Norry Wilson:
Hello, I’m Norry Wilson. Welcome to If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk, a podcast by Glasgow City Heritage Trust about the stories, relationships between historic buildings, and the people of Glasgow. You’ll usually be used to hearing Niall introduce the podcast, but now, for the final episode in series two, we’re doing something a little bit different and I get to turn the tables on Niall to hear his thoughts and opinions about Glasgow, its built heritage, and how it impacts upon the communities that we all live in. So, to get started, Niall, can you tell us a bit about your own journey, how you ended up in Glasgow, and how you have risen to become the Director of the Glasgow City Heritage Trust?

Niall Murphy:
Gosh, that sounds very posh. Okay. Right, how did I wind up here? It’s a long story. So, yeah, I originally come from Hong Kong, so I was born and brought up in Hong Kong in the 1970s, and I absolutely loved living in Hong Kong. It’s a fantastic city. But both my parents came from Scotland, though my mum technically was born in Birmingham, her family are from Leith and Newhaven, in Edinburgh direction, Leith obviously separate from Edinburgh, so you can’t make that mistake.

Norry Wilson:
Always got to remember that.

Niall Murphy:
Whereas my dad comes from Kilmaurs, which is a wee village just outside of Kilmarnock. And so they both wound up in Hong Kong separately and met there and got married there and had a family with my brother and I. And because they were both employed by the Hong Kong government in the 1960s, they were still on colonial contracts. And so they both come from quite lowly backgrounds. My dad’s family were builders and miners in Ayrshire, and my mum’s family, they were involved in ship building on the Firth of Forth, and so that was their background.

So, anyway, as part of your colonial contract, you could send your children to school in the UK, and their thinking at the time, in the mid ’70s, was they were going to be coming back to the UK at some point, and so they thought they would send my brother and I ahead to school in Edinburgh to get us used to it. And so I wound up going to boarding school in Edinburgh, which was a horrible experience and absolutely not me, and got sent when I was nine, and I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy because it was a really horrible experience and it made me terribly homesick.

Norry Wilson:
I’m not surprised.

Niall Murphy:
But it was funny because I found the Edinburgh Botanics and the glass houses in the Botanics, and I used to escape to them because I was really badly bullied at school. So, I used to escape to them and hang out, and I’ve always wondered whether any of the staff in the Botanics thought, “Why is there this 10 year old kid hanging around in the Botanics all the time?” But in the glasshouses, because they were the tropical ones, they were so nice and steamy, it was a nice escape for me.

Norry Wilson:
I suppose it would almost be like being back in Hong Kong temperature wise?

Niall Murphy:
Well, absolutely, it was that. It made me feel at home because it was like the rainforest in Hong Kong. So, it was nice to discover that. But anyway, the good thing about that school was it had a really excellent art department, which you could escape to, and we had a really good set of teachers there who were fantastic. This husband and wife couple, Mark and Lottie Cheverton, who were really lovely, very Christian. And they went on to establish the Leith School of Art in Leith. And very sadly they both died in a car crash when they were very young, but Leith School of Art has kept on going that they set up. And they believed firmly that anyone could draw, and so they were really rigorous in doing this. And you had to do these exercises where basically you weren’t allowed to take your pen or your pencil off-

Norry Wilson:
Off the page.

Niall Murphy:
You had to do the whole thing in a single line. Oh my God, it was so difficult. But that was the discipline of doing it. That really taught me how to draw and how to look. And then the other thing that they did, which I’ve really appreciated in hindsight, was they sent you out to draw en plein air in the city, and so you got to know Edinburgh. And it’s funny, I hated Edinburgh at the time, because I just wanted to be back in Hong Kong and Edinburgh was so not me. And I now look back and realise, oh, my God, I was so spoiled because Edinburgh is such a fantastic city.

So, it was really interesting and that was what taught me to look at cities and begin to appreciate cities. And because I was growing up in Hong Kong and it was such a fantastic city, it’s interesting because I’ve realised now in hindsight in my life that growing up in Hong Kong would’ve been the equivalent of growing up in Victorian Glasgow, because it was going through that same kind of boom. And then what I’ve done is effectively, by travelling back to Scotland, moved forward in time to a post-industrial city from a city that was going from pre-industrial to industrial to a post-industrial city, which has been quite interesting because I can look back and compare the two, with Glasgow being this incredible Victorian boom town.

And so I realised as I was looking at the city evolving, that I was actually really interested in cities and how they evolved. And I was particularly fascinated, Norman Foster’s Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, which was the world’s most expensive building which was being built in Hong Kong when I was in my early teens, and so it was that that that eventually switched me onto architecture. And when you have to apply for schools of architecture, I had all the wrong exam results, but I had a really good portfolio. And so my school were like, “Yeah, you’ll never get in,” and totally discouraged me from doing architecture anywhere. If you weren’t going to be a doctor or a lawyer, they didn’t want to know. And they were like, “Why do you want to be an architect? Architects don’t make any money.” And it was like, yeah, I discovered that later that they were in fact correct.

But anyway, I applied to the Glasgow School of Art and I got in on the strength of my portfolio. And it’s funny, I also had to apply to Edinburgh as well, but if you put Glasgow first, Edinburgh reject you completely. So, I got unconditionals from Glasgow and from Dundee, and I opted for Glasgow because when I came to Glasgow, the Art school was so fantastic, and it was after I left the interview, I was walking down through the city because I didn’t know Glasgow at all, and got to St. Vincent Street and was walking down St. Vincent Street. And the way that St. Vincent Street, the buildings really rise up and it becomes this canyon of stone and all these fantastic facades, and it really reminded me of Causeway Bay in Hong Kong where it’s really densely packed buildings and you’re in a canyon of buildings and I thought, “I could live here. I like this city.”

And it was a bit of a shock to the system coming here. So, the first night I was here, this is 1981, I was with a Singaporean friend who was studying medicine up at the university and we were going to the ABC. So, we’re standing in the queue to get into the ABC on Sauchiehall Street and chatting away, and this guy taps me on my back and says to me, “Where are you from?” And I’m like, “Should I explain the whole Hong Kong bit or do you think that’s probably a bit much?” So, I said, “I’m from Edinburgh.” And he said, “Right, so you’re a snob.” And that was when I realised that whole public school accent I’d picked up by being in Edinburgh for too long had to go, you couldn’t do that in Glasgow.
So, yeah, on the back of that, I began to get to know Glasgow. The good thing about the Mackintosh School of Architecture, which had a really good reputation, not just in Scotland but in the UK and globally at that time because it was headed up by Professor Andy MacMillan.

Norry Wilson:
Who went on to Chicago School of Art. No, it was the guy after Andy MacMillan that went on and headed up the Chicago Institute of Art.

Niall Murphy:
That’s right, yeah. But Andy was a real salt of the earth Glaswegian, and with him, he was quite funny, so he did the introductory lessons when you start in year one and he’s so no nonsense Glaswegian. He had just come back from a summer in Hong Kong, and he’d been kicked out the Hong Kong Club, which is the poshest club in Hong Kong, for refusing to wear a tie. And he was like, “These snobs, I hate public school snobs.” And I was like, “Uh-oh, I better do something about that as well.” So, it was a bit of a baptism of fire, doing architecture here, but the good thing about the Mac was it was all based in Glasgow. Any exercises you did, any building that you were set a brief to design, it had to respond to a typology in Glasgow. So, you had to design a tenement, you had to design a civic building that had to be on particular sites in Glasgow, you were always set these tests. And so you got to know the city really well as a consequence of that.

And you got the feel of the place as an urban city. And it was unusual because most schools of architecture just focused on the building themselves, whereas in Glasgow there was a real element of urbanism to it. And so you got to have a better feel for how a city actually is pieced together and works so that the city is, not to sound pretentious, but as this spatial experience of being able to pass through and understand the city, you really got to know that at the Mackintosh School of Architecture. And that’s never left me. And it’s something you didn’t get in other schools of architecture, and it’s really tough course. So, it’s a seven year long course and part of it is you get what are called crits where you basically have to pin up your work for the entire school to evaluate.

