Glasgow, there’s a couple of responses.

Oh, Edinburgh’s very beautiful, is one of them often or the others. But, oh, is Glasgow is is it not a bit rough? And because they they hear the stories of high rise buildings and that still per pervades, but but there’s so much more to it than that. And and so I think our how we think about our our buildings is important to to how we think about ourselves. And and there’s ways of being more more cogncent of that or not.

You can be a very active participant in your relationship with your city. You don’t have to be. You You don’t have to be at all, but you can be a very active participant in that. And, there’s lots to be proud of and there’s lots to to think about and and how that relates to our identity.

Niall Murphy

Do you think it’s to do that the the reason why there’s kind of a sort of nostalgia for these buildings and the kind of, emerging kind of renewed appreciation of them is because, people are kinda conscious that they come from an era when the city still had a real ambition and a sense of vision for itself and and where it was going at the time. Whereas now kind of this thing on Twitter with this mental health and well-being survey of countries around the world that was recently published that the UK came bottom in it and, which kind of was a bit depressing. And the kind of sense that, you know, the direction of everything is kind of a bit stalled and nobody’s quite sure where we’re going at the moment. Do you think that’s what it is? That there was a very positive this is what we could be in the future whereas now it’s like the future is quite unclear?

That’d be something to do with it?

Rachel Loughran

Yes. That that seems very thought out.

Niall Murphy

I don’t know. It’s just the

Rachel Loughran

It could be. No. I I agree. I I agree. That absolutely could be because I don’t know.

Do people really think about the utopic idea, you know, when they look at the buildings or do they just they’re like, oh, that’s ugly or are they like, I used to go to school there or, or it was better than my old school? If if you’re from an era that you existed or you lived in a

Niall Murphy

I don’t know. It could it could just be me. It’s like my reading habits are really weird because I I split my reading habits between history books and science fiction books. So I’m always kind of exploring other kind of parallel worlds and kind of, you know, where where things have been and where they could go.

Rachel Loughran

Yeah. I think if if people are reflecting on that as a nostalgia, then there should be something going on that makes it not a nostalgia to aspire to better communities and better housing for people.

Niall Murphy

Completely agree.

Rachel Loughran

So if we can turn nostalgia into some sense of action and direction for Glasgow as a city, architecturally, and also what follows on from that confidence in in our creative ability, confidence in our our sense of self or or Glasgow as a whole being proud to be from this city not in a insular way but to think okay we’re gonna build good communities for people we’re gonna build good buildings for people we’re gonna enhance folks’ lives just from the way that they move around the city. So my hope is that, yes, if people are feeling a sense of nostalgia for the utopic ideals that were first instilled into these buildings, Although a lot of them, the the idea is less utopic certainly within the Glasgow context and more practical. We need houses for folk and these are better. Yeah. So there’s those practical are those practical needs too.

But if they are thinking this this was the sign of a new time, great. Let’s turn that nostalgia into action.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Very very much. Natalie, any thoughts?

Natalie Tweedie

Well, I think if you ask any Glaswegian when they see, a photograph of the Savoy sign it’s just pure nostalgia. You know I think maybe that’s the test of your of your Glaswegian ness but yeah for me that’s you know, it’s it’s like Billy Connolly’s banana boots. These things are etched into the back of every Glaswegian’s mind, and one of them is the Savoy the Savoy facade.

Niall Murphy

Uh-huh. Very much. It’s it’s such a period piece that now.

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah

Niall Murphy

It’s great. It’s a really stylish piece of work. It’s great. It’s just kind of that kind of self confidence. And the thing is like in most new buildings, and this is not a kind of I don’t think this is completely unfair, but the New Gorbals did this really well where they integrated art into into buildings.

But it’s not really something we’ve picked up on since

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah.

Niall Murphy

Which I kind of feel is a bit of a shame, and yet it’s also present in so many brutalist buildings that they were. They weren’t just art in themselves. They had really good bits of sculpture incorporated into them.

Natalie Tweedie

Definitely. The facade, even just down the side of the Savoy, get into the side door. These Yeah.

Niall Murphy

It’s fabulous. That’s that’s better.

Natalie Tweedie

The foam Yeah. Freezes. Yeah. Brilliant.

Rachel Loughran

The the funny thing about that building is it’s sort of back to front. Like, a lot of the real interesting architectural textural moments are the side and and then what we might think of as the back where you think of the front of the building as being Sauchiehall Street. Yeah. And, yeah, it’s a fabulous place. I mean, as as part of the the show, I do go running around the club with a Zoom mic.

So I don’t know how much, I don’t know how much of that those interviews I can actually pull into the show itself. So no promises, but it was hilarious. I can highly recommend A Night Out in the Savoy Club.

Niall Murphy

Okay. That’s a first. Okay. Where to next in terms of your your partnership and, you know, what you’d be discovering in this kind of this first collaboration, and do you have any plans for future development?

Rachel Loughran

I would quite like to get through this first. At the moment, I’m very, like, stuck in archives. At the moment, we’re still in quite a I wouldn’t say foundational stage, but it’s not too far far off the foundations and really pulling this together. The next stage will be really trying to make this as cohesive as possible.

Niall Murphy

Mhmm.

Rachel Loughran

And then actually part of the fun stage is bringing this onto the wall and how we’re going to do that. So I have ideas about the design. I have a design plan within that, but that will that will change slightly as as I go into the space and and and work out how people will physically interact with that space down to the simple level of how much room they need. Sure. I love working with other people.

I like collaborating. I like drawing in information, ideas from lots of different people. If there is a way of, expanding this exhibition with with Natalie, with the Heritage Trust in some kind of another way, I’m all ears because the more you you run back and forth with ideas, the the sort of more expandable these things can become. At the moment, I’m very focused on on trying to get this this show as as tight as we can we can make it. But, yeah, there’s always places to go with collaborations.

Always unlimited.

Niall Murphy

Great. Natalie?

Natalie Tweedie

Yeah. I think maybe in terms of Glasgow, I’ve probably exhausted the brutalist buildings by 1 or 2, but, there’s always East Kilbride. There’s always Cumbernauld. There’s, you know, there’s a whole world of brutalism out there to explore.

Niall Murphy

The town center in Cumbernauld does not look long for this world Yeah. Sadly. So I know there’s tons of discussion about it at the moment, but, yeah. So I guess it’s kinda watch this space.

Rachel Loughran

I agree. And what might be interesting see, I’ve just got an idea, Niall. I’ve just got an idea. Because this is very Glasgow specific, of course, we’re talking about Brutalism as an architectural movement, as a philosophy, as a style. These threads come through it.

And so a larger conversation about Brutalism inevitably happens within brutal Glasgow within those Glasgow stories. But every single one of these new towns also has a a story to tell as well Yep. Via its architecture. And that’s something we we touch upon because it’s inevitable within the within the brutal Glasgow story. But the fact that you can look at, a large movement such as Brutalism which comes, you know, which is a modernist movement.

If you can then break that down into little sections, okay, we’ve got the Glasgow story. We’ve got the Cumbernauld story. We’ve got an East Kilbride story. And how they connect to a larger story of, of sort of garden suburbs and and the like and also it’s a different different things. So there’s lots of satellite areas that connect with this.

Niall Murphy

Very much. If you’re looking for some great imagery, actually, I can recommend, Urban Newtown Corporation’s kind of master plan for for Urban Newtown because the illustrations in that were drawn by Angus Kerr who’s kind of an extra retired director of, BDP. And, his illustrations are fabulous, but it was this kind of great Japanese metabolist vision of what what what has eventually become a thing as the Rivergate Shopping Centre, which, kind of is was supposed to be this mega structure that kind of went from the town center bridge to River Irvin and then extended all the way out into the Forth of Clyde. And it was just the most amazing drawings of this kind of straight out of kind of, Tokyo Bay. It’s fabulous.

If you ever get a chance, that’s that’s you’d really enjoy them too, Natalie. They are great architectural illustrations with kind of very primary colours used in them, and really really very very enjoyable. But I I suspect it was a vision that was in no way deliverable. But back to It’s traditional. Yeah.

To have that vision was great. It was it’s really interesting. So I could definitely recommend that if you’re kind of sifting through the archives. If you come across that, wow. That’s something else.

Natalie Tweedie

So it’s interesting.

Niall Murphy

Okay. Great. The final questions then. And we ask everybody who comes to our podcast this question. I suspect you might have answered this already, Natalie, but we can always go back to it.

And that is, what is your favorite building in Glasgow, and what would it tell you if its walls could talk? Who wants to go first.

Natalie Tweedie

Well, I did mention this earlier, and it’s the BOAC. The alien spaceship in Buchanan Street. Yeah. What more could I say?

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Great great building. Looks as it was done with a scalpel.

Rachel Loughran

My favourite building in Glasgow, it’s not a brutalist building. It’s, one we all use frequently or most people use frequently, and it’s Central Station.

Niall Murphy

Same as me.

Rachel Loughran

Oh, no. Okay. Well, it’s not a competition, but I like it more. Central Station, I’m sure it’s loads of folks’ favorite building as well. And there’s a couple of reasons for that.

Architecturally it is such a showboat this is Glasgow welcoming folk in off trains it’s absolutely fascinating from from that perspective and just the way that you can look up and you have that elongated stretch into this fabulous greenhouse of people waiting and coming and going. So there’s that aspect of it, the magnificence of it. But then there’s also, it is a place of homecoming when you’re coming and I’ve been away living on and off in Glasgow and London. Coming home on train from London into Central Station is a magical magical feeling and listening out for Glasgow accents is is brilliant and feeling at home and and I that is very deeply rooted. I imagine I mean if if Glasgow’s I don’t know if it would tell me if its walls could talk.

I don’t know if it would tell me its secrets, but I’d love to know like what dates went on there who met under the clock?

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Absolutely.

Rachel Loughran

Who got stood up? What was the date like? Did you try and get away? Did you have an emergency phone call from somebody? I want the gossip.

Okay? That’s what I want from Glasgow Central Station. I want the gossip. And I’m sure I can provide a wee bit of gossip myself from from, you know, many meetings in Glasgow Central, but I won’t divulge.

Niall Murphy

I know. It’s funny. I remember having a debate with somebody on this, online about it once, and this other person was going on how how much better it was to live in Glasgow’s West End than the south side. And that my retort was and this was to quote Vincent, Scully, the great American architectural historian, when he talked about the demolition of Penn Street Station in New York. And that, you know, the replacement, the difference between the two was like, you know, you could enter the city like a goat in one of them and then the other you were scurrying in like a rat.

And I was saying, you know, you come via the subway from the west end whereas I get to come into this amazing train shed every day. What’s not to like, you know?

Rachel Loughran

Oh, great.

Niall Murphy

Which I thought was a nice retort. So Natalie, what about you then? Going back to the the the BOAC building, what would its walls tell you if if, you know, they could talk?

Natalie Tweedie

Oh, I have no idea. For me, it’s just a a glimpse into the past, isn’t it? It’s a glimpse into another era. Mhmm. So maybe it would tell me what it what it would be like to live in the future.

Completely different to now anyway. So

Niall Murphy

Yeah. The future is never quite what you think it’s going to be.

Natalie Tweedie

No. Definitely not. I think I would much prefer to live in a sixties vision of the future than now probably, but they’re certainly more optimistic.

Niall Murphy

Yes. I suspect you’re right. Well, look, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to the 2 of you and I am really looking forward to the exhibition and seeing what the 2 of you combined produced because I think it’s gonna be really fascinating. I think it’s gonna be one of our best and I’m I’m really looking forward to it.

Rachel Loughran

Thank you so much. It’s been great chatting. Definitely.

Niall Murphy

Yes. I’ve really enjoyed chatting to you guys too.

Kathararine Neil

Glasgow City Heritage Trust is an independent charity and grant funder that promotes the understanding, appreciation, and conservation of Glasgow’s historic built environment. Do you want to know more? Have a look at our website atglasgowheritage.org.uk and follow us on social media at Glasgow Heritage. This podcast was produced by Inner Ear for Glasgow City Heritage Trust and is sponsored by Tunnocks.