And you have a panel of lecturers and professors that sit and pass judgement on your work in front of everybody. So, there’s nowhere to hide, so it can be really demoralising, though it can be, if you get good feedback, it can obviously be quite good too. There’s some funny stories there with Andy. There was one time, there was this huge crit space at the back of the Mac where there were three sliding boards, so the first person would be pinning up, the second person would be getting critted, and then the third person would be taking their work down and they would just slide the boards over so that they could get one after the other. So, Andy’s not paying attention to this person in the middle who’s giving their whole spiel on how wonderful their building is. And he’s focused on this guy who’s pinning up, and the guy slides his work over and Andy just goes, “Just keep going.”
It was so cruel, but that’s what the place was like. So, I ended up on the back of that, because I did do lots of sketching en plein air, I won the Robert Lorimer Award for my sketchbooks, which was really nice. I just did that off my own back. I was being encouraged by an American friend of mine who was an exchange student who was like, “You do really good sketches, why don’t you just fire it in and see what happens?” Because at that time I had no confidence in myself. And so I did, and that was all on sketches around Glasgow and some sketches in Boston, and so I won this award on the back of that. And then after that, having finished that, I’d gone back to Hong Kong for a couple of years. I was working in Hong Kong for a couple of years and then you have to come back for your final two years at the Mac, and then after that, basically that’s you. You’ve kind of…

Norry Wilson:
Set free into the wild.

Niall Murphy:
Set free into the wild, though you have to do a further year of professional studies and then you can sit your part three exam. So, that’s why it’s such a long process, so when I got out, there were no jobs in Glasgow at that point, and Hong Kong had been handed back to the Chinese by that point. So, 1997 had happened and the Far East Asian financial crisis was happening, and so I couldn’t go back to Hong Kong because there were no jobs there. And by that point, I’d been doing some work, because I had worked in Hong Kong for two years and I’d been able to save money, I’d spent a summer doing voluntary work for Scottish Aids Monitor, and because this was all part of coming out and accepting that I was gay, and I met my partner there.

And so my partner’s very working class Glaswegian, and so we’ve been together ever since, but still there were no jobs in Glasgow. So, I eventually ended up working in Berlin. I had friends in Berlin who had been at the Mac and they needed people in their office, so I ended up going over to Berlin to work. And at that point I really wasn’t sure what I was doing with my life, and it turned out, ironically, that the one thing the Germans aren’t terribly good at is their postal service outside of Germany. And so I was sitting writing all these letters back to my partner at home and he wasn’t getting anything and he thought I’d just cut him off and that I’d basically just done a runner. And then one night I was thinking about, and this is about three months in, I was living in Prenzlauer Berg at this point, in a tenement in Prenzlauer Berg.

Norry Wilson:
I know the area.

Niall Murphy:
Which is now very posh, but at the time was in the East, and so was still quite impoverished. And the experience of living in a tenement in Berlin is quite tough. When you live in the tenement in Berlin, you realise how well the Glaswegians build by tenements. So, things like our stairs, because all the building code here was pretty strong compared to Germany, the stairs in Germany were timber stairs. Six story tenements with timber stairs, and you used to go up them and think what would happen if there was a fire? You’d be stuffed. There was no way out. It’s shocking, it was so poorly built.

Norry Wilson:
It’s strange. My stepson, who’s a graphic designer, and his girlfriend because he’s a graphic designer, as long as he’s got an internet, he can work anywhere. So, they did about three years of living in Berlin, in various parts of Berlin. And of course it was my first thought, I had been through Berlin a couple of times, Eurorailing years back before the fall of the wall, So I remembered the East West thing. But obviously they were there after the wall was down, so myself and David’s mother were like, brill, we’ve got a base in Berlin. So, it was literally every three or four months we just went, right, cheap flight to Berlin, and we’ll go out and have a weekend.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, it was the same thing with my friends, it was exactly the same thing.

Norry Wilson:
And it’s that strange aspects of Berlin I saw there in Glasgow, except for the fact that in Berlin you can catch the U-Bahn at 3:00 o’clock in the morning.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, their public transport network is fabulous.

Norry Wilson:
Whereas in Glasgow on a Sunday after 6:00 o’clock. No, sorry. You’ve had your fun.

Niall Murphy:
When you come back from Berlin you think, oh, my God, Glasgow, you’ve really got to up your game, and it still hasn’t upped its game, but it’s got to do so much better. But, yeah, absolutely. That was my experience in Berlin and with my friends there. It was one time, New Year’s Eve, 1995, there was a huge party in front of the Brandenburg Gate, and it was still complete desolation at that point except for the Hotel Adlon had been rebuilt by that point, but nothing else was there. And I remember doing this huge conga at midnight through the Brandenburg Gate and thinking, oh, my God, this is just so bizarre.

Just a handful of years beforehand you’d have been shot because you were in no man’s land. And it was just how much Europe had changed, it was such a fantastic experience. But at the same time I began to realise I actually really missed Glasgow and I missed my partner. So, yeah, this one night he turned up out of the blue, opened the door to the tenement, and there he is sitting on the stairs, and it was like, what are you doing here? And he was like, “I hadn’t heard from you, what’s going on?” And I was like, “I’ve been sending you letters.”

Norry Wilson:
And I take it this was pre-ubiquitous mobile phone days?

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, exactly, pre-mobile phone and internet. And the ironic thing was as soon as he got back to Glasgow, all my letters arrived. I was like, “See? I was telling the truth.” And so after that I decided, right, well… Because Berlin is a really fantastic city, it was great fun living there, but at the same time it’s so flat. And it began to do my head in, because coming from Hong Kong as a harbour city which is all surrounded by steep mountains, and then Glasgow is surrounded by steep mountains and a fantastic harbour as well, really began to miss the sea and began to miss the mountains. And one time someone said, “Why don’t you go and try one of the hills in Berlin?” And it was this mound in East Berlin, which was about 100 foot high.

Norry Wilson:
And is that the one that they built from the rubble?

Niall Murphy:
I think it might have been, yes. That’s it, that’s all. But at the same time you do realise that there are really strong parallels between Berlin and Glasgow, particularly the grids of tenement streets, where you get datums in Glasgow, the three or four story tenement streets that were imposed by John Carrick, the city architect. You get all that stuff happening in Berlin too, these really long linear streets, really appreciated that quality and can see that when you’re standing in areas like Pollokshields, you can really see it, or Govanhill, you can really see that really clearly. So, I appreciated those qualities too. So, anyway, came back to Glasgow, we’d bought a flat in Pollokshields by that point, and fell in quite accidentally with the folk from Pollokshields Heritage. And so that switched me onto conservation.

It was quite funny because it brought down the average age quite a bit, which I think they were interested in. It was, “You’re an architect as well, so we’ll have one of you.” But actually it made me think about conservations and cities and what’s special in cities. And so that did really switch me onto it, and Glasgow had a lot of value in that. And I remember going to an interview as an architect in Glasgow and commenting on how fabulous the Victorian and Edwardian buildings were and how beautifully they were ornamented in the city centre, and this guy in the interview commenting, “I know, it’s such a shame, the planners want us to keep them.”

Norry Wilson:
There’s a problem with that? pointless comment.

Niall Murphy:
I know, absolutely. They wouldn’t let us do anything modern, I’m thinking, but these are so fantastic and you’re never going to be able to emulate them. You’re really going to struggle. And having real debates with people about that 123 St. Vincent Street, I remember having a debate with one well known architect about that, that it was just sham facadism. And I’m like, but it’s such a fantastic series of facades. Okay, I completely agree that the interior shouldn’t have been lost, but he was basically like, it should have been demolished completely, start again, but you’d never be able to match that kind of quality.

Norry Wilson:
It is that strange thing, folk talk about knowing a city like the back of their hands, and there’s hundreds of bits in Glasgow that I know that I could be dropped in and I can tell you within less than a second exactly where I am, exactly which way I’m facing, and what I’m surrounded by. And yet there’s other more modern bits of Glasgow where if you dropped me, I’d be looking about for 30 seconds before I went, “Ah, this used to be…”

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, exactly. And so, anyway, on the back of being involved in Pollokshields Heritage, I wound up sitting on Glasgow City Council’s Glasgow Urban Design panel, and to get to see all the big planning applications that basically affect the city centre or other parts of the city. If there’s a major planning application, it usually gets run past the Glasgow Urban Design Panel for a comment. They don’t have any statutory weight, but if the planning officer is interested in what their commentary is, it can end up being put into the report that goes through the planning applications committee, so it has a bit of influence. So, anyway, I felt that being on that panel, it was incumbent upon me to know something about Glasgow, to know about its history, to know about how it developed urbanistically, and that’s it.

Norry Wilson:
Put your money mouth where your mouth is.

Niall Murphy:
And to get to know what all the buildings were in the city, what was special about them and who the architects were, because I felt that if you were there to serve a civil purpose on that committee, you had to know your stuff. That turned out that not everybody agreed with me on that particular point, but anyway, so that was how I really began to… And I’d also, having been to boarding school and had this pretty horrendous experience there, I still have friends who are from that boarding school, but they’ve been scattered to the four winds, and so they’re all over the world.
And one thing, because I’d been so badly bullied and I’d been so homesick for Hong Kong, I really wanted to put down roots in a place and I didn’t want to be this rootless person that didn’t really know where they belonged in the world. I wanted to be somewhere that I could call home. And so I have done my utmost to make Glasgow my home on the back of that, and so it was all that too. And then it’s just a series of coincidences. So, Doors Open Day came up, this was in 2001, and Alison Grey-

Norry Wilson:
Sorry, I’m laughing slightly because I’d been doing my own heritage thing, the then Doors Open Day came along, and they got in touch with me and before I knew it, I was…

Niall Murphy:
You got sucked into all that?

Norry Wilson:
Yeah.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah. Well, this is back in 2001, and Alison Tanner, who was running Doors Open Day for Glasgow Building Preservation Trust at the time, put out this email to people who she thought might be interested in the city basically saying, “Would you be interested in suggesting any buildings that you want to see opened up on Doors Open Day?” And I was the only person who responded to her email and it was these buildings I’d really like to get into. And so she said, “Okay, right, I’ll do my utmost to get those open for you, but here’s the quid pro quo, would you do a walking tour in Glasgow for me?” And it was like, well, okay. And so I volunteered to do this walking tour up Buchanan Street, and I thought, well, I’ll give that a go.

And then of course this is six months before Doors Open Day happened, and so about a month beforehand, started panicking about the whole thing. Oh, my God, they’re going to rumble me, anyone who comes on this, because it sold out, and anyone who comes in this is going to straight away go, “You’re not a Glaswegian, what are you doing this?”

Norry Wilson:
Imposter syndrome.

Niall Murphy:
Imposter syndrome, and I was really terrifying. So, I dragged both my partner and my mum along on it, which was quite funny too, and we started at what’s now the Caffè Nero in St. Enoch’s Square, which was originally the entrance to the Glasgow subway. And so I was standing in front of it and I suddenly noticed that James Miller, who designed that lovely little Scottish perennial jewel of a building, that the archway has these devils masks around it, and basically this was…

Norry Wilson:
The entrance to hell.

Niall Murphy:
It was the Buffy The Vampire Slayer, is it hell gate? It’s Glasgow’s hell gate, and so I said that, “Here we are at the starting point, this is Glasgow’s hell gate,” and everyone started laughing and I thought, this is good, humour can connect to people. And so we ended up going way over shot, so we ended up doing this two and a half hour walk that went up Buchanan Street and then hung a left and eventually got into Central Station, then we stopped in Central and I left everyone there and this elderly Glaswegian lady grabbed my arm at the end and she was in tears and said, “Son, you’ve completely transformed the way I look at Glasgow. Thank you so much.” And I was really touched.

Norry Wilson:
I’m not surprised.

Niall Murphy:
And meanwhile on this route with my partner and my mum, my mum’s standing there because she’s a school teachers, “No, don’t talk to the buildings, talk to the audience.” It’s like, okay, mum, I will. And so it was training on how to do a walk and it was after that point I thought, yeah, I’m here amongst my people.

Norry Wilson:
I belong to Glasgow and Glasgow belongs to me.

Niall Murphy:
It’s true, and it’s also because it does remind me of Hong Kong in so many ways because Glaswegians are real salt of the earth and the Cantonese in Hong Kong were real salt of the earth too. And they know how to party, so that’s critical too.

Norry Wilson:
Well, it’s strange cause the only times I’ve ever been in Hong Kong, the first time I was delighted and surprised to meet a Glasgow tram.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, I know. Absolutely.

Norry Wilson:
And it’s still running, and then the Coronation trams.

Niall Murphy:
Quite a lot of them were burned, but others of them did wind up in Hong Kong.

Norry Wilson:
And the other amazing thing was getting in the Star Ferry and seeing a Glasgow maker’s plate.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, absolutely.

Norry Wilson:
Everyone else is admiring the scenery and taking photographs, and I’m walking around staring at bits of machinery, looking for Glasgow marks.

Niall Murphy:
See, I used to do that too because the stuff, it was dirt cheap, but you could nip across between the island and the Kowloon side on it, and all the tourists went on the upper deck, but it was like, no, who’s interested in the upper deck? You go to the lower deck because you get to see all of the machinery, it’s much more interesting.

Norry Wilson:
It’s a bit like going in the Waverley and going to see the paddles.

Niall Murphy:
Indeed, it’s exactly the same. Yeah, great fun. I miss old stuff like that. And, yeah, I suppose that when I’m thinking about Glasgow, the first night I spent in here, in Glasgow that is, this is back in 1989, there was a ferry that tooted its horn on the Clyde, and I thought, a-ha, harbour city, I could live here. But I’d never heard a ferry toot its horn on the Clyde.

Norry Wilson:
And it’s one of these strange things because my grandfather, who was born in Aberdeen in 1886, and had been four times around the world under sail before he was 21, ended up being a chief engineer out of the Clyde, 30 years in the Eastern Mediterranean, six weeks way down to Israel. Well, obviously it was at that point it was pre-Israel, but right the way down to the Eastern Mediterranean. And I grew up with him living in the house. And when I was wee, one of the great treats every Hogmanay, apart from the fact that grandpa would give you a cigar and a dram when you were about eight, you were allowed to stay up till midnight. And at midnight he’d rush you out into the garden and at that point there was still a lot of shipping in the Clyde, and you’d hear all the ships’ hooters and bells and everything going.

And my grandpa always said the amount of New Years that he’d spent in foreign ports when he was all alone and he was the only man on the ship, and he said, “Tonight, in Glasgow, there’s shipmates from all over the world alone in those ships, so raise a glass to your shipmates.” I still do it every year I dash out at midnight thinking, “Am I going to hear a ghostly hooter?” It was such a shame, the situation this year that the two cruise liners that are down in the… Is it King George the fifth dock?

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Norry Wilson:
Might have done their hooters, but probably the wind was in the wrong direction.

Niall Murphy:
Right, you didn’t hear it.

Norry Wilson:
And the amount of fireworks now at midnight. You can’t hear it.

Niall Murphy:
It’s a shame, it really is. We need to get ships back on the Clyde somehow.

Norry Wilson:
Even just some hooters.

Niall Murphy:
So, anyway, fast forward a bit, I was still at that point thinking about being a commercial architect and then mysteriously managed to win this competition for what was going to be Glasgow and Scotland’s tallest building, which was where the Scottish Power building now is on St. Vincent Street. And so that was called Elphinstone Place. And it was on the back of that, it was originally going to be three towers and we’d called it the Trinity Project to begin with in the office, and we had to do wind tunnel testing for it. Because if you’re building a tall building, you can’t make the wind conditions around your building any worse than they currently are. That planning is that that’s not allowed, so we had to do wind tunnel testing, and so it turned out the design was an absolute disaster from wind tunnel testing.

And it was standing, and so we had to build this whole scale model of Glasgow city centre, and this was working with our engineers. And there were only two places in the world that did this at this point. One of them was in London and the other one was in Toronto. So, we were at the wind tunnel in London and we had to basically do 92 different runs to end up with a solution that actually worked in wind tunnels, because it turned out it was one of Glasgow’s big firms of solicitors was in the building right next door. And the wind conditions at that would knock you off your feet, you were thinking, “Hmm, could possibly get sued, that might not be a good idea.” So, we had to rethink the whole thing, and so it was while I was doing that, and I’m standing this wind tunnel looking at the scale model of Glasgow City Centre and everything’s pretty low rise in Glasgow.