 

Luna Amanita

So we’re in Parkhead, which, is in East Glasgow and one of the poorest parts of Glasgow. And we get volunteers from our local area, but we also, like, we do get volunteers from, say, Dennistoun or Southside and, like, there’s a broad demographic of kind of service users, I guess, and and people who want to engage with the space. And, like, yeah, like I mentioned, like, maybe there’s different interests, there’s different capacity, there’s different ability. Like, we’re trying to be more responsive to that because, yeah, like, the gardening and food production orientated sessions are great, but there’s a job to do.

Fay Young

Hello. Fay Young here, and I’d love to take Niall with me to the wash house garden, which was my first opportunity to get out into the real world with this podcast. But if Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk, were there amongst some interesting old walls. And Niall, I was thinking how much you could add to the setting in terms of your knowledge of, wash houses perhaps.

Niall Murphy

Well, I’d I’d have loved to have been there particularly given my, wearing my Govanhill Baths Building Preservation Trust hat because, obviously, we’re kind of in charge of helping to restore the what was Glasgow’s largest steamy.

So, yeah, I’m very interested in, you you know, steamy architecture and also the kind of the amazing social history aspect of the steamy, which is what Govanhill Baths are trying to record. All that fantastic working class social history, which, you know, is at risk of it getting lost. And so we are very interested to hear how you go on.

Fay Young

So today, we have a real spring treat, and the weather has even been quite kind. We’d like to take you on a real life visit to the wash house garden in the east end of Glasgow.

Fay Young

I’m here with Luna Aminata. A co director of the Pioneering Community Enterprise, which is bringing new life to a piece of land behind the old Parkhead wash house. The steamy was once a vital part of the local community, and now we’re going to discover how this it’s half acre of garden?

Luna Amanita

Half an acre, yeah.

Fay Young

Yeah. It’s bringing local people together again with a revitalizing sense of purpose. Luna, would you like to lead us around?

Luna Amanita

Yeah. Sure.

Fay Young

Where should we start?

Luna Amanita

Maybe we should start right at the bottom of the dugout and and work our way the people come in.

Fay Young

So this this piece of land, what was it before?

Luna Amanita

Yeah. So it’s an interesting one. We believe it was the steamy the drying ground for the steamy the wash house, way back, and have heard from people who’ve been in this area for a long time that it was used as a food growing space, during the war. Right. We haven’t been able to verify that, but it’s quite a nice idea that we’re tapping into this heritage Yeah.

For food production. More recently, it was set up by the local housing association as a more typical community garden. And then it was taken on and trying to transform from that into its current state, 6 years ago.

Fay Young

Wow.

Luna Amanita

And, yeah, it was turned from a community garden into a more market garden set up. So we are standing at the foot of the garden and there’s 10, beds that just start running along the floor and

Fay Young

Almost like a runway, aren’t they? Long beds.

Luna Amanita

That’s yeah. Yeah. Like, ton runways, of yeah. Bed’s about a 100 foot, and this is the most market gardeny part of the garden, because what we do here is, like, intensely cultivate crops and have, like, a strict, crop rotation. So, we grow, like, a wide variety of vegetables, and as soon as they’re kind of ready to harvest, we’ll be getting them out of the ground, and then we’ll be putting in the next thing.

So we’re at quite limited space, but we want to maximize the space we do have Right. To grow as much food as we can.

Fay Young

I saw that you’ve got some grapes. Oh, yes. Broad beans. That was, but what is this stuff lurking under the ground?

Luna Amanita

So we’re recording in mid April, so it’s quite early for for us. But in a month’s time, this whole space is gonna be really very green and planted out. At the moment, we’ve got broad beans, we’ve just sown carrots last week, shallots, and I think we’ve also done turnips in this section.

Fay Young

The ground looks very nice. You keep it, well mulched, do you, or composted?

Luna Amanita

Yes. Exactly. We describe ourselves as eco ecological. So our ethos is kind of restoring soil, and promoting soil health over time. So we add in as much organic material as we can that we compost here on-site.

And then recently, the last couple of years, we’ve been ordering in more compost to top up the the site as well. Actually, we don’t have road access here, so, like, getting all the compost into the site has been the labour of the last month or so

Fay Young: So what do you do, because you have quite a narrow path up from the main road

Luna Amanita: Barrels. Yeah. I think we probably did 10 ton bags of compost.

Fay Young: Ten ton bags.

Luna Amanita: Yeah. So we’re

Fay Young

That’s hefty.

Luna Amanita

Yes. Or achy, one or the other. Oh, gosh. And then, yeah, as I mentioned, this place will soon be very green and like we’ll be growing lots of different things. We’ll do like a lot of radishes early in the season, salad, is really like a a winner for us.

Lots of more beans, like, especially French beans. Basically, if you can grow it in Scotland, or in Glasgow, I should say, then we do try. Because of the limits on the amount of space we have, we don’t tend to do a lot of, potatoes and onions or things that are

Fay Young

Yeah.

Luna Amanita

Quite space intensive. But other than that, we’re pretty diverse in what we’ve heard.

Fay Young

Yeah. You’re very impressive. So I’m just trying to work out, are we Is that south facing?

Luna Amanita

Yeah. That’s south.

Fay Young

Yeah. And you’ve got the wall, so it it’s feeling quite warm in here. So when the sun is shining, it’s it’s quite a a gentle benign growing condition.

Luna Amanita

It’s reasonably sheltered, which is really handy for us. Yes. There’s a wall on on the south side, and buildings all around. As a market garden, that is really very helpful. And, like, if you ever visit, historic market gardens, they’ll have, like, a reasonably high wall all around them, because, like, we do you do wanna keep the wind out as much as you can.

That being said, because if we got this quite tall southern wall and, like, tall flats around us, it doesn’t mean we don’t get a lot of sun in the off season. That’s one of our challenges, but, you know, we do have you know, it’s also a benefit to have the wall. So it’s

Fay Young

Yeah.

Luna Amanita

Right. Shall we move on?

Fay Young

Speed on.

Luna Amanita

We could go up this this way. On my right, I’m just walking past some black foreign, hawthorn trees, bushes, some raspberries. So we planted up this bed, which was in rotation with with the other beds here until last winter, and with at which point we planted up with perennial plants. So this is a bit more what you might call permaculture design.

Fay Young

That’s fine.

Luna Amanita

The idea being that, yeah, these plants will be in here for much longer and they’ll establish and, in some ways, be, like, much lower maintenance. And just going past the cherry tree, which has pretty gorgeous, white blossoms just now, and some rhubarb.

Fay Young

Nice tree

Luna Amanita

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

So we got bees here, and I don’t think they need to go much further than our garden for for their foraging. Absolutely. They also help us by pollinating our crops. And now we’ve come to a wider section of, what we just call our food forest. So like like the bed I was just describing, this is more, grown in along permaculture principles.

So we’ve got a couple of fruit trees, couple of apple trees, and and plum, And it’s not as intensive to, kind of, work this style of growing. And you can, like, let there be weeds because in this context, you know, they’re not weeds. They’re just part of the, you know, the canopy of growth.

Fay Young

And already, you’ve got a colour in here with the honesty flowers

Luna Amanita

and The honesty. The dandelions.

Fay Young

Yes. Which, are are full of life, aren’t they? And and, forget me nots.

Luna Amanita

Forget me nots, I think. Yes. In between the dead nettles

Fay Young

And is this

Luna Amanita

This is oregano.

Fay Young

Oregano. That one. Isn’t that lovely? Lovely big spread of it.

Luna Amanita

Yeah. It’s kinda lower input for us. It does mean we don’t get as much yield as the, kind of, more classic market garden setup. But it’s gorgeous. It’s better for the ecosystems, because we’re not uprooting the plants that they wanna live in or disturbing the soil at all, really.

And a kind of broad, long term aim is to move more into this style

Fay Young

Uh-huh.

Luna Amanita

Of gardening and and food production. Yeah. I think especially in the community context, it makes sense to have something like this where, you know, you could, there’s other places in the city that will grow fruit trees, and then anyone can just come and collect the produce. And I think, yeah, that’s kind of something that we’re interested in kind of expanding here.

Fay Young

There’s a there’s a different mood even in, you know, a small space. There’s a different mood in this area, isn’t there? Tell us about the your little friend over there.

Luna Amanita

Yes. Actually we inherited. So, as I mentioned, the local housing association used to have a community garden here, and maybe 10 years ago or so that was active. But, yeah, we when we inherited the site, we also inherited these, very charming wooden carvings. This was a little deer in the tucked in the dead nettle.

Yes. And, yeah, we’re really fortunate because these these trees were, these larger trees here were were planted by the housing association. And it meant that we knew that this land was safe to grow on, which is not a given in the city, and especially not in Glasgow. So, yeah, that’s kind of this area. Maybe you can move over to the closest thing that we have to a building here, which is our canopy space, which, yeah, is a large outdoor space, with a roof but not walls, that allows us to have community groups, using the space and this will be where we gather for our potluck lunches and our volunteer groups.

And, yes, it’s just, like, makes, especially the winter, much easier. Yes. To having a little bit of a dry space to go back to. And, yeah, we’ve got the fire going just now, and kind of storing quite a lot of stuff in here as well. Yes.

Fay Young

It has a really good lived and worked feeling to it.

Luna Amanita

Thank you. I think that’s a compliment.

Fay Young

It is. It is. And behind you, there’s the polytunnels.

Luna Amanita

Yeah. So we’ve got 3 polytunnels, 2 smaller ones and a larger one, and they are really integral to kind of our systems here. I’m gonna walk you through the propagation tunnel, which is where we start almost everything we go here, we start off indoors or in the propagation tunnel.

Fay Young

Oh, look at this.

Luna Amanita

It’s just a place with lots of tiny baby plants. Yes. And,

Fay Young

Look at them.

Luna Amanita

If you’re ever feeling stressed, it’s quite a good place to go. Yeah.

Fay Young

Yes. All this new life and looking very healthy as well.

Luna Amanita

Yes. Especially, yeah. Coming up now we have it’s been a slow start to the season, it’s been pretty cold spring, But, yeah, now getting very full here, and lots of things that are almost ready to plant out. So, yeah, like I mentioned, like, the relatively bare section we started in will will will soon be much fuller.

Fay Young

I can see that.

Luna Amanita

So, yeah, it’s it’s very exciting for us. Winters can be quite long.

Fay Young

Yes. And this one seems to have been a lot longer.

Luna Amanita

Extra. A bit extra this year. Yes. As I as I mentioned, we we we, we start almost everything off indoors, and that really allows us to control the conditions, which is really important in these first couple weeks of growing. And it allows us to kinda time things so that when we are ready to harvest one crop, like, we can see what’s ready to go in and

Fay Young

Yeah.

Luna Amanita

And we can, over time, like, get better at the timings of of things. So, yeah, that’s kind of the

Fay Young

So you’ve you’ve got some really terrific mixture in here. Pak choi and celery and, kale.

Luna Amanita

This is cauliflower, Romanesque of cauliflower. And we’ve got some flowers that are coming up. But again, yeah, we’ve put we’re gonna plant that to kind of help the diversity in the garden.

Fay Young

And and more herbs. Mint.

Luna Amanita

More yeah. Catmint here. Yeah. And, like, yeah, propagated a few of our perennial plants, so gooseberries and

Fay Young

Yeah.

Luna Amanita

And blackcurrants and stuff. And I’ll just take you through see one last thing

Fay Young

Okay.

Luna Amanita

Which is the bees. Oh. Maybe we won’t get too close, but we should be okay just just out here.

Fay Young

Goodness me. I didn’t expect to see them so busy.

Luna Amanita

It’s yeah. They’ve actually they don’t seem to be having a bad season at all. We

Fay Young

How interesting.

Luna Amanita

We did what’s called a hive inspection earlier this morning, in in one of our hives, and it’s really it seems very full.