And the engineer from Arup is saying, “Yeah, Glasgow’s actually really well designed from the point of view of wind because that four datum tenements actually works really well in deflecting winds, and what you’re doing is basically bringing the winds down into the city centre.” And I’m looking at this tall building thinking, what have I done? And had this complete road to Damascus conversion thinking this is not what I want to do with my life. I want to go more into conservation. And so ultimately that’s what I ended up doing. I got made redundant from a big firm of architects in 2011 and got snapped up straight away by a friend of mine, Peter Drummond, who’s one of Scotland’s top conservation architects, and retrained as a conservation architect. And while I was doing that, I was getting invited in here to give lectures on occasion.

And then the post of grants officer came up here and the then director just asked me if I’d be interested and I had to apply along with with everybody else. And I thought, I don’t know, I’ve really enjoyed being an architect, but maybe it’s time for something different. I’ll give this a go for six months. And I absolutely loved it because it was things that was the educational part of it, being able to connect with people and see what you do to help people about what was happening with their buildings or explain why something has happened a particular way in Glasgow or how the city has developed a particular way. So, it was being able to apply my skillset set to things like that, so from that point of view, it was absolutely a dream job.

I absolutely loved working here, so it was a good fit. And it’s funny, I knew various politicians at the time and they were all having a good laugh saying, “You’re a square peg in a square hole, well done you, and it’s a good fit for you.” So, yeah, I’ve really enjoyed it ever since.

Norry Wilson:
Fabulous. Now, during lockdown, we were all holed up like moles, you started Tweeting about Glasgow’s architectural heritage using the hashtag #MomentsOfBeautyInGlasgow. And you’ve amassed a huge number of followers with that, obviously not quite as many as Los Glasgow has.

Niall Murphy:
He says modestly.

Norry Wilson:
I know. Can you tell us a bit about that? I follow it and have done I think since the earliest days. And again, I think I know Glasgow and then you’ll pick out some tiny, almost unseen detail in a building and I’ll think, why have I not noticed that before?

Niall Murphy:
That’s well spotted that, yeah. It’s good because there’s a bunch of folk who do that kind of thing, so it’s always interesting to see what people come up with. But, no, the Tweeting was a complete accident, and I was actually getting completely slagged off by Stuart McDonald MP and Paul Sweeney, who’s now an MSP. And the two of them were completely slagging me off, going, “Come on Niall, get into the 21st century, how come you’re not on social media?” And it was things like Twitter and stuff like that, to me it was so easy to trip yourself up. And I was thinking, career suicide.

Norry Wilson:
Just ask Gary Lineker.

Niall Murphy:
Just really not a good idea. And then it was one day, unfortunately I suffer from poor lung health because of having grown up in Hong Kong, and the pollution there was really bad, and I’ve had pneumonia three times, sadly, and I’ve wound up apparently with lungs that would suit a smoker and I’ve never smoked. So, oops, anyway, just one of the things in life. So, after the third time I had pneumonia, I decided I was going to start walking into the city centre and try and use that to get fit. So, I was walking into the city centre down the South City Way one day, and I won’t name the bus company, but this particular bus who were sponsoring, it was world pollution day that day to stop bad emissions, and a bus with this advert on it sponsoring this thing sails past me belching out diesel black smoke down the South City Way.

And I was like, this is ridiculous, got into the office and kind of checked their website and I could not find a phone number for complaints because I was so angry about it. It was like, this is outrageous. And it was Taylor in the office said, “Why didn’t you try Tweeting?” And I was so mad that I forgot all my don’t ever do this and thought I am going to. So, she showed me how to set this up, and that was the first thing I did was like, “How could you do this? It’s a disgrace,” and then was able to copy it to several of Glasgow’s politicians.

And then it took off from there quite accidentally. And it was when lockdown started, I just started deciding I was going to do a Tweet a day of my walks around the South Side. And then it was funny because then the South Side started getting quite busy and I was supposed to be shielding, and then the irony was that my shielding letter turned up six weeks late, by which point I’d been out and about all over the place, and the shielding letter is saying, “You can’t get within two metres of an open window,” and I thought, oh, my God, I’m going to be turned into Rapunzel and I don’t want to do that. So, I just carried on walking and in the end I shifted over to the city centre because there was nobody in the city centre. It was completely deserted.

Norry Wilson:
It was strange because even though, 99% of Lost Glasgow is still Facebook based, but I was about the same during lockdown, because even though we had a Twitter account, I hadn’t really used it that much. And during lockdown, it became an absolute lifesaver, and all of a sudden, before you know it, one minute you’ve got 1,000 followers and three days later, and you look and it’s 7,000, where did they come from?

Niall Murphy:
What happened?

Norry Wilson:
And all of a sudden you’ve built almost a secondary community that would never be on Facebook but are on Twitter. And it’s been a learning experience for me as well.

Niall Murphy:
It really is. The point of doing it, and I was just trying to limit myself, and I still do try and limit myself, to a Tweet a day, so I’ve figured out that 7:00 o’clock in the morning is my time to tweet and it means I can either set it up the night before because I’m always getting woken up by my cats at stupid o’clock in the morning and I can’t get back to sleep again. So, I will set the Tweet then and then it goes out at 7:00 o’clock in the morning on the dot, and I just try and find a different thing every day to have a bit of fun about it. But the point of it is to raise civic pride in Glasgow and show that Glasgow is a really beautiful city, because it is. And so I was just having a lot of fun with that.

And I was trying to encourage people to go out for walks during lockdown, and so it initially started in Pollokshields and just random stuff in Pollokshields, if I saw something interesting on a building, and I knew a bit of history to the building, I would just talk about that. And it got picked up by, it was Janice Forsyth firstly who picked it up at the BBC, and then it was, I got it interviewed by, is it John Beattie on BBC Drive Time as well? Which was quite good fun. And it just snowballed from there. Janey Godley started retweeting me and that was really sweet of her, and I’d loved to meet her. And so it just went from there and it’s just been really good fun. But it has this serious purpose that is to get people out and about and make them look at Glasgow’s fantastic architecture and be able to appreciate it.

Norry Wilson:
Well, it is also that thing, Glasgow is such a wonderfully walkable city, and yet so often we jump in our cars or we jump in a bus, or if you jump in a bus, you look up and down the bus and nobody’s looking out the window, if the window is clean enough to look out. They’ve all got their noses buried in their phones. And you think, look what you’ve just passed, or better still, walk it and stop and actually appreciate what you’re in. You go back to that grid system thing again.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, the grid’s fantastic for walking.

Norry Wilson:
It’s absolutely lovely for walking, and particularly the East West accesses, where one day you’re getting a spectacular sunrise over there and that evening a spectacular sunset at the end of the same road. And it’s also the fact that you can, I know myself from looking at historic photographs of Glasgow, it means the tall buildings work almost like the Nomons, but a sundial, so you can almost work out exactly what time of day. You might not know what year the photograph was taken, but you can work out what time of day by the direction and the length of the shadows. And that’s almost like looking at a clock face.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s completely different from living in the tropics because the sun was directly overhead quite a lot. But Glasgow, really long shadows on particular days, which are really quite fabulous, and Glasgow sunsets are phenomenal, absolutely superb. So, the quality of light that you get on the West Coast is wonderful, and I also love down the water and just the Clyde Estuary is so beautiful. And, again, this is another parallel with Hong Kong, because in Hong Kong you’re living in an archipelago effectively off the Pearl River Estuary. And it’s really similar to the Firth of Clyde, and various people as well, Fiona Sinclair, who we’ve just interviewed in this podcast, she thinks I’m completely mad for this, but I’m like, I’m telling you, Fiona, it’s really similar to the landscape around Hong Kong, because you know how you get those windswept trees?

Norry Wilson:
I must admit, I love that. I’ve done enough, not for a long time, but enough walking and hiking on the West Coast of Scotland and all of a sudden you’ll come across a wind blasted Scots Pine, and it’s almost like a Japanese watercolour. It’s almost like one of these Japanese wood block prints, and you just think, hang on, I’ve seen this before and it’s not a Scottish artist, I’m looking at a Hawkerside.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely. But then that touches on all these fantastic… Because Glasgow was a great trading city that had all these great international connections, which is why you get things like the Glasgow Style, and you look at what Charles Rennie Mackintosh and James Salmon Junior are doing, there is an incredible Japanese influence which is what’s coming back with the Glasgow Boys coming back, with bringing all these Japanese art back from Japan. And you can see all those connections, and that’s what I like about Glasgow, it’s an incredible hybrid. And you don’t get that in terribly many places, but it makes it really fascinating.

Norry Wilson:
It is, it’s that river city thing, the Clyde, I regularly bang on about it in talks. The Clyde was our original information superhighway. And everything, there was goods in Glasgow went out to the world via the Clyde, and everything that was good, bad, and indifferent in the world came back to Glasgow up the Clyde.

Niall Murphy:
Totally. And this is, again, where I’m fascinated with Glasgow’s history, and where you look where the grid came from, because I think you get this cliché that Glasgow gave the grid to America, which I’ve never entirely bought because I think it was the other way around.

Norry Wilson:
It’s one of these strange things. I do know that the city father’s of Chicago, after the Great Fire of Chicago destroyed pretty well the entire centre of Chicago, did visit Glasgow and looked at the grid system.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, they did the same thing.

Norry Wilson:
However, they spent a year and visited every other major city in Europe at the same time. It sounds like a wonderful council jolly, if you know what I mean? So, for Glasgow to claim we’re Chicago, or we invented the grid system…

Niall Murphy:
But I think it’s that, because when you look at how after the Jacobite rebellion, how the city takes off after that, when you look at Glasgow’s connections to the American colonies and the Eastern Seaboard and all the way down to the Indies as well, and you see all the small settlements that were springing up where the tobacco lords, the apprentice tobacco lords, all had to be based in those settlements to know their market, they’re bringing back all those ideas to Glasgow. That’s where it’s all to do with commerce, it’s a mercantile city, it is not a major governmental city or doesn’t have a palace in it.

So, it’s not that kind of thing, it’s a pure mercantile city, so having a grid like that is a completely commercial and pragmatic thing to do. But what makes Glasgow more interesting than the American cities, I think, is because we do get that initial very harsh grid on Blythswood Square, that’s the ultimate evolution of Glasgow’s grid, because obviously you’ve got earlier grids that extend out from Trongate and the High Street. By the time you get to the West End and parts of the South Side, the grid is being adapted for landscape, you’re getting crescents introduced, and it’s all becoming softer and more organic. And so I think that’s really interesting too, because you see it developing in a completely different way from how the very ruthless way it developed in the United States, and it gives Glasgow a richness and a great sense of identity.

Norry Wilson:
I like the way that the grids have almost frays around the edges, if you know what I mean. All of a sudden you’re… Hang on, that one’s going off that way and that’s not a right angle.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, that, and I know people aren’t necessarily fans of the motorway, and I’m not much of a fan of it myself, but I do think that the way that Glasgow as a city is an overlay on a mediaeval, post-mediaeval city, and then you get the Georgian city appearing, and then you get the Victorian city appearing, then you get the Edwardian city, and then the War city, and then again this modernist city all superimposed on top of each other. It’s not like Edinburgh, where you get the Old Town and then they make this decision to add the New Town on the other side of the Nor Loch. So, the two didn’t mix and have these different characters.

Norry Wilson:
Never the twain shall meet.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, Glasgow is different, it’s all superimposed and it makes it such a fantastic, cinematic city. So, I find all that really interesting.

Norry Wilson:
So, moving onto the podcast, and I realise that this is the last episode of two series, how have you found working on it? Obviously you don’t have any trouble speaking to folk, a bit like myself, is there anything in particular that has stuck with you, struck you, or stayed with you from the conversations you’ve had across the two series?

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely. Two episodes in particular, and the first one was talking to Dr. Jeff Meek about mapping queer Glasgow, which also touched on Scotland as well, because I had this revelation halfway through that… So, it was from a personal side of things, and it was a horrific revelation about my family, which slightly disturbed me, and I was having it in the middle of this podcast and it was like, I better not show my emotions at this point. And that was, we were talking about James Adair, who was a prosecutor in Glasgow who sat on the Wolfenden Committee in the 1950s, which was the thing that ultimately led to the legalisation of homosexuality in England, though it doesn’t happen because of him in Scotland until the early 1980s.

And it was we were having this discussion about him and various people around him, and one of whom was William Merrilees, who was this very famous policeman in Edinburgh, in the City of Edinburgh police. And I had this sudden thought, because my granddad on my mum’s side was a sergeant in the City of Edinburgh police, and I really loved my granddad, I really looked up to him. And I had this sudden though, I bet my granddad knew this guy, because this guy was at his height in the 1950s, and he conducted a war on Edinburgh’s gay community and was arresting people, and it was a real awful time for repression.

And there’s a really good book, Peter Wildblood, he writes this book against the law at the time, and he ends up being one of the people who’s witness to the Wolfenden Committee. And it was all about what was basically a sting operation which arrested him and it was on the basis of these letters that were written between him and this RAF airman that he was having a relationship with, which were found on an RAF base I think and thereby exposed him and he was arrested on that basis and several of his friends were arrested too and he ended up being flung into prison. But he got an awful lot of public sympathy because all he was doing was he was in love with somebody.

What’s the harm in that? But there was this real atmosphere of repression, and I wondered, did my grandfather know this guy? And afterwards, I went and spoke to my mother, and she was like, “Yeah, they were friends,” and my grandfather knew him very well. And it all made sense, because when I did come out in the ’90s to my parents, both of whom have been completely fantastic and I’ve been really lucky from that point of view, what they did say to me was, “Don’t tell your granddad.” And I never quite understood why would I not want to tell him something that’s so key in my life, why would I not want to say anything?

And it wasn’t until years later that I’ve realised that was why, because he would reject you and you don’t want that kind of blow. And that was it, and at the same time, you can say, well, he must have been an awful person, but that was the context at the time, was that there was this whole thing going on and the police were not very liberal, and still have problems obviously. So, he was part of that context, and you can’t just divorce people from that context that they’re in, so it was a horrible realisation. But it happened right in the middle of the podcast, so I’ve never really forgotten that one, so that was interesting from a personal point of view.

And then the other one I really enjoyed was talking to Reverend Dr. John Harvey, and it was Stuart from the…

Norry Wilson:
Stuart Baird from the Motorway Archive.

 

Niall Murphy:

What was the Motorway Archive and is now the Scottish Road Archive, and I really enjoyed that discussion, particularly we weren’t quite sure whether to stop it at the end because there’d been a technical issue, so we just carried on talking between the three of us, and it was really interesting because the Reverend Dr. John Harvey was in his late 80s, sharp as a tack, and he had been one of the Glasgow Group who had done all this fantastic, very religious based, but had done this fantastic work in the Gorbals, and I’d been asking him, he lived in Abbotsford Place, and so I’d been asking him about what it was like to live through the clearances in the Gorbals, what the poverty in the Gorbals had been like.

What it was like to live through the shattering of this community, had they resisted at all? And he said, yes, that they had gone and spoken to and made petitions to the city and asked them to think again, that they were going to destroy this community, and the Gorbals, when you look at it, obviously there was real poverty at that time, and not helped by, first of all, after the First World War, when you get the rent strikes and Mary Barbour, and obviously that’s a good thing because they were being exploited. But when the cap was put on rents then and it stops things like the factoring profession, and investment in tenements and the maintenance of tenements, and it was basically just shift the responsibilities towards the maintenance of tenements, which is why the tenements in Glasgow by the 1950s were in such a bad way, because they hadn’t had maintenance for the best part of four decades, and are not in a good way.

And that’s why so many of the owners then sell them off to the individual people living in the flats and you get this fractured ownership, which is something we’re dealing with now. Because the buildings were never meant to be like that originally, they were built for rent rather than for ownership, so it’s something we’re still trying to deal with. But with areas like the Gorbals, effectively they were the equivalent of what happened in the United States with redlining, and so I was really interested in that point, because I’d come across Dr. Mindy Fullilove, fantastic name, who’s this African American sociologist.

And so it was her, she was doing this whole analysis of this African American community in Pittsburgh that had been destroyed, which had a really vibrant community, which had major links to jazz, and it had been destroyed by the authorities in Pittsburgh, and they rebuilt it as a convention centre with this huge motorway running through it. And I was thinking, oh, my God, the parallels with Glasgow are fascinating, and then discovered that Glasgow had sent a delegation to go and have a look at it. And I’m thinking could you imagine now sending, let’s go and have a delegation to look at the redlining and removal of an African American community.