Fay Young

Oh, gosh.

Luna Amanita

And we’ve added on an extra sort of super to give them more space. So, yeah, they they don’t seem to be slowed down at all.

Fay Young

What kind of what kind of honeybees are they? Are they?

Luna Amanita

Generally, like, most honeybees are kind of like a mix. Yeah, we’ve run courses around beekeeping and

Fay Young

How many bees are there, do you think?

Luna Amanita

There’s 2 hives that we’re looking at. Hives. They’re both busy. There’s lots of foragers coming back to the hives and getting trapped at the entrance. It’s just too busy.

The the box on the on the bottom of the hives, this is quite wider than the supers and, taller than the supers even. It’s got a brood box. And I think, you know, you’re talking in the 1,000. I think it’s it’s, 1 or 4. I think it can be 3 to 4000.

And that’s that is gonna top of my head. So Okay. What an amazing, thing to have to to be able to interact with these guys.

Sometimes we interact with them, yeah, more than we’d like to. So let’s let’s move away. But I’m

Fay Young

So have you done the beekeeping course as well, Luna?

Luna Amanita

Yeah. So, couple years ago, we got funding to run beekeeping sessions, and we had a really knowledgeable beekeeper who, yeah, very generously, like, taught the sessions. And then I was kind of co running those.

Fay Young

Right.

Luna Amanita

And then last year, I became the beekeeper with that training. So

Fay Young

Gosh, I didn’t realize we were talking to the beekeeper.

Luna Amanita

Now now me and Jack are are sharing the responsibility. But, yeah, it’s, it is like a steep learning curve, I I would say. Because, yeah, there’s there is actually quite a lot to it. And from spring until until maybe November or so, like, they, you know, they’re a bit like a pet. You need to, need to be, like, checking in on them, do a hive inspection every week or so.

So, yeah, they’re fairly demanding. But, yeah, maybe let’s sit around the fire.

Fay Young

Lovely. So thank you very much. That that’s a a lovely introduction. Can you tell us a bit more about how you became involved?

Luna Amanita

Yeah. So I started off here as a volunteer in 2021, and it was kind of like a interesting junction point for the for the project. Because Max, the founder, had until that year been running it, more as a market garden than a community garden. But then he started bringing in volunteers that year and I was one of them. And, yeah, I think, like, it became obvious to him at that point that, like, yeah, the community part of it, that was, like, that was the real offering or that was what could be the best way to utilise the space.

And and, like, when I joined, it was really such a lovely crowd of us. It was during lockdown or just coming out of lockdowns, and, yeah, a lot of people had come and get involved during that period. And we would, yeah, just do volunteer sessions twice a week and, share a potluck style lunch. And, you know, we’re nowhere we were there to get the gardening the jobs of the garden done but oftentimes those lunches would they would go on a bit, let’s say. And that was 2021.

The following year, Max brought me on to help out with the admin for the business, and I was still volunteering as a for the gardening group. And then last year, he and his partner had a baby. So very quickly, it became my, this became my baby. Oh,

Fay Young

so that was a really big step up in responsibility.

Luna Amanita

Yeah. And I’m not a I’m I’m not a gardener by trade. Alright. I haven’t been I’ve never done any horticultural training.

Fay Young

What did you do before? What what was your line of work?

Luna Amanita

So I’ve worked in care before that and until he offered the the at first, like, the admin side of stuff, and then and then more responsibility. It hadn’t really occurred to me as a career but I’m very grateful that it did.

Fay Young

So working with working in a garden, a community garden, you are also working with people. Mhmm.

Luna Amanita

It’s it’s not  just about growing plants, you’re establishing relationships and and in an environment where people come together and, so that does take well, as well as organisational skills, you know, just getting to know one another.

Fay Young

How how many people do you have coming here? How volunteers and and members of the community?

Luna Amanita

It could be quite variable. There’s been points where, like, our volunteer sessions would have five or six people coming regularly, and then they’re, like and then that might it might just go down to one or two. And we’re we’re quite we’re at the beginning of this season. We’ve just started up with our gardening volunteer shifts, garden volunteer sessions. So we’ve only got two or three at the moment, but, yeah, we’d anticipate that to build up over time.

But, also, like, yeah, we’re in a bit of, like, a place of flux within the project and, hoping to move more or so in the community direction. So we’ve also just started community sessions on Fridays, which are more aimed at, involving the community and being responsive to what they want to do rather than the needs of the the the growing schedule and and and work. And, again, yeah, those are just started and only a couple people so far. But, hopefully, those will build up and then we’ll be able to reach people who have, yeah, different interests and different needs from the space.

Fay Young

So you have people coming from roundabout? Mhmm. Because you really are right in the heart of a residential area, aren’t you?

Luna Amanita

We’re very residential. Yeah. So we’re in Parkhead, which, is in East Glasgow and one of the poorest parts of Glasgow. And we get volunteers from our local area, but we also, like, we do get volunteers from, say, Dennistoun or Southside and, like, there’s a broad demographic of kind of service users, I guess, and and people who want to engage with the space. And, like, yeah, like I mentioned, like, maybe there’s different interests, there’s different capacity, there’s different ability.

I like and we’re trying to be more responsive to that because, yeah, like, the gardening and food production orientated sessions are great but they are you know, there’s there’s a job to do.

Fay Young

Yeah. Yeah.

Luna Amanita

And Yeah. I guess maybe it’s worth mentioning that, like, we are here growing lots of interesting things, but maybe, like, to a lot of people, especially in in areas like this, it’s it’s quite unusual and, like, maybe a bit foreign as well. So there’s yeah. I think there’s long term work to be done on on firstly convincing the the the very local people, the very local community that this is a space for them, but also, like, to introduce them to or, like, generate interest in in a wide variety of vegetables. Or, you know, like, having at least like more of a conscious relationship to food and where it comes from.

I guess that we do see that as part of our our mission here.

Fay Young

Yes. I was I was going to ask you because you’re you’re you’re talking about being perhaps looking at how it works and and how what it’s for. But you have a core set of aims. Is that right?

Luna Amanita

Yeah. I think our USP at at to an extent, and I think it is fairly unusual, is to marry the intense output, like, a lot of food production on the small amount of space. With a community garden, you know, oftentimes, you know, these things exist, but they exist separately. And what we are about, to an extent, is restoring relationships to food, growing to food, to land, and the access to those things to communities that are not enjoying those benefits. And it’s, yeah.

Like, certainly, when I started volunteering here, the idea around feeding people does add, like, a certain quality, a certain meaning to the to the work. Not that ornamental gardens are are not also, like, really valuable, but, yeah, we think this is also something that people should be able to do. And in an urban context, it could be quite difficult to access. Yeah.

Fay Young

Yeah. Mhmm. The benefits of coming here are are quite varied. Do you notice, do you feel, that those, people changing or or showing new sense of confidence or use gaining new skills? Is is that part of what you do here as well?

Luna Amanita

Yeah. Definitely. And yeah, we’ve had volunteers, who I think have have really had a lot of impact from being involved with the space and, like, building confidence, maybe, like, building employability skills. We’ve had people who like me or, like, I never thought that this food growing was for me and then have gone on to pursue as a career. And, yeah, I think there is, like, quite tangible things like that.

But also I do yeah. I I feel like there’s, kind of harder to pin down, more ethereal benefit to engaging with with the land in such a tangible way. Literally, you’ve got your hands in the soil. And to me, yeah, there’s something about, like, connecting to practices that have been done by people for a very long time. And the secret is out now about, like, the benefit of being outdoors and, yeah, I increasingly understood, like, the, like, the for example, the benefits to your gut bacteria if you’re getting your hands dirty and, regularly.

But, yeah, like, also to me, like, there is a bit of, like, a yeah. I would for me, it’s a a spiritual thing, to be in in communion with the land in that way.

Fay Young

Yes. And I think it’s something that we don’t think about street, cities as streets and concrete

Luna Amanita: and

Fay Young: hard hard landscaping, and yet it is all built on the land, isn’t it? And and Yeah. You don’t have to leave things alone for very long for nature to reassert itself and Okay. Grow back through the cracks. Yeah.

So, but you have you have a it’s half an acre, and it’s fertile, and and it responds to to what you’re doing. That must be very rewarding. Perhaps we could talk a little bit about the actual practical things, the activities in the the calendar. So you’ve been talking about the workshops that you do and and we’ve had a look at the planting calendar, it’s already well on its way. But what’s on the agenda for, activities here in the in the near future?

Luna Amanita

Things are really getting rolling just right now. But, yeah, we’re gonna continue our our volunteer sessions on Thursdays that are, yeah, orientated towards the the needs of the of the product of the crops and, doing lots of seed sowing, planting out, lots of lots of weeding. But then on Fridays, we’re also gonna be doing these community sessions and, yeah, like, to, in a sense, seeing what the community wants it to be about. Could do things like, you know, sowing wildflowers, looking around at the ecology of the space and, you know, trying to identify different bugs. They could just come and hang out, you know, like, if that’s what what people wanna do, then then that’s great.

And, yeah, we’re just starting this week working with local partners to run gardening sessions for people who are pregnant and going through the, maternity process, but might, face barriers to that, mostly because they’re women from refugee backgrounds. And, yeah, another partner organization supports local young people. So we’re gonna do that, like, a combined group. And, again, yeah, like, I guess, it’s taking a holistic approach to the health of of these people, because, really, it’s just about being in the green space, having a social, outlet and way to connect. And, again, like, that does feel like a really it makes a lot of sense for for spaces like this, for spaces like for projects like ours.

Maybe for a lot of people, the benefit is being here and, like, to be in community and yeah. Like like you mentioned, to grow food and community as well. It’s like, these are such restorative practices. So, Mondays, we’re here just a our little team, and then Tuesdays is is the those sessions. And then we’ll be doing the Bee Club.

It’s already fully subscribed. I know we’ve got a waiting list, but, we’re gonna be running once a month sessions, to teach what we know about beekeeping, but, like, but more broadly to expand the kind of pool of people looking after our bees here because, like I mentioned, there’s quite a lot of work. It’s like, you need to be quite seem to be here. And sometimes we wanna take holidays. So our our hope is to get a group that’s relatively self organizing and sharing information, sharing knowledge, and enthusiasm, and, yeah, looking after the bees with us.

And, yeah, again, like, that model of, you know, this being a place of mutual learning, mutual growth, I think, is, you know, we don’t have all the answers maybe, you know, only 20% of the answers. So that makes sense to me and to us.

Fay Young

It is when you have groups working together, it’s amazing what other people know, isn’t it? And sharing and learning for one another is a really great experience. It’s when when we’re sitting here, you know, we’re watching a bee going past you as you as you were talking, and we’re hearing the birds sing. It it’s a it’s a lovely space to be in. We are all terrifically conscious, I think, of places where life isn’t as as enjoyable.

And and also this when you’re growing and working in a garden, you’re really very much aware of how the climate is becoming much more challenging. Mhmm. And is that something you’ve found?

Luna Amanita

It’s an interesting one. Growing food in the west of Scotland is always gonna be challenging and has been, I think, yeah, time immemorial. And historically, the east of Scotland was was where most market gardens would be found. Yeah. Slightly better climate for for food growing and and much better soil and flatter.

So it yeah. It’s it’s difficult to say, honestly. I I’ve been here, as I said, since my since 2021. So, you know, every season has felt quite different in terms of, you know, climatically. But is Glasgow always just like that?

Is West Scotland always like that? It’s hard to say. I think what’s kind of scary for us as as things as the climate continues to become more unpredictable, is actually drought, which is an interesting problem to be worried about in in Scotland and Glasgow. But we here are really very fortunate. We have really sandy soil.

Most of Glasgow is quite clay soil. So the predictably huge amount of rain that we get isn’t an issue, isn’t as much an issue for us because it drains and doesn’t drown all our poor little seedlings. But it does mean we’ve got this handy, so if there was ever a drought and then, I guess, like, this time last year, last May, we had we did have a couple weeks without rain. We were managed to be responsive to that. But, that is a bit of a worry.