Norry Wilson:
How we destroy a city.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely. Just completely horrific. And that was exactly what had happened with the Gorbals, and the authorities had made up their mind that they were getting rid of it, nobody was going to change their mind, and so this whole part of the city was just wiped from the face of the map, and the community shattered. Yeah, absolutely. Which I just think has been such a disaster for the city, and I do think that this is one of the reasons why Glasgow suffers from poor urban health, it’s exactly what coming up, what the Nazis did with Warsaw. It was about destroying the culture of the place to destroy people’s sense of sense, and inadvertently we ended up doing that to ourselves in this idea of urban renewal. And rather than invest in the building and the infrastructure of the neighbourhood, it was just like, we’ll start again.

Norry Wilson:
And going back to your earlier point about enjoying living and working in Berlin, I always found it that very strange thing when I’ve visited German cities that were almost wiped off the map during the Second World War, and yet they managed to restore particularly their old towns, almost as was but with new infrastructure and better facilities and all the rest of it. And yet Glasgow, which stayed pretty well unscathed apart from a few individual stray hits during the Second World War, as soon as the Second World War is over, we set about doing the work that the Luftwaffe didn’t do.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely. On the other hand, you can appreciate when you look at the statistics that Glasgow had major problems at the time. The overcrowding is really bad compared to any other UK city, we were an order of magnitude worse. But you could have thinned out the population, you didn’t have to destroy the actual fabric of city to do that. And you.

Norry Wilson:
Yeah, it was almost about…

Niall Murphy:
… better homes, and you could have had a much more sense of conservation surgery approach to the whole thing, like what Patrick Geddes was promoting in Edinburgh back in the Victorian times. You could have something that had a much more sensitive approach to it, you didn’t have to throw everything out. But there’s this whole worship of the car. The car is a machine, it doesn’t feel. People need environments that are going to nourish them, not something that’s going to prioritise the car, I’m so sorry. My feelings about that are getting in the way.

Norry Wilson:
It chimes in particularly with a lot of things I think about. Obviously we talk at the moment about 15 minute cities and all the rest of it.

Niall Murphy:
Glasgow was built as a 15 minute city, so you’ve got the city centre, you had roughly 700,000 people living within a mile of the city centre, so it was incredibly dense, twice the density of London at the time. And that’s why you get things like the strength of the theatres, the Empire Theatre, because they could get audiences, people wanted to escape from their lives and be entertained.

Norry Wilson:
Yeah, you’ve got audiences on your doorstep.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, so you’ve got all of those things on the back of that. Now it’s operating a third of the density of London. How did we manage to scatter people so far about?

Norry Wilson:
And also it drives back again to the building of the M8, where Glasgow ends up with the largest inner city motorway system in Europe, and yet Glasgow per capita has perhaps the lowest car ownership of any city in Europe.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, and has the worst health problems.

Norry Wilson:
The worst health problems.

Niall Murphy:
So, active living, things like that, they do help. So, I do think about those kind of things, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m interested in Glasgow’s tenemental neighbourhoods in particular, because they were 15 minute cities, and it’s weird how suddenly 15 minute cities has become a culture war kind of thing, and it’s like, where did this come from? People have been talking about this since the 1990s or 1980s.

Norry Wilson:
Yeah, planned gardens, suburbs and all the rest.

Niall Murphy:
I know, and suddenly it’s become a culture war thing. It was like, where did that come from?

Norry Wilson:
Yeah, who doesn’t want a nice café and a nice park?

Niall Murphy:
I know, yeah, exactly.

Norry Wilson:
Good public transport links, [inaudible 00:55:22].

Niall Murphy:
Why wouldn’t you enjoy that? How is that something evil?

Norry Wilson:
No, I demand to be allowed to drive 15 miles across the city. No.

Niall Murphy:
It’s very odd.

Norry Wilson:
And it’s also the working from home thing during COVID. I know I’ve certainly got to know my own area so much better during that, simply because I have been out walking about. There’s a new café opened, go inside and speak to the folk behind the counter, and before you know it, three weeks later and you’re walking down the road and somebody says hello to you, and you go, that’s the guys from the café. And before you know it you’ve got that nice mesh and it’s not so much a support network, it’s just that lovely… Embedded.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, it’s a feeling of community and being embedded in a community, and I have been very community focused, I joined things like Pollokshields Community Council, got involved in things like Govanhill Baths, which to me is incredibly important health and wellbeing.

Norry Wilson:
Right, it’s one of these things, I know you’re a member of the trust, but in my early, more radical years, I was very much one of the occupiers.

Niall Murphy:
Because it’s all about working… They have such a fantastic archive to do with working class heritage, which I think is incredibly important, so that’s Paula Larkin who’s really been leading on that, but I really admire it, the community trust. So, I’ve ended up being the chair of the building preservation trust part, because I’m a conservation architect, so I’ve ended up being the chair of that. So, we’re actually leading on the physical rebuilding project, but the community trust [inaudible 00:56:53], I was the chair of the community trust at one point, and I did remark to them, are you sure I’m the right person for this? Middle aged, balding, and at the time a little bit rotund.

So, jokingly said that, “No, we want you to be chair,” okay, fine. So, the first thing I did is I ended up going on a diet because I thought it’s not the right perception, if anyone can do it, I’m going to show if I can do it, anyone can do it. So, I did that, which was good.

Norry Wilson:
Get to your fighting weight.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, exactly. But, yeah, it’s been a really interesting project to be involved with doing something like that.

Norry Wilson:
Yeah, I’m still very peripherally involved. But one of the joys of it has been meeting up with Bruce Downey.

Niall Murphy:
Bruce is great.

Norry Wilson:
Who has written two absolutely fabulous books, and is now doing I think walking tours and stuff. Oddly enough, I recently was asked very much last minute, the Australian version of Who Do You Think You Are? You know, the family genealogical thing, and it was a guy who’s very well known in Australia, but he’s got connections to Govanhill. So, Bruce had him out filming one day in Govanhill, showing him the tenements where his grandparents and parents had grown up, and the next day I got to take him to the school that his father and his two uncles went to.

And of course they’ve still got the record books all the way back to the 1920s, showing you what they’d done right that day, six of the belt today. No explanation, just six of the belt today. And it’s lovely because, again, it looked into that idea of knowing where you are in a city and being embedded in your own corner of the city, and Glasgow, God, as you know probably more than most, Glasgow as a city is the small thing North of the river. Everything else that we consider Glasgow is villages that have been sucked up.

Niall Murphy:
Subsumed by the city, yeah.

Norry Wilson:
Subsumed by this monster that is now Glasgow. So, you meet somebody outwith Glasgow and you hear a Glasgow accent and you ask them where are you from? They don’t say Glasgow because they hear your accent. You both know you’re from Glasgow, so you say where you’re from. I’m from Shawlands, I’m from Govanhill, I’m from Partick, I’m from Finnieston, I’m from Easterhouse, I’m from Govan, I’m from the Gorbals. Because you pin each other down, and as soon as somebody says, “I’m from Govan,” you say, “You don’t maybe know so and so and so and so?” And before you know it, there’s this spider’s web of six degrees of separation that runs through the city.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, which I also really enjoy as well. So, yeah, Glasgow’s a great place. It’s good fun. And that’s what I like about it, and that’s what makes it feel like home.

Norry Wilson:
So, we’re coming towards the end, there’s a real theme of change, disruption, and displacement across the conversations in all the podcast series, and this is the proverbial $64,000 question, because we can probably talk about this for the rest of the day, how do you feel the city has changed over the past 200 years?

Niall Murphy:
Well, I suppose it brings me back to that point about… And this is what I really like about Glasgow, and I feel like it’s a really cinematic city from that point of view, is that unlike the preciousness of Edinburgh, people in Edinburgh probably hate me for saying that, bu Edinburgh is terribly precious. Glasgow has never been really precious about it and it’s always been it has to see itself on the edge, and doing what’s going to be the next big thing. So, yeah, it has tended to go in great leaps forward and white heat of technology solutions stuff.

Norry Wilson:
Yeah, three steps forward, two steps back.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, exactly. But it is that layering up of the city I think is really fascinating, but it does mean that you do get mistakes. But I’m fascinated by the idea, because obviously history isn’t a static thing, it’s always ongoing, cities are always about change, and you have to deal with those kind of things, so it’s all about each generation adding something to the city. So, I’m very interested in that and how you do get this layering up of different cities in Glasgow, so one of the things I’m interested in is future conservation areas. I was thinking about this with, is it the Wyndford?

Norry Wilson:
The Wyndford Estate, in Maryhill.

Niall Murphy:
Wyndford Estate. Yeah, because Wyndford Estate, actually when you look at it, it’s a real period piece now. And I was thinking that as well, we were down at the Boathouse yesterday, and there’s the huge RMGM towers directly opposite the Gorbals, that are on that weird angle because they’re North-South East-West facing, whereas obviously Glasgow’s grid is not the same. And you’re looking at them, and I remember seeing them, they were used in the BBC series, The Nest, a couple of years back.

And I remember thinking then and thinking again yesterday, that’s a future conservation area. And it’s the same with New Gorbals as well. New Gorbals has been a fantastic piece of work, and people have put a lot of thought into those areas. And I think those kind of things is where you’re seeing, that’s actually a conservation area of tomorrow, because it’s really good work and it’s really helped heal that part of the city. And, yes, that kinda rum drum scheme is a rupture in the city, but it has its character, and I find that really fascinating.

And that is what I like about Glasgow, you have these shifts in character, so it’s literally that’s what’s cinematic, because you splice different bits of different cities together. And that’s I think why filmmakers enjoy Glasgow as a city, and it was fantastic last summer seeing it kitted it out for Indiana Jones Part Four. The Dial Of Destiny?

Norry Wilson:
I’m not sure.

Niall Murphy:
I’m not sure about that title.

Norry Wilson:
I was coming in and out of the city a little bit and I had just started coming back into the office, I came about one day a week, and I remember one day coming out of Central Station, and cutting along Gordon Street, across the Union Street, round Field Street, and looked up and it was just like, oh, God, it’s the Fourth of July up here.

Niall Murphy:
I know, it was amazing. What a transformation, but Glasgow just has such an American appearance to it. And because of that, the grid, and also because of, particularly after, at the start of, the First World War, you get this whole wave of American classicism appearing, particularly under James Miller. And I love those aspects, that influence of the city. I suppose in terms of where it goes to next, and I’m interested in things like what happens with George Square. I did this whole conservation management plan on George Square hopefully will be getting published shortly, but that was really interesting.
What I decided to do when I was doing that, because I didn’t think anyone had done it before, was actually track the different landscapes of the square and where the statues had been at different points, because…

Norry Wilson:
Well, they were, yeah.

Niall Murphy:
Glasgow’s stodgy statues moving about and…

Norry Wilson:
A great game of chess,.

Niall Murphy:
So, I decided to track all of the things like that. And, yeah, the statues have moved at various points, particularly for the Cenotaph, and also when the square, because it originally started off as no man’s land, without a real, defined idea of what people were going to do with it.

Norry Wilson:
Yeah, it was originally a swamp where folk used to drown dogs and slaughter horses.

Niall Murphy:
Exactly, then it becomes this pleasure garden that’s planned by the guy who does the botanics, whose the head gardener of the botanics.

Norry Wilson:
Which was fenced in, and the locals kept tearing down the fences.

Niall Murphy:
Exactly. And ends up with this very grand, quite like Charlotte Square and St. Andrew’s square, fence around it, which ironically the city fathers paid for and took possession of it at the same time, so they actually had legal title to it, not the owners of the townhouses around the square who thought they did. And then in 1866, it’s that that allows John Carrick to transform it into a public square when he’s trying to find a location for Prince Albert, the equestrian monument to Prince Albert, and that’s when Victoria moves into the square from St. Vincent’s square.

And so it was like mapping all of those, the moves of all the monuments, which was really interesting. And I’m interested to see where the square is going to go now, because it peaks between 1924 and the 1950s and it’s downhill thereafter, particularly in the 1990s when it gets really bad. So, I’m interested to see what’s going to happen with the square, and what the council are doing at the moment with things like the avenues programme, and introducing trees and softer landscapes in the city centre I think is really interesting too.

I remember there was a PhD student that came into talk to me a number of years ago now and wanted to know why there weren’t really any trees in the city centre, and I was like, well, you just have to think about it, Glasgow was a really polluted city, so that was going to go against the trees, and then the second thing was that it’s built for commerce, it’s not like Paris or London, where you would have-

Norry Wilson:
It’s not Boulevard City.

Niall Murphy:
It’s not like that, so it’s built for commerce, the trees would get in the way. So, you see these stray specimens from what were country roads which have been urbanised and then they gradually die off and they never get replaced. So, that’s why it had been like that, so I think if we want to attract people back into the city centre, and this is one of the problems with Glasgow post-COVID is that Glasgow was the busiest city centre in the UK outside of the West End of London prior to COVID. But because Glasgow has a really good transport network and is very commutable, people don’t necessarily have to come back into the city centre because you can work from home now.

And so that’s had a real impact on the city center’s economy, and it’s about how we get that going again, it would be better if we actually encouraged some of those 700,000 people that ended up leaving that area around the city centre to come back into it once more, and the only way you’re going to do that is to get more amenity back into the city centre. So, it’s looking at things like with the Avenues Project, what they’ve done with Sauchiehall Street about getting trees down the streets, and that will really help soften some of the vistas.

Norry Wilson:
It is that strange thing, Glasgow and the Dear Green Place, and actually in most of the city centre, the lack of greenery is noticeable.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, we have the least greenery of any city centre in the UK now. So, it’s about working some of that back in and making it more pedestrianised, friendlier for everybody, and getting a lot more planting back in. And I think that’s going to have a phenomenal effect on the city, and it will make it more attractive. We have something like 3,500,000 square feet of upper floor space in the city centre which is not in use.

Norry Wilson:
Yeah, which is lying empty.

Niall Murphy:
And what do you do with that? And that’s not including the new buildings that are getting built, which I’m still puzzled why we’re building such enormous new buildings when people are working from home. I think we’re going to end up with a hybrid scenario, but it doesn’t seem as though people are crying out.

Norry Wilson:
I’ve got this horrible idea that they’re actually going to make us live and work in our own office in the city centre.

Niall Murphy:
See, that did my head in. After a while, it was like it was okay for the first six months, and then after a while it was like, I need some space between work and home, not just a two minute walk.

Norry Wilson:
And you know yourself, it’s not for the work, it’s for the water cooler moments.

Niall Murphy:
It’s chatting with everybody in the office, and I miss that camaraderie.

Norry Wilson:
The city is a hive, it’s a human hive, and having even just that good morning, how are you, nice weekend, did you watch the football? That human connectivity, that’s what I really miss.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, it’s absolutely critical, so I’m getting really frustrated with Royal Exchange Square at the moment, which should be a thriving European square and is not. And I realise in part that’s because a whole section of it has been basically left vacant, which I think is a great shame, but that should be full of street cafés and full of life and a real hubbub, and it could be that throughout the year, and yet just isn’t operating to its potential at the moment, and it needs people to look at that and we need to get that character into a lot of…

It’s ridiculous, I remember being out in the West End just about a month ago, and Byres Road, I was walking back across Byers Road about 11:00ish, and Byres Road, absolutely thrumming with people. Couldn’t move for folk, and getting on the subway, back in the city centre in about 12 minutes or so, getting out, George Square being pretty deserted, getting into the Brunswick and there being nobody around. And you’re like, what is going on here? This is ridiculous, it’s totally topsy-turvy. So, we have to get people back in somehow.

Norry Wilson:
It’s that doughnut effect as well, where the city centre is busy during the week, and every night almost come 5:00 o’clock there’s a changing of the guard, all the sensible people go home to the outskirts, and certainly during lockdown it was young people that came in and basically took over the streets.

Niall Murphy:
There was one night, I had to come into the office, and I’d suddenly realised that I needed this document, and it was a legal document which are all in our archive, and so I had to come into the office, it was 9:00 o’clock at night. And I was like, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back as soon as I can,” and there was literally no one around, so I just legged it into the city centre, because no trains were running. And legged it into the city centre as fast as I could, and I walked across the car park at St. Enoch’s East, and was heading up past The 13th Note, and it’s how you’ve got parallel streets, I could see this whole crowd walking down the High Street, and I’m thinking, it’s 9:00 o’clock at night, what are they doing? And all I was thinking of was The Warriors, that film in 1970s New York.

Norry Wilson:
Warriors, come out to play.