Yeah. And these kinds of challenges are only gonna get deeper, and it’s already food production in the UK, in Scotland, particularly in Glasgow, is already very challenging and also very, very necessary if we’re going to address the causes of climate change. Like, we really do need to be producing a lot more of what we’re eating and not importing it from overseas. So yeah, I guess, arguably, like, we should be really investing in figuring out how to grow more, like, at a societal level. We should be investing in in how to grow and produce enough food to to sustain us in Scotland so that we can, you know, have some preparedness for the challenges to come.

Fay Young

And it’s interesting in what you were saying at the beginning about this possibly being a garden during the Second World War.

Luna Amanita

Right.

Fay Young

And when people had to respond and adjust very quickly to that very thing that you’re talking about, being self reliant, self sufficient and, because you couldn’t import food.

Luna Amanita

Right.

Fay Young

So probably they were growing a lot of potatoes here I’m guessing.

Luna Amanita

Quite possibly.

Fay Young

And I think when you speak in those terms, and also maybe adjusting to a chain a warming climate, and, 22 things, you’re able to grow more things, but you might have to be working with the different kind of, pattern of weather. Too much rain at sometimes and not nearly enough at others. But also, it just an awareness of of, how the local and the global are really connected and I don’t know if that’s something you find in the garden in human terms and in in crop terms.

Luna Amanita

Right. Yes. Like like, working here and working the land, like I I I talked about it, like, to me, that is such a birthright. That’s something that I think old people or communities should have access to. And I really believe that if we are going to meet the challenges of the decades to come, we do need to restore and remember our connection to what is you know, these are our lands.

Not in a sense that we own that, I don’t believe in owning land, but in the sense that these are the thing these are the c, this is the relationship that has sustained our communities for a long time. And when I say sustained, I don’t just mean fed us, but also, like, given us a context of our own position in the world and and and in history and in geography. And, yeah, along those, I guess, like, I want to, like, draw the connection between and, like, the histories of of this land and how they are manifesting in different ways in the world we have today. I think a lot of the health issues that people in Scotland, people in Glasgow, people in Parkhead face is because of historical forces that have severed that connection that sustains us, physically, spiritually, emotionally. And, yeah, here in Scotland, it’s it’s not in living memory, you know, the Highland Clearances, enclosure, and so on.

But that is part of a process which has continued and continues of displacing people from their land, from their ingenuity, and, as we speak, is still ongoing in in Gaza and Palestine. And we perceive ourselves in a global community and struggle to restore land to people. And I think that the more I personally am in relation to the land and what it offers and what it provides us, the more sure I become that the only way to a just future is remembering our connection to the land, remembering that that’s sacred, and restoring the lands that have been stolen and are being stolen.

Fay Young

Oh, that’s very nicely put. And that just being in the growing world, I think you feel that much more strongly. Mhmm. The cost of running a space like this, you know, what what does it cost and and how do you pay for it?

Luna Amanita

It’s you don’t get into horticulture to get rich. I think probably it’s never been something that people have done because they want to be wealthy. But particularly now in our food system, growing food on our scale, like, a very small amount of land relative to, you know, like, to other farms is really economically challenging. And we are reliant on grant funding for what we do. And, I guess, you know, like, the pragmatic part of moving in more of a community garden side kind of direction is because, you know, like, this Max tried to make it work as a business that just grew food and sold food and it’s not really possible on our scale.

And I would say, like, we’ve since figured out not desirable or, like, not the best use of the space, but, like, yeah, that’s part of our kind of desire to move in a different direction and and perhaps, like, things like training and working with, higher education providers and and, like, health services is, like, part of our future. So, yeah, we’re largely grant funded just now and rely on the, goodwill of our team to accept the accept insecurity of doing this kind of work when you are, you know, when you are reliant on on grants and, you know, a yearly funding cycle. Yeah. Yes. We do have our vegplot scheme, which does it does help.

And we are a social enterprise. So, you know, we’re we use the money from the Vegbox scheme to help us run the rest of our kind of social program.

Fay Young

So tell us about the Vegbox scheme then. How does that what’s the, the structure of it then?

Luna Amanita

It’s, it’s a small one. Last year it was like between 20 30 households, and all of them are local. Again, maybe not a lot of them from Parkhead itself or the more deprived areas, I should say, of of East Glasgow. But, all of them from within the city, and we ask our customers to come here to collect the veg, which obviously has, like, very you know, has a logistically, it makes a lot of sense for us. But, also, you know, it has serving the purpose of people are directly seeing what what they’re getting and what we’re up to.

And we harvest those veg boxes the Thursday and then, you know, they collect them on the Thursday evening. So as fresh as can be. Really fresh. Which, yeah, I perhaps worth mentioning, like, the nutritional value of produce deteriorates really quickly. So, yeah, again, maybe it comes back to this thing.

It’s like, we deserve all of us deserve, like, freshly grown produce. And if people could do more of what we’re doing, you know, that could be much more available. At the moment, we run a kind of sliding scale model, for our boxes. So, for example, like, the medium sized box was, like, £10, £12, or £14 last year. And, like, the £10 is, like, is not making us any money.

So, you know, we can do what we can to try and to try and promote access and availability in our very small scheme. But, yeah, like, we have this multifaceted challenges in the food system where it’s, like, we’re importing huge amounts of food, but they are then not nutritious, and more luckily, green food is not affordable. And, like, the incentives within the food system are kind of I would describe them as the opposite way I would set them up, more towards a much larger scale production, which necessitates production methods that are not environmentally

Fay Young

It’s got built in waste, hasn’t it? Right.

Luna Amanita

And, like, yeah, the built in need to store things for a long time when they, you know, they’re getting shipped to to market, supermarkets. Yeah. It’s I I don’t think it’s a good system.

Fay Young

Not at all. No. Not at all. Enabling people to, to to get really fresh produce. Also perhaps encouraging, experimenting with different kinds of foods that they haven’t seen in the supermarket.

Luna Amanita

Yeah. Forced experiments.

Luna Amanita

People never know what to do with kohlrabi. That’s always the

Fay Young

Oh, kohlrabi.

Luna Amanita

People always in a pickle about that. Yes. Don’t don’t put it in a pickle. But,

Fay Young

It’s, it’s an extraordinary looking vegetable, but it actually tastes really good. It’s really crunchy.

Luna Amanita

I like it and it grows very well here.

Fay Young

Does it? It’s sort of like a turnip, I suppose, in behaviour, isn’t it? Yeah. Exactly.

Luna Amanita

But I think there is yeah. There’s also this issue of, like, the things that grow well here are often not very valued here. So kohlrabi is one. There’s a type of like salad green called Purse Lane or miner’s lettuce which could grow like way into the winter in Scotland and it’s delicious. Or, as the sun goes, it’s delicious.

But nobody eats it. So, yeah, I guess there’s also there’s cultural changes within built into those economic challenges within our food system. What was the question?

Fay Young

I was just wondering what what is so you’ve got kohlrabi, you’ve got what else have you got in the box?

Luna Amanita

It’s we try to be quite varied with it.

Fay Young

Yeah.

Luna Amanita

And, yeah, like like you mentioned, like, there are there’s a few times where people would be like, what is this?

Fay Young

Do you put recipe cards in?

Luna Amanita

What we’ve done in the past is have, like, a shared Google Drive.

Fay Young

Okay.

Luna Amanita

Of so people just share their recipes and and the volunteers. The customers can share them too. But yes. We’ll try to kind of have a lot of variety and, like, hit different, I guess, like macronutrients is a way of putting it. Like, we’ll try and put, like, beans or peas, something rich in protein, or try to put something quite starchy.

So we don’t do a lot of potatoes, but, maybe other root veg. Lots of turnips. Leafy greens grow really well here, salads, kale, a lot of kale. You’re going to learn to love kale if you don’t eat, a sustainable diet in Scotland. And we use the tunnels, to grow things that yeah.

And more easily appreciate let’s say. Like tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines. And I am always campaigning personally to do more winter squash because it’s kind of my favorite. This doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to do for us because it’s in the ground for a long time and you only get a crop right at the end and Yeah. Like, it tends to make more sense for us to do things that are in the ground for a short time and give you, like, a a good yield.

But, yeah, also, like, we eat everything that we grow here as well, so we wanna be growing stuff that we like to eat.

Fay Young

Absolutely. Yeah. So maybe you could have the symbolic squash. You just grow a few of them, but you you really celebrate. But I was wondering about having cookery demonstrations here.

I used to belong, when I, in in Edinburgh I used to belong to a group that that did that. And, people from all over the world, you know, showed, say you had the Indian, African, Spanish, Scottish way of cooking the potato or the apple

Luna Amanita

We’ve got, a chef joining us for our Tuesday sessions with it’s kind of the the closed group. And they’re gonna be cooking on our fire right here using produce from the garden. Wonderful. So, yeah, tasty lunches for me. But, yeah.

Yeah. You’re right. And the great thing about working in a place like this and, like, these kinds of outdoors places is there’s so like, there’s no limit to the amount of things that you you can get into. And, like you mentioned, like, the mutual kind of mutual learning is, like, everyone’s gonna bring a different kind of interest to any one thing and, like, maybe different recipes from from different family members that go back back and back. So like

Fay Young

Yeah. Yes. Food is such an emotional thing actually and there’s nothing like making, growing, making and eating a meal together is is really perfect Yeah. Kind of cycle, isn’t it? Right.

Luna Amanita

It feels very, yeah, nurturing.

Fay Young

Yes. Yes. Absolutely. So I I would just, one of the one of the questions we ask, guests is, do you find in the work that you do this this reason to be cheerful that despite all the awfulness that’s going on around us, that there is some hope. I mean, do you feel that from from the work that you do?

Are there signs of hope?

Luna Amanita

I think signs of hope are there. I really, want to be careful not to understate, like, the seriousness of the situation. And also, like, that when humans have faced a credible catastrophe before, largely, it wasn’t because of things we could’ve or things that could’ve been preventable. And, yeah, to me, would would have been preventable or more more prevented than they have been if there wasn’t the massive disenfranchisement of communities around the world. And as I’ve talked about, like, I believe removal from the land and the knowledges that come from the land is a massive part of that.

The reasons for hope, I think, are are yeah. Maybe, like, the thing that makes me hopeful is that I do really yeah. Like, I really believe, like, the getting back to communities organised around shared use of land, common goals, nurturing of one another, and, yeah, like, have, like, the resources within them to be sovereign, like, sovereign communities, I think that is the way through the crises that are happening, the crises to come. But what makes me hopeful is that if that happens, it would also begin to unravel a lot of the threads of domination, imperialism, alienation, I sound like an academic, and poor health, and I mean that I mean, poor health in the broadest sense that afflict us and have afflicted our societies societies even before the climate breakdown started to to become un ignorable. Does that make sense?

Fay Young

Yes, it does. It does. It’s The the hope and the despair are often very close together, aren’t they? But but, everything has to start somewhere, and what you’re doing here is is a very encouraging and

Luna Amanita

Thank you.

Fay Young

Uplifting start. And and it’s certainly sitting here. A lot of things feel possible. So amazingly, we’ve we’ve reached the end of our, conversation, except for one question that with which everyone gets asked, and can be difficult or not, depending on your way of looking at buildings. And and, it’s, to ask you what is your favorite building in Glasgow, and what its walls would say if they could speak.

Luna Amanita

I find it much easier to appreciate the

Fay Young

Well, it could be a space. It I don’t think it has to be a building. Great.

Luna Amanita

Okay. That’s where I’m going.

Fay Young

Great. Good.

Luna Amanita

Yeah. The beauty of natural design are outdoor spaces, which, you know, can be human spaces also, is something that I find much easier to appreciate. Last week, I went to the Southern Necropolis here in Glasgow, which is yeah. It’s in the Gorbals Bulls. It’s off this really big main road, and perhaps, like, not as well known about as the the the central Necropolis, but, it’s beautiful.

There’s old birch trees and lots of there’s a bit of a sense of wellness to it, and there’s lots of plants that really like living in in grave yards and cemeteries. And Yes.

Fay Young

It’s good, rich, environment. Right.

Luna Amanita

And it’s in terms of buildings, there’s a kind of I wanna call it a portcullis, it’s like a gatehouse, which, yeah, maybe when the necropolis was being built, like, security in these places was a big concern. But, obviously, it’s long abandoned now and the pigeons have taken up nest there. So I think that the walls who are speaking there would be goo goo. And, literally, they are. So I think that’s

Fay Young

That’s it. That’s lovely. It’s very different. Thank you so much Luna. Thank you.

It’s been really, a a very nice time to spend with you here and, we’ve covered a lot of ground and literally Yes.

Luna Amanita Thank you for metaphorically. Bearing with me.

Fay Young

Not at all. No. It’s it’s been a great pleasure. Thank you very much indeed.

Katharine Neil

Glasgow City Heritage Trust is an independent charity and grant funder that promotes the understanding, appreciation, and conservation of Glasgow’s historic built environment. Do Do you want to know more? Have a look at our website atglasgowheritage.org.uk and follow us on social media at Glasgow Heritage. This podcast was produced by Inner Ear for Glasgow City Heritage Trust and is sponsored by Tunnock’s.

Bash Khan

You need to invest in people. If you design it from the community, if anyone else who comes in parachutes in, that never ever works.

Niall Murphy

No. It never works. It’s gotta be grassroots.

Bash Khan

It’s always got to be connected to grassroots. But also to recognize that there are skills within that community. Uh-huh. Because I think sometimes what happens is people expect people to do that for for free as well. And I also think that’s slightly unfair.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. It is.

Bash Khan

If the planners are getting paid, if the designers are getting paid, if the architects are getting paid, if the builders are getting paid, then someone who is qualified should be, you know and I said that I put this word of value again down. Value those people’s time and expertise, but and also value that something good might come out of it.

Niall Murphy

Hello, everyone, and welcome to If Glasgow’s Walls Good Talk. I’m Niall Murphy.

Fay Young

And I’m Fay Young.

Niall Murphy

In today’s episode, we’re meeting Basharat Khan, Bash for short, a Glasgow based filmmaker and visual artist with a real passion for bringing public spaces to life. He is telling the stories of real people in new ways and often unexpected places.

Fay Young

Yes. And his larger than life images are quite literally eye opening. During the pandemic, Bash’s live film portraits celebrated the more usually invisible people who kept, they still keep, our vital services going. He projected them telling their stories onto familiar buildings at a scale normally reserved for celebrities. The impact was astonishing.

Niall Murphy

Yes. That really was eye opening. We’ve all grown used to seeing faces no bigger than our thumbs on mobile screens. And there they were, ordinary people being celebrated for the extraordinary work like hero;s. Work like this challenges the way we see the world. Bash let’s start with you telling us what you’re working on right now.

Bash Khan

Thank you very much, for that introduction. You just touched upon on the Edge project, which was well, I really exploration of looking at, you know, the value of people and the value of who actually makes our society run. And, of course, this is very much on the, kind of, the backdrop to the conversation coming from our political classes, you know, who are questioning the value of people in our communities, the value of arts, the value of teachers, the value of nurses. So, really, I think it was a real response to that narrative that was going around about the working class, people from migrant communities. And as I said, these are the people who actually make our societies run.

Absolutely. But, of course, the second thing that I was also looking at was how the places where the key workers were staying in were literally on the edge of Glasgow’s boundary. Mhmm. Now my experience goes back 20 odd years, and I first started working in the Red Road Flats, up in Springburn.

Niall Murphy

Yes.

Bash Khan

Working with Street Level Photo Works. We were exploring the the new communities that were coming in, from, you know, all different parts of the world and being housed in these high rise flats. And even at that stage, it struck me about the extreme extreme lack of facilities, everyday facilities that people require to, you know, live, you know, what you consider to be, you know, happy, comfortable lives. So the only shop that that a place all had is one shop, I believe, and one pharmacy.

Niall Murphy

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s that Billy Connolly quote, deserts with windaes.

Bash Khan

Yeah. And I think since that time, that’s really been at the forefront of my kind of thinking about how places have they been designed for communities? Mhmm. You know, what what are the processes that have led to, you know, our built environment? There are so called consultations that happen, but in reality, how many of those suggestions that people ask for, how many of them were actually implemented, into planning, for healthy, vibrant communities.

And, yeah, and going back from Springburn, you know, 20 odd years to even now working in in the Gorbals, which is Mhmm. How it has gone through, regenerations every 15, 20 years, I think.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. The Gorbals me as one of the most interesting parts of the cities precisely because of that.

Bash Khan

One of the participants I was working with last year, a lovely woman called Mary, and, you know, and her joke always was, she goes she goes, all these planners and set designers, they all got bored and said, you know what? Let’s tear down the garbles and start again. And and that’s how the community sees it. That’s how people see it on the ground that it’s been designed not for people in mind. Sure.

Niall Murphy

Okay. No. I can I can completely understand that? And, yeah, I mean, areas like the global sample happened to Springburn are hugely frustrating. And particularly when you look at the city now, you think you just can’t afford to, like, constantly be demolishing, starting again.

It’s such a waste of resources, but it’s also what it does to the community at the same time, that kind of fracturing of the community, the kind of loss of all of the kind of the the the places where them they they associate memories with. Things like that to me, that’s that’s one of the tragedies of Glasgow, that people lose kind of once you obliterate things like that, they people kind of it it’s it’s, you know, I think it’s one of the issues that causes the Glasgow effect. And I’m kind of with Sir Harry Burns on that. I think that’s a that’s a major issue for me.

Bash Khan

Mhmm. Yeah.

Fay Young: Yeah. Could I ask you both what you what you think makes a good public place? What what helps people to feel like they belong and to to have the confidence to make friends, actually, you know, to feel part of a community?

Bash Khan

Yeah. I think I’ve got one suggestion. I was like, benches.

Fay Young

Somewhere to sit.

Bash Khan

Somewhere to sit. Somewhere to take a a moment. Somewhere just to be present in a place rather than just passing through it. You know? And I think if you look at you know, we’ve all been to different places around the world, and we’ve seen some amazing parks and where the seating has been designed in very specific ways where it kind of encourages, you know maybe you may have a chance with a conversation to the person next to you or you might play chess or backgammon out in the park, you know, that, you know, that I’ve seen in other places.

You have to create those spaces and those, yeah, those benches and seats. And if you think about it, whenever you walk in certain community areas, how often do you find a place to sit?

Fay Young

Yeah. Yes. In fact, sometimes they’ve taken the seats away. You know, I’d I lived in Edinburgh for a long time and they actually removed a bench because they felt it was encouraging, the wrong kind of people to sit there.

Niall Murphy

That’s so so depressing. I remember at the Glasgow and, obviously, this has been subject of huge debate, the concert hall steps. Ah, yeah. This is when this was first mooted getting rid of the steps back in 2006. And there’s a police representative, and this was, you know, pre Scottish police, or Police Scotland.

And the police representative I always got quite well with suddenly said, no. You don’t want that space. People loiter there, and they eat sandwiches there. And you’re like, my goodness. A crime.

And everybody else was, no. No. No. That’s a good thing. Like, that means you’re encouraging socialisation.

And there was a the police’s attitude was, no. It’s all now to us. You don’t want them. And it was like, but the but they used used for graduation ceremonies and take people taking photographs. What’s wrong with It was it was completely different ethos.

And, yeah, you have you have to create those spaces around the city where you can get spontaneity and, you know, people interacting with each other. That’s what makes a city fun and makes you wanna live in it.

Bash Khan

You know, on on that note, just to connect connect it up, on one of my projects, I actually took a red bench for a walk around the east end of Glasgow.

Fay Young

Oh, wow.

Bash Khan

So that’s, you know and as as part of the two processes, one is, of course, is the bench itself. The second process is the camera. And the camera then, I encourage people to sit sit on the bench and talk about this idea, about the lack of public spaces and setting. So then those those two kind of those two things at play create the image at the end. And, you know, and that created a whole range.

And one, you know, over a few weekends, that created a whole range of conversations. Allowed me to meet all the different business owners. I met to meet some people who live in that in that area. And that only happens at the city within maybe 4 or 5 hours.

Niall Murphy

Yes.

Bash Khan

And how much connectivity you can actually get within that short space time is remarkable. But if you create the the space for it, the sculpture or the environment for that Yeah. And I think this is something that we still haven’t really done in in communities, because you have to instigate these things. You have to create interventions, I think, which, you know, used to happen through fiestas, for example. Yeah?

People would decide, okay. I can get I can get involved now in this. Okay? Yeah. Of course, Christmas does at at times.

You know, people, okay. I can get involved in this now. I can sing in a choir in a public space.

Fay Young

Yeah. And what you’re describing doesn’t take a huge amount of money, does it? I mean, you can you can create a welcoming environment by putting a bench down as you’re describing, but also just those gentle interventions that require some human skills, I guess, and an open mindedness.

Bash Khan

Yeah.

Fay Young

Bash, you do seem to have a natural talent for bringing people together, and and perhaps as you’ve described and and Niall has been saying an interest in people who live on the edge. Is that right? And how did you become a filmmaker? What brought you into this?

Bash Khan

The idea of representation has always been very interesting for me. As someone coming from, a diverse background, growing up in Scotland, it’s something you become very aware of growing up as a, you know, as a young child, even in your in your professional life, about the lack of representation of people of color, people from diverse backgrounds. But also for me, that also goes into the said even into the working class which, you know, really covers a whole range of people. That really does cover everyone. So that thing’s always been very important for me.

The I did reps how to represent, people that may not be given the that I feel that they should have in society. And and, yeah, and fair, you were alluding to how that kinda came to be, about seeing the value in others. My kind of journey in this started in a very different way. I was I was on the road to become a mechanical engineer, an extremely bored mechanical engineer, if if I if I had gone gone through with it. So I’ve kind of got a course in my kind of, education and where I was gonna go next.

And and interesting enough, I studied two things at that time. I did a part time course in psychology for six months, and then I did a part time course in photography. And I was gonna I was gonna choose between the two. And then the summer before I was gonna start the course, I had the chance to go to to France for the World Cup. France 98.

Is that right?

Niall Murphy

Yes.

Bash Khan

Oh my god. That’s so Yep. Yep.

Fay Young

Okay. Oh, no.

Bash Khan

So anyway, going to France, I actually borrowed my one of my, you know, best friends from school. I borrowed his camera to say, like, I wanna go and try taking some photos and photographs. It was the first time I’d kinda gone with that kind of process in the mind that I want to, yeah, just document this time, this moment. What that was, I wasn’t aware of what what was what was going to be. And then the excitement of having the camera and having, you know, being in Paris on, I believe, the first day or the second day, we were going out to the, the main square to watch the match.

And so we took the metro and lo and behold, by the time we turned up to the square, the camera was gone. No. I had left it on the train, in some in some process. I don’t know if I left it or it was taken for me. I’m not sure.

Niall Murphy

Easy done. Yeah, especially in Paris.

Bash Khan

So the the dreams of documenting all this kind of, can evap evaporated. But then a week later, we were camping in Leon, for sorry. We were in a week later for the next round, of the following the Tartan army round. And on the night after the game, on the way back to the campsite, I found another camera lying around.

Niall Murphy

How how how handy?

Bash Khan

You know. This was a well, my friend’s was quite a nice expensive kind of proper thing with the lens and everything. This is a plastic thing, and it was a kind of a point and shoot, but no one no one claimed it. So then I had this camera for the last seven days of of the journey. And then I suppose the pivotal moment became one night I end up actually kind of, somehow being completely losing my friends one night.

It’s just the crowds were just so huge. So I ended up this one one evening in Paris, just myself and the camera walking around. And because of the camera, I managed to connect. And this is important as well. If I was with my friends, this would not happen.