Niall Murphy:
I was thinking, oh, my God, it’s The Warriors, and absolutely legged it to the office to get inside, thinking, I’m going to get mugged and help, because there was no one around. Yeah, that was a weird night.

Norry Wilson:
Zombie apocalypse.

Niall Murphy:
It was like Glasgow was the zombie apocalypse. So, yeah, keen to see people back in the city centre, and it is important because Glasgow’s city centre is one of the drivers of Scotland’s economy and should be seen as a national priority. So, getting people back living in here and actually making whatever you create here in terms of residential space attractive and desirable and for everybody, so it’s affordable for everything, I think that’s absolutely key and how we go back to it.

Norry Wilson:
Because Glasgow’s always been about that mix of not just building types but social classes and all the rest of it, living on the street by jowl, which you don’t so much see in Edinburgh, whereas Glasgow, I don’t know if it speaks more to an egalitarian spirit or simply the organic development of Glasgow rather than the great planning development of Edinburgh, things are amorphous. One minute you’re in the most expensive bit of the West End, and you turn two streets and you’re actually in a pretty poor bit of Maryhill. And it’s the same on the South Side as well, all of a sudden you turn the wrong corner and you’re like, how did I get here? Which way is North from here?

Niall Murphy:
I quite like that.

Norry Wilson:
I like it as well.

Niall Murphy:
Because it gives it a completely different character. And it’s much more it’s for everyone. So, yeah, really value that.

Norry Wilson:
It’s the grit that makes for peril.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, I couldn’t live in Edinburgh.

Norry Wilson:
It’s nice for a fence game.

Niall Murphy:
You’re a very beautiful city.

Norry Wilson:
Well, we’re drawing to a close here, and, again, this is one of these killer questions, because I remember when you asked me it when you interviewed me.

Niall Murphy:
I know, I’m like, oh, God, the tables have really turned.

Norry Wilson:
Yeah, I know, I’m thoroughly enjoying watching you squirm here. So, we’ve talked about all sorts of Glasgow buildings, but what is your favourite building in Glasgow and what would it tell us if its walls could talk?

Niall Murphy:
Oh, God, it’s such a loaded question, and honestly, my favourite building in Glasgow changes every five minutes. It’s a new one every week. So, when I first thought about this, there are obvious classics like I absolutely love, and it’s such a shame what’s happened, the West Elevation of Glasgow School of Art, which is Mackintosh at its absolute height. And one of the things about being in the architecture school, the Mac, is you’ve got these huge windows that look onto that. And seeing that and the sunrise, because we used to do all nighters in the studios, you can’t do that now apparently.

Norry Wilson:
Probably it’s a fire risk.

Niall Murphy:
We used to do all nighters in the studios. Yeah, I know, funny that. And so everyone would go out and get pizzas in the middle of the night and then we’d end up having a little dance party in the middle of the night to keep everyone’s energy up, and then you would watch the sun rise over the art school, and it was fabulous. And I wonder whether they do that now. Anyway, so that has been a favourite, but, of course, after everything that’s happened, I just don’t want to think about it. Other things that have been really influential, I’m never quite sure how to pronounce it, is it the Athenaeum Theatre or is the Athenaeum?

Norry Wilson:
The Athenaeum.

Niall Murphy:
It’s the Athenaeum, see, I’m never quite sure how to pronounce that. But the Athenaeum, so Burnet’s Athenaeum extension I absolutely love, and I was lucky enough to see-

Norry Wilson:
And that’s, which is going to be the Hard Rock Café.

Niall Murphy:
which is now the Hard Rock Café, I was lucky enough to be at the last performance in there by complete fluke. And it would have made such a good jazz club, and it’s a shame that it’s got the stuffing knocked out of it, but still, key features are being saved at least, but all the auditorium and the seating and everything has all been stripped out.

Norry Wilson:
It was, it was a beautiful.

Niall Murphy:
It was a lovely wee theatre, really beautiful. But from an architect’s point of view, it’s a really interesting building, because it’s about the first time you can take a Georgian townhouse plot and then go high once you’ve got electricity to get lifts into buildings, so it’s one of the very first lift buildings in Glasgow. But it’s also about how Burnet and his then partner, John Archibald Campbell, handled the programme in the building, because every floor has a different purpose to it, so you’ve got dining rooms, music rooms towards the top. It’s a really fantastic building programmatically, and then you’ve got the lift, which is one of the first examples of a lift in Glasgow.

And at the top of the building, he has this little tower of winds, with wind gods around it, which is like the lift going up and down, it makes wind. And I think that’s quite witty and funny, and the whole narrative, it is an elitist building, because that narrative, this whole classical narrative of Athena, who’s the goddess of the arts and everything, you would only know that if you were educated on that kind of thing, so it is quite elitist. But I like narratives in building, that’s something that appeals to me. So, that’s been a favourite for a very long time.

But my ultimate favourite would have to be Glasgow Central Station. But it’s not so much a building, it’s the space and the experience. So, I just think it’s fantastic, because obviously the station was built over the top of Grahamston, the village that disappeared underneath it and allegedly survives, but it doesn’t actually. Though there are a couple of buildings that are still there in Argyle Street and on Union Street which come from the original village. But it’s the space, because it’s not a single building, it’s a whole multitude of buildings that form the urban block around it, and obviously you’ve got what’s now Grand Central Hotel on the corner, which is supposed to be the landmark that identifies it within the city. But it’s the fact that the Victorians somehow managed to conceal this enormous station within an urban block.

Norry Wilson:
It’s a city within a city.

Niall Murphy:
It is, it’s completely concealed. You would not know until you’ve seen the Hielanman’s Umbrella that there is this enormous station sitting there, completely concealed within the heart of the city, because they handle it so well, and if you look at, say, a relatively modern example, of St. EnochCentre, which I can’t stand, and how that effectively internalises the city because it’s got blank frontages all round. Absolutely not the way to handle it. You have to have active streets around it, which is what the Victorians did so well, and I just love the whole concourse.

It’s the original 1879 to 1880 84/85 concourse, and then you’ve got the later 1900 extension by James Miller and Donald Matheson, which has a subtly different character. But it’s a very amorphous space, but Donald Matheson and James Miller had this idea of making people flow through the station as though it’s a river, and you use these organic curved pods to shift people, make them flow towards the platforms, I think is a really beautiful moment. And it’s like the Cunningham and Blythe trusses from the original concourse are really quite aggressive, big, I think they’re Vierendeel trusses. They’re so matter of fact and blunt, but then Donald Matheson has those bowstring trusses which are much more elegant for the extension.

But it’s just this incredible organic space, and it’s so lovely. You see all of life there, and whether you’re coming into it during the day and it’s a beautiful sunny day and you’re getting this beautiful blue sky over the space, which I assume must be larger than George Square, maybe it’s not. But it’s one of the biggest space, and technically it’s a public space, it’s kind of public private, I’ve taken tour groups in there before and been told off for doing it. You’re very naughty, it’s like there’s a yellow alert at the moment, what are you doing.

Norry Wilson:
Obviously I’m going to agree with you because you asked me that question and I said Central Station.

Niall Murphy:
Did you? There you go, whoa.

Norry Wilson:
But the wonderful thing that’s happened with Central Station just in recent years, the TV programme, Inside Central Station, which I’ve guested on a few times, and fortunately through that I’ve got to know Paul and Jacky, the two tour station guides.

Niall Murphy:
I really need to meet them.

Norry Wilson:
And they are just the most passionate, knowledgeable, they know every brick, they know every story, they know every mote of dust that goes through. And what they have done around Central Station, which I’m quite sure even 10 years ago, if somebody had said, “Do you want to organise tours underneath Central Station?” Folk would have gone, “There’s no interest in that.” And yet, now their tours are booked up months in advance.

Niall Murphy:
I know, it’s fascinating.

Norry Wilson:
Because everyone wants to know what goes on underneath Central Station.

Niall Murphy:
The old platforms are amazing. I went to see them several years ago. It’s the most wonderful space. Even at night, when you’re coming into it, then when you come in from the back of that huge advertising screen and you can see the light from the advertising screen cast over the concourse as you’re coming in on the train, it’s a real Blade Runner-esque moment that I absolutely love, because it’s really cinematic. And then there was one morning a couple of months back when there was something weird going on with the weather, and it was colder inside than it was outside because it had been really cold for a while and then suddenly