Being on your own, I had to connect with someone again and say, how do I make that kind of connection? And for me, the camera became this really kind of universal language. So I didn’t have to speak that person’s language, but putting the camera and making a suggestion with your head saying, like, saying, can I take a picture? Everyone everyone understood that language. Yes.

And it was through that process. You know, I still remember that night very clearly. I know I met Mhmm. People from from Chile, from Morocco, from Argentina, from Senegal, Iran. You know, it was just a huge night.

Niall Murphy

God, that’d be such a such an amazing experience.

Bash Khan

And then I realized at that moment that actually the camera was a tool to connect. The act of making an image or even the act of asking someone for the image was maybe an act of saying, I recognize you. I feel that you are worth representing.

So I think those things at that point became quite a powerful powerful thing for me. And when I came back from Paris, I started doing photography, and photography then became that was my first love. Mhmm.

Niall Murphy

So what was it like coming back home then?

Bash Khan

I think that that was a a new journey then, taking a start on something new. You know, being involved in the in the arts was something I’d never ever considered. It was wasn’t something that, you know, culturally growing up that you think might be a feasible career option. You do wonder, but that even that case as well of representation and and even now, we are still we are still getting there, but we haven’t, you know, rectified those issues. So going back 20 odd years, if you can imagine the landscape was even different back then where the lack of representation was very, very low.

So it’s about finding that space for yourself and finding that, yeah, space and avenue where your work connects, where your work can fit in.

Fay Young

And you’ve branched out considerably with your work, working not just in Scotland. You’ve worked across the world, haven’t you, as far, from Spain to to Pakistan. Are you seeing I mean, the the stories you tell, the stories you record, and they’re available for people to see on your website, very interesting website. Are there common themes that you you find, you know, when when people are telling their stories about maybe often disrupted lives?

Bash Khan

If you touch upon the the documentary that I made in Pakistan, and I said it’s always a bit challenging. It’s all about challenging perceptions. I think this is always a key, the key theme that runs through a lot of my work. Now that was made just about, oh, maybe about over 10 years ago. Now when I and this is how the the media and even now, we have got huge question marks, and people are now beginning to realize, you know, the impact that the media has on swaying and forming and sculpting public opinion is powerful.

It’s hugely powerful. So myself as, you know, first generation, Scotch Pakistani, you know, I have connections to Pakistan. I’ve got cousins there. I’ve been over, you know, many times. I know the place well.

And even when when I was going to go across and said to him, I’m gonna go across. I’m gonna be there for two months and I want to work on something. I want to explore. And I said the camera gives you that excuse to do this. So this is why I became very conscious that, you know, the camera is powerful and I need to to use it to tell stories.

So I was kind of thinking what what should I focus on? What are the themes that I should focus on if I’m going to go to Pakistan to make a documentary? Now the first things that came to my head when I was making some notes and ideas was terrorism, poverty, environmental issues, human rights. Everything I initially thought of was ideas that had been kind of almost been shaped in my head by what I’ve what I’ve been exposed to by the media over the last ten years prior to that.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. There’s not not a lot of joy there.

Bash Khan

No. And if that’s someone like myself who knows the place, who comes from Pakistani heritage, those are some of my thoughts about that place. How is someone else going to react to that place if they’ve got no exposure to it whatsoever? So at that point, I became you know, I had to kinda slap myself in the head and said, right, why are you having these thoughts first? Because there’s much more to a place than what these things, you know, are laid out by by the the mainstream media.

So I kinda went with a very different approach to say, well, I the idea I said, how do I represent people honestly? Do I go with my take on it of what should talk about? So should I go and force them to talk about terrorism and poverty or whatever? Or would the act of representation actually be to ask them what’s important to them? Yeah.

I see. So in that case, they set the agenda of what they wanna talk about.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Yeah. So voices that are important in this.

Bash Khan

Yeah. So if if they wanna talk about something that’s heavy and intense, then fair enough. That’s absolutely fine. But if something else that they wanna talk about, then let’s try to kind of follow, follow that process. And so again, I used it over a process called of serendipity where I allowed kind of one main character who was a taxi driver who’d written his book about his experiences of working in a taxi, and he has some lovely kind of thoughts and ideas which also reflected some of my approach about finding the other side of the story.

Mhmm. So one person led me on to another person about who I should speak to next, and they said, well, we should go and speak to this person. This is gonna be quite interesting. So I kinda allowed that process to kind of connect the dots, and, yeah, just turn into a very kind of, I call it, vignettes of different different lives, and different short stories at play.

Fay Young

It sounds fascinating. You can see it being a great documentary. And you could do the same in Glasgow, of course.

Niall Murphy

Certainly, you could.

Bash Khan

This is the thing where, you know, I don’t even a lot of my, you know, part of my process involves media education as well. And Mhmm. And one of the key things that that I look at, especially with lots of young people, to say we can’t just be consumers of stories. Okay? And I’ve become quite conscious now so that after COVID, how much stuff we consumed and how much more films can you consume.

But also getting young people to think about not just being consumers, but creators of stories as well because you’ve got the tool in your hand. It’s such a powerful tool at the moment. And of course, young people are doing that through TikTok and Instagram, finding all these different, models. And I think we are telling more stories than ever before. There’s no doubt about that.

Niall Murphy

True. But then there’s some of the formats of things I’ve I’ve ended up being quite divisive, which I think is really weird. And, you know, I thought I thought things like Twitter would be great for, like, finding out about aspects of the world. And, yeah, some of it ends up in the sewer all the time, and you’re like, it’s quite depressing because it doesn’t have to be like that. You have a choice.

Yeah. You know? You don’t have to be that way.

Bash Khan

In a couple of my films and actually, I also in terms of some of my style of because of my own personal work, has been quite slow, you know. I working in in in the media sector, everyone’s like, can you make it quick? Can we make it short? Can we make it one minute? Can we make it small, wee and twee and quick?

And I was like, of course, we can do that. But I said, if a person’s interested, they’ll watch that thing. Yeah. I know I know you are, you know, jostling for people’s time and attention, But I think there has to be space for something that’s slow and considered at times.

Niall Murphy

Absolutely. I mean, it’s like it’s like with reading, you know, and people’s attention spans has gotten much shorter because of what the media has done and the mechanisms that we’re using to convey things. Whereas the pleasure of being able to read something, that’s that seems to have been lost to a degree to to to a degree now. Mhmm. Yep.

Fay Young

And it brings us back to what Niall was describing at the beginning of of how you turned people into well, well, actually, and, instead of being tiny figures on a on a TikTok screen or whatever, you see these magnificent large scale images that you were projecting. That’s a really interesting turnaround. And I suppose going back to what you were saying about slowing things down, You have to take more time to look at a bigger image and

Bash Khan

Yeah.

Fay Young

In in around you in this space. How do do you want to tell us a bit more about how you created that and set it up and how it was received as well?

Bash Khan

Do you remember at the start when I said I was gonna choose between two2 things, and it was going to be either psychology or photography? What was really interesting was over, you know, over, you know, over my my practice, so far. Of course, a lot of psychology has come out from the, you know, the the visual, medium. There’s a lot of psychology involved in how how we see ourselves, how we read stories, how we feel about things, And one of my earliest projections so as part of my process, I started looking at the using video projections as the outside gallery. Okay.

Looking at ways of using the public realm to tell stories that took place in those environments. So if the story is about the high rise flats and Gorbals in Norfolk Court, then that story should be told outside Norfolk Court rather than Yeah. Another location in the centre of town or somewhere else.

Niall Murphy

Yes.

Bash Khan

So connecting, you know, the story to place is really important. So some of these early projections that I kind of did in these environments involves two things. One is video portraits. So the way I take the images is they are taken in the style of a traditional photographic portrait, but they’re done in video. Now when I ask people to do this, I said, listen.

All I’m gonna do is I’m gonna record you for about a minute, minute 30. Sometimes it’ll be 2 minutes max. And all I need you to do is just to just to be present. That’s all. Just to be present.

And what that process allows is everyone starts off being maybe a little bit tense or putting on their photographic face. But after 15 or 20 seconds, that breaks. And what I can feel is a real humanity comes out. And I described it as living, breathing portrait. So you see the person breathing, smiling, blinking.

And eventually, I said they they reveal something about themselves. And for me, it’s humanity. It’s beauty in that element. And when I asked someone at this point, I said, how does that feel to be part of that process, you know, to be photographed in that way? And I said, you know what?

Actually, it was the first time where I didn’t have to think about anything. Mhmm. I was just I was just being present. I was just here for 2 minutes in this experience. So even that act, when people are getting photographed, there’s something there that comes through.

But, again, slowing things down, it’s not quite a photograph that happens in 5 seconds, especially we we are here. But also the psychology as when I’m looking at your eye Mhmm. When I look at your eye for a few seconds or for 5 seconds or 20 seconds or 30 seconds, the longer I look at that connection, because as I said your eyes are alive Mhmm. You build those connections. You build that empathy with Yeah.

Niall Murphy: Yeah.

Bash Khan

So that is the experience that the the audience gets, or I hope the audience gets by looking at this work. The second thing was a mother came came round, and she said, oh, my daughter got involved in this project. I heard her photographs are gonna get projected onto this, big screen. Can you can you tell me hurry up and tell me when it’s gonna happen? I have to go soon, you know.

Can you come on? I have to go soon. And I think this would be about it’d be half 5 at night. And I said, look, we’re gonna be ready in, yeah, 15, 20 minutes, and we’ll be right, you know. We will get started.

And of course, when I’m presenting this kind of work, I do look at the audience. I’m always interested to see how an audience is engaging with the work, you know, if it’s making the connections, if they’re, you know and I looked around, and this time it was about 6:45, and an hour later, the woman was still there looking at her daughter on on on the screen. And and this is where and I said, you realise these things by doing these things, by testing these things. And at that moment, I thought, wow. I said she’s never seen her daughter at that scale before, you know, at that size before.

She’s larger than life. And, of course, when you’re that large, you’re seeing someone. I think you’re important enough to be that scale. Mhmm. So I think at that moment, I’ve realised that there’s a real interest in psychology within this play as well.

And I think in Scotland, we need that anyway. I think we need to be a bit more confident about ourselves as a nation. So I think all these things are kind of designed to, you know, yeah, see if we can make those small changes. Mhmm.

Fay Young

Yeah. That’s that’s really that’s very touching, actually. And the relationship that that, comes about. Yeah.

Bash Khan

And of course, yeah, you know, so this is then being replicated with On the Edge. The 4 areas we worked on for On the Edge project, was, Dumbarton, Milton, Easterhouse , and Castlemilk . And again, literally, I said four areas right on Glasgow’s, boundary. And again and I think this is where the the idea of looking at the public realm came into play after COVID. So following on from conversation about lack of benches but also the lack of gathering spaces in our communities.

I was conscious of it before COVID, but I think after COVID, it became a huge, huge thing to say, well, where can we gather outdoors safely? Yeah. It’s okay. So you can’t be okay. But, you know, surely there could have been ways that we could have rectified that and encouraged people to be outdoors and still not feel so alone, so isolated.

So on the Edge Project, worked kind of with local communities, worked with local, community organisations to identify locations which in themselves were meant to be a conversation about, well, can this place be used for something else? Can this place be utilised for the community’s usage? So all the four sites that we we saw were kind of semi derelict kind of places, places that have been kinda shut down, but also fantastic open green spaces, which, you know, are not used for anything at all. So it’s also about reactivating and thinking about those places and how you know, I I think we’ve got huge issue around accessing our public spaces, you know. How much you know, without having to go through lots of kind of red tape and jumping through lots of hoops.

But how can we get small allotments out there? How can we get benches and seating areas that are covered? You know, we have to work with the weather, but Mhmm. There’s ways to do that. So, yeah, it’s just really looking at when we’re designing these places, when we’re looking at building new houses in the Gorbals and we had a chance, I feel, in the Gorbals as an example, to look at examples from around the world where you create hubs right in the heart of all these houses.

Because even now with all the beautiful houses being made, I’m looking at where are the coffee shops? Where are the the the kind of the small kind of drop in commute community centers? Where are the decent parks?

Niall Murphy

Yeah.

Bash Khan

They’re right there. Yep. So, yeah, I think there’s still issues around that that need to be looked at. Mhmm.

Niall Murphy

That’s it has has been a failing. I mean, you’ve got Crown Street as as the retail hub for, the Gorbals. But the problem is when you begin to look at places like Goebbels Plus, it just doesn’t work. It’s you know, there there is no proper active frontage onto it. You know, the north side is is the back of the the the the supermarket.

And then on the south side, you’ve got the health centre and then the new Gorbal Housing Association offices. But neither of them are genuinely active because they can’t be active because those are you know, you have to have private conversations and things in those particular buildings, and they’re they’re they’re, you know, they’re business conversations. They’re not designed to connect into the public realm. You know, what it needs is a cafe. What it needs is proper cover.

What it needs is interesting shops. And it needs, as you’ve said, kind of benches or seating that people can spill out onto and actually have a conversation about.

Bash Khan

Nialll, have you seen have you been have you been inside the the health center?

Niall Murphy

Not the health centre, but I have been in New Gorbal Housing Association’s offices, which are lovely offices. They’re just they’re not, you know, they don’t engage with that space. So what’s the what’s the health center like inside?

Bash Khan:

Well, if you get a chance to go inside, I also created some of these about over 200 portraits of, the local community.

Niall Murphy

Right.

Bash Khan

So you’ll find you’ll actually find those, video portraits inside the health centre. Mhmm. And that, again, that was done as a project to allow people from the area themselves Mhmm. Mhmm. To see themselves reflected in the places that in their communities.

Niall Murphy

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The NHS, they have a really good program of doing things like that, which is really exciting and innovative. So I’ve been involved in some of those before in East Pollock Shields.

Bash Khan

Yeah. And, of course, when we were working in the Gorbal’s, we invited people following the Gorbal’s to say, like, well, me and Garbal’s, Plaza, The Gorbal’s Piazza. And then they’re like, where’s that?

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Good luck.

Fay Young

That’s a way.

Niall Murphy

It’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s it’s more of a kind of pedestrian corridor with a bit of car parking thrown in. It’s not a genuine public space. It just doesn’t work. And it’s it’s funny because there’s a lot lot of talent involved in it, and they just didn’t get what public space was.

Fay Young

Yeah. Well, I was just wondering, who makes the decisions about, you know, planning the the public space? Is is it a planning issue? Is it the consultations that you referred to Bas? I’ve been involved in consultations and you know, what happens to them?

What happens to the the people’s thoughts that are gathered? I I wonder where they end up. But, yeah, Niall, do you is is it a planning issue?

Niall Murphy

I I suspect so. I think probably because it was too detached from people. I mean, I don’t I don’t actually know the background to how the space came about, but it does feel awfully disconnected. I’ve been involved in I helped set up a charrette in East Pollock Shields. This is back in 2016.

And the whole the whole thrust of that was it had to be people from the neighbourhood who were leading on it, and it had to be a grassroots initiative. And even as the person who helped set up, it was myself and the chair of the local community council. We stepped out of it because we wanted, you know, we’d had our say. We’d set the thing up. But we wanted local people to come forward and to actually lead in it and get their say because otherwise, I’d be sitting going, no.

You got that wrong and you got this wrong. And and that wasn’t the right thing to do. I had I had to it’s like, you know, letting your child loose into the the world. You have to let them learn to make their own mistakes and kind of they have to have genuine ownership and authorship of something.

Fay Young

Uh-huh.

Niall Murphy

So I think that’s kinda key.

Fay Young

Yeah. And that ownership is something you’re really interested in, isn’t it, Bash?

Bash Khan

Yeah. I think, you know, I I always look at culture in a very interesting way where culture and heritage, of course, are really important for communities, really important for society. But I also wonder, for example, culture and heritage is also evolving as well. And if you allow people those spaces to create so for example, in Govanhill , Govanhill has created some new cultural events over the last, 5, 10 years with the festivals and such like. Yes.

Those things weren’t always there. Those things were created because people were almost given a bit of, authority, given a bit of respect, given a bit of, money probably. It always helps. Right. Yeah.

But you need to invest in people that really, you know if you design it from the community, if anyone else who comes in parachutes in, that never ever works.

Niall Murphy

And no. Never works. It’s gotta be grassroots.

Bash Khan

It’s always got to be connected to grassroots, but also to recognize that there are skills within that community. Uh-huh. Because I think sometimes what happens is people expect people to do that for free as well. Yeah. And I also think that’s slightly unfair.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. It is.

Bash Khan

If if the planners are getting paid, if the designers are getting paid, if the architects are getting paid, if the builders are getting paid, then someone who is qualified should be, you know and I said that puts word of value again down.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. It does.

Bash Khan

Value value those people’s time and expertise, but and also value that something good might come out of it. Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve been involved luckily in a whole and this is one of the beautiful things about being involved in film. You get to get involved in a whole range of different kind of sectors and, you know, exposure to different, things.

I’ve been involved with, architecture and design there for the last 5 years. I worked in the Scotland and Venice project, for on 2 occasions. I’ve worked in various Charettes in the past as well, Niall, you know, being around, gathering people’s thoughts. So I’ve I’ve seen that combination of people’s thoughts being gathered. Yeah.

And to tell you the truth, have I have I really seen a visible visual outcome of those and all that time, I would have to honestly, I’d I’d struggle to and maybe something small was done, small or twee. Gosh. But honestly and and do you know what? Sometimes to build something like, even a really nice, beautiful, I don’t know, garden office cost £20K. Right?

Mhmm. Okay. Now I’m not a mathematician or someone who’s doing budgets, but when people are spending 2, 3,000,000 plus, if not 5,000,000, 10,000,000 on building projects. If someone said told me there’s not enough 20,000, 50,000 to actually build something, then I I would I would question that.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Yeah. I I find the whole process quite frustrating. I mean, we that was the first, community led Charette in Glasgow that we did in in East Pollockshields But see, getting even though we got funding from, the council and we got funding from the Scottish government.

We could not get the planners to adopt it.

Bash Khan

Oh.

Niall Murphy

And that that it was it was really we were in this weird position that there were a lot of brownfield sites, just to the east of East Pollokshields. And all the developers were talking to us about what we’re trying to do. We’re kind of buying into what we’re trying to do. Couldn’t get the planners to to to buy into it. And I think that was that was in kind of the early days of kind of mainstreaming of charrettes.

And I think they were just frightened that was by the loss of control. And, and we were trying to say, no. This is about empowering communities and

Bash Khan

Yeah.

Niall Murphy

You know, getting communities to buy into this kind of stuff and shape their own vision for their own place. But, yeah, it’s it’s it’s it was it was a diff it was a change of mindset. And being able to step away from control over that, I think, is very difficult for some people.

Bash Khan

Yeah.

Fay Young

Yes. We haven’t got there yet, have we? We could learn a lot from, Paris and the participative budgeting that they do. Yes. We have I know, Edinburgh has the Leith chooses and things like that, but there’s such tiny sums of money and people have to compete with one another.

You know, groups doing really terrific work have to compete with another group doing terrific work and, I think the the Paris scheme encourages collaboration and, so people put in joint bids and they get serious money. But it encourages a really, well informed grassroots shaping of the city.

Niall Murphy

Absolutely. Yep. It’s a it’s a great idea. It’s a really good idea.

Bash Khan

I mean,

Niall Murphy

There was a bit of participatory above budgeting, and I don’t know whether that’s continued or not because I stepped away from the community council. But we did and we did kind of this must have been back in 2017, 2018. And there was supposed to be a £1,000,000 per ward to kind of work with.

Bash Khan

Yeah.

Niall Murphy

And, and it was interesting to see the proposals people came forward for for that. Uh-huh.

Bash Khan

But it

Niall Murphy

was again, there was this process. You all had to bid against each other rather than

Fay Young

be collaborative,

Niall Murphy

which is Yes. A bit frustrating.

Fay Young

Uh-huh. So, Bash was saying about the Gorbal’s cinema, project that you’re working on. That sounds

Niall Murphy

Really exciting.

Fay Young

A good one.

Bash Khan

I suppose I’m trying to kind of now think about, you know, this conversation that we’ve had about, kind of, communities feeling confident, you know, to have a voice or to feel that their voice is going to be listened to. I would say maybe that’s one of the pressing potential thoughts going through many people at the moment, you know, in our kind of current political climate, that, you know, are we being listened to? I suppose this idea of being listened to or the idea of stories has always been important to me as well. And one of the saddest things that I suppose I could have discovered during, you know, the time of working in the Gorbals was 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. You know, at one point within within maybe about 7 or 8 blocks, there was about 9 or 10 cinemas in the Gorbals.

You know, right in the heart of all of with some fantastic kind of names, you know.

Niall Murphy

It’s amazing.

Bash Khan

Wellington Palace, the Colosseum Theatre, the Empress Empress Picture Hall, the Hippodrome Cyn Hippodrome Cinema, the the Paragon and the Crown Picture House, Bedford Cinema, and Eglinton Electrium.

Niall Murphy

But Bedford, of course, is is that’s go to ABC now, isn’t it? The Bedford?

Fay Young

Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Bash Khan

And I think that’s the last that’s the last one. And even some of the other cinemas, I was trying to do some research around what these cinemas actually look like. And there are some images, not that many. But do you know what? They were they were beautiful buildings.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. They were really

Bash Khan

beautiful buildings, the design. And, of course, as also the place for, again, where people could gather in the Gorbals It was key to that.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Bash Khan

It was key to the community and the cohesion. It was a great moneymaker. I did well financially for for a for

Niall Murphy

a while. There were warm spaces. Yeah. You know, if that mattered.

Bash Khan

You know, for me, it was really quite sad in that actually the place for stories because this place really inspire, yeah? Films inspire people, inspire young people, inspire communities. A place of storytelling, a place to inspire was taken away from the Gorbals completely.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Yes.

Bash Khan

A place where narratives could have, you know, could have been built, you know, a place where new ideas could have been developed. They were all taken away.

Niall Murphy

Yeah.

Bash Khan

And what did they replace them with?

Niall Murphy

Nothing.

Bash Khan

Nothing really.

Niall Murphy

Yep. And it’s desperately depressing. Yeah. When you look at Norfolk and Stirlingfauld Court and those huge slabs, there was just there was nothing there other than filing cabinets for people. That’s it.

You know? And it’s quite depressing. It was like the all the spaces in between, nobody thought about. And Mhmm. Just, you know, other other amenities actually to have a proper, you know, multilayered functioning community just weren’t there.

And I find that really odd.

Bash Khan

Yep.

Fay Young

Really is, isn’t it?

Bash Khan

And if you look at what what happened, you know, to the Gorbals over the last 50, 60 kind of years, you know, and the kind of the misrepresentation of the area I got, you know, about what the people in place started to represent. I always kind of feel that actually it wasn’t by choice. This was by design. Mhmm. You can build something and, you know, create something in a place, but if you take something away from a place, you’re also designing another kind of narrative.

And this is, of course, not being a very, very positive narrative. Yeah. And even now, it’s one of my kind of, you know, it’s kind of one of my dreams that a place, you know, like, you know I quite like I don’t know why, but I like the the Empress Picture House. You know, it’s a good name. But, you know, a place like that, if think about the heritage of the Gorbals and this is the place where the first talkie film was screened in in Glasgow and most likely in Scotland as well.

Right. There’s heritage there. Mhmm. But we’ve totally kind of let it go in it, You know? And it’d be amazing in some kind of way.

And this is kind of the conversation that we’ve had about how do we bring those places back, you know, those designs of those beautiful buildings back. They’ve now physically gone. But is there a thought there? Is there a process there of, you know, bringing them back in a different format through the digital mapping and projections again?

Fay Young

Mhmm. So is that what you’re working on?

Bash Khan

That’s one of the ideas now that’s kind of being developed since, since the the residency that we had last year. I think I’m much more interested also about how we can have conversations about creating those places with stories again Yeah. In the Gorbals. Yes. You know, and what that place is.

And, you know, local cinemas and projections, whatever format that takes. But again, as you said, it has to come from the community. It has to come from, grassroots. But sometimes you have to also kind of make a case for it as well.

Fay Young

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Bash Khan

Yes. Yeah.

Fay Young

Sow some seeds. Yeah. Scatter your seeds on the ground and see what actually sprouts. Yeah.

Bash Khan

Yeah.

Niall Murphy

Awesome. Yeah.

Bash Khan

There’s a really interesting and a remarkable number of people. And I think there’s some sort of, who can either migrated to Australia, Canada, whatever, but there’s a lot of people that still connect back and look for information from the Gorbals Yeah. From abroad. A lot of stuff that kinda comes up, with through the Gorbals, even the Oscar Marzaroli collection of those beautiful photographs that he he took. It draws a huge number of of people and audience to that thing.

And I kinda feel like these people have moved away from the Gorbals, back in the sixties.

Fay Young

Yeah.

Bash Khan

So there’s an audience there, I feel. The Gorbals has got a huge audience. So we need to kinda tap into it and yeah.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. The so, like, Glasgow’s diaspora and, yeah, definitely from from various neighborhoods within Glasgow. Yeah. Very much. But, it’s very interesting.

And I think, you know, I mean, again, with going back to touch on the Glasgow effect, I think that kind of shattering, that did have an impact on the city, and it’s like it because it kinda tells you, you know, your city’s finished. Yeah. You know, because we just wanna bulldoze it.

Fay Young

Yeah. Bulldoze it.

Bash Khan

But but so if I’m just touch upon it, but that you know, exactly so that Glasgow effect that, you know Yeah. That you mentioned. This is what I’ve I’ve been looking at where I can ask people about stories really shape who you end up becoming or thinking who you are as a community, a society, a country, whatever. And I always give us example example to someone to say, you know, what are your thoughts or ideas about Paris? So it’s a question it’s a question to both of you.

What are what are the first ideas that come up when when I mentioned Paris to you?

Niall Murphy

Just kind of a a a fantastic city, but a city that definitely knows its value. So

Bash Khan

Yeah. Yeah.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Just a Yeah. But rich. Rich. Yeah. Yeah. Romance, definitely. It’s a total pleasure to walk around.

Bash Khan

We have romanticism. We have architecture. We have culture. We have arts. We have good food.

You know, we have walking in the rain, you know. Even that becomes Yes. More sexier in Paris compared to walking in the rain

Niall Murphy

and Very very true. Haven’t done it but

Fay Young

I love Paris. We’ve got friends and go and stay with them and we get to stay in the sort of grittier bits of of Paris. But there is that, wonderful mix of sort of arrogance and and confidence, you know.

Bash Khan

And that’s my point exactly because even if it is you’re right. Once you go outside the centre of Paris, it’s some of the possibly harshest areas and toughest areas you could stay in. But the narrative of Paris through story, through books, through songs has created this image. So when even when we go to Paris, we become cultural. We become romantic.

Niall Murphy

Is is there not a syndrome, with kind of Japanese tourists who arrive in Paris expecting it to be kind of the most beautiful and lovely city in the world, and then they get shocked when they actually meet genuine Parisians who are rude and kind of Yeah. In your face and they don’t know how to react to this when they go to the shop.

Fay Young

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Then they come to Glasgow and and you get somebody who takes you around the city if your lost. I know.

Niall Murphy

And it’s like, yeah. And just starts talking to you at random.

Fay Young

Yeah. Yeah.

Bash Khan

I think you’ve had I think nearly head there. If you think about it, there’s been a certain narrative that’s been created about Glasgow, certain areas of Glasgow, which for me are not always embedded in the complete reality of the truth.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Very much.

Bash Khan

So who’s creating those narratives for us?

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Yeah. Completely. Completely. Yes.

Bash Khan

Yeah. I recognise that thing completely. You said, oh, someone actually took me around and showed me what where I had to kinda yeah. I’ve had various friends saying that thing. So, you know, we asked someone for help, and they were so nice to to do that one.

Yes.

Niall Murphy

Yep. Yep. Yeah. It happens happens a lot. It’s what I love about Glasgow, that people are prepared to do that.

Fay Young

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I was gonna ask we’ve got a couple of key questions that we ask on the podcast, and Niall I know Niall has got the one up his sleeve that will end the show. But the Yes.

The other one is, you know, how optimistic are you? The work that you do and the what we’ve talked about today does inevitably look at the the big challenges and the the depressing truths and realities that are around us, but there are also reasons to be cheerful. Do you find that in your work? I mean, can you give maybe 1 or 2 examples of reasons for hope?

Bash Khan

It’s a very good question. It’s a very tough question, because when we’re talking about optimism and, you know, especially in, the current situation that’s happening, you know, in Palestine and everything else, it’s really hard to think about that. You know, I think myself and and many other people have been really affected, I think, last few months with what’s going on. And I’ve actually worked with students from Gaza, through an on online project many years ago. So, you know, some very and the university that, of course, that they were working from no longer exists. It’s been completely obliterated.

Niall Murphy

That’s shocking.

Bash Khan

So when when you’re asking that question about optimism, it’s it’s very hard. And you really have to fight for it. You have to and I think that’s part of the fight as well, within the whole process. And and the reason why, I suppose, I always go back to this idea that we have to find places to connect because that’s the only place where you’ll find something real. Yeah.

Now, I said, through my process, you know, I get to meet amazing people. So On the Edge was nominated by people in the community. It wasn’t me choosing people. They were nominated by people from their own communities about things that people had done during during COVID and lockdown. And and some beautiful stories all around, you know, too many to talk about now, but one woman that I met, beautiful women.

She worked, in a care home, helping assisted I think assisted living. Is that right? Is that what it’s called? Yeah. Yes.

Yeah. Help people at the end stage of their life. And so I asked someone eventually, okay. Who’s this person? You know, what’s she done?

So one of the main reasons she wanted to nominate this woman was one of the women she cared for was turning a 100. So during COVID, she she got this beautiful big street party organised for her. Got papers down with sure everything was socially kinda destined and, you know, but made sure that that that moment wasn’t messed during COVID. Okay? And then that’s what the people told me.

So, of course, when I go and I meet people before we photograph them, I sit and talk to them for, you know, sometimes half an hour, an hour. An hour and a half is the longest we’ve had a chat. And then you realise that this woman and that was just one thing she’d she’d done for others during COVID. There was a whole range of things that she did, you know, beyond her job remit. Then during COVID, she actually lost her her her own son to suicide.

Now you’re sitting there and you’re talking away to her and the whole place has got photographs of her son on pillowcases and images and everything else, you know, And she’s got such courage. You’re speaking to this woman, and you’re just thinking. It goes, wow.

How would I put myself in her shoes? How would I and, honestly, the courage that women had kind of shown and the words that she’d kinda said just blew me away. I was like, wow, you know, and that was stuff that people not are not even really aware of that what underneath it all, what people are going through. Yeah. So when you’re seeing the optimism, then when you can grasp onto people like this and you realise that people go through huge challenges, and somehow they still manage to stand up and manage to rise up and still look out for others.

That’s the only bit of hope that I, you know, you know, that I see when I get to meet these kind of people. Yeah. So yeah.

Fay Young

Mhmm. Thank you. Yes.

Bash Khan

So there’s people like that, that’s you kind of think there’s still gotta be hope.

Fay Young

Yeah. Yeah. We need a moment after that, I think.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. That’s That’s that’s yeah. Profoundly sad. Okay. Shall I ask the final?

Fay Young

Release the question.

Niall Murphy

This is the this is the, yeah, the the loaded question, Bash. And we ask everybody this who comes on the podcast. And it is, what is your favourite building? Or I suppose if you wanted to, you could, have a public space in Glasgow. And what would it tell you if it’s walls could talk?

Bash Khan

My favourite building in Glasgow.

Niall Murphy

Yep. It doesn’t have to be a building, it could could could be a space.

Bash Khan

No. No. Actually, literally, no. No. two days ago, I I grew up around Kelvingrove Park.

And, actually, right now, I’m in, yeah, I’m in in the house that I grew up in, actually. I’m in here at the moment. Right. So and the other day, I was just driving past, and, of course, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum was beautifully lit up. And as I drove past, I kinda went, you know what?

It wasn’t a bad place to grow up, but you’ve got that right there, okay, on your doorstep. But as a kid growing up, actually, the bandstand for us was also an amazing new place because when we were growing up, the bandstand was, shut down. It was kinda derelict. So we managed to kind of, course, kinda sneak in and mess around. We didn’t we didn’t set fires or anything or damage anything, but we enjoyed that was our back garden, really, that whole that whole area.

Niall Murphy

That’s lovely.

Bash Khan

So, definitely, like, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum has got a special place, but, again and again, I love, there’s this beautiful big cafe in Kelvingrove Park next to next to the and as kids, we used to play there all the time. And at that time, there used to be toilets.

Niall Murphy

Yes. Yeah. I remember. Yeah.

Bash Khan

But even as a young kid, at that point, I would just say, do you know what? It’d be amazing if this wasn’t shut down toilets, but be something else. Yep. An Clachan the cafe.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. That’s the cafe.

Bash Khan

So, actually, that rebuilding itself, I really loved that little rebuilding going up because that’s literally our playground. So Kelvingrove Grove is is is special to me. So I would go with that one. Yeah.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Fantastic. Good good choice. You’re actually the first person to have chosen Kelvingrove in the podcast so far. So which is which is very interesting.

So we’ve had

Bash Khan

Well, I was gonna go between the people. The toilets the toilets are exactly like, I said, those and do you know do you know what? Maybe I should be in the toilets. I think maybe I should be in the toilets because that’s a perfect example of a place that’s been very used for people again.

Niall Murphy

Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Because it was, yeah, it was derelict for years. And yeah.

Absolutely. It’s a really good idea.

Bash Khan

Mhmm. And, again, as well as defense, how do we make our parks more safe? Well, if you add more lights and add more food carts and food places

Fay Young

Yep.

Bash Khan

You know, parts become safer.

Fay Young

Yep. Yes. You know? Yes.

Niall Murphy

It has been an issue in Glasgow because I know I remember when peep people had previously talked about putting up cafes in various places, there had been resistance. But, yeah, to me, it makes sense because it means you can use those spaces after dark, and they’ve they’ve become safer because there are people around you.

Bash Khan

That’s it. Yeah. There we go. Kelvingrove. Alright.

At the moment, actually, Kelvingrove’s quite interesting because I’m trying to write up some stories from the time I’ve kind of grown up around here. You know, in the good old days in the eighties, grown up around Kelvingrove . Mhmm. So, yeah, it was good to come back.

Niall Murphy: Very good.

Fay Young: We look forward to that.

Niall Murphy

Well, it was an absolute pleasure talking to you, Bash. Well yeah. Look forward to hearing those.

Fay Young

Yes. Thank you.

Bash Khan

Well, thank you so much for in in for inviting me. And, yeah, I was hopeful to see you guys at some point. That was a pleasure. In due course. Okay?

Fay Young

Yes. At a good gathering place. Okay.

Niall Murphy

Yes. Very much. Okay. Thank you, Bash.

Fay Young

Thank you.

Niall Murphy

That’s much appreciated.

Katharine Neil

Glasgow City Heritage Trust is an independent charity and grant funder that promotes the understanding, appreciation, and conservation of Glasgow’s historic built environment. Do you want to know more? Have a look at our website at glasgowheritage.org.uk and follow us on social media at Glasgow Heritage. This podcast was produced by Inner Ear for Glasgow City Heritage Trust and is sponsored by Tunnock’s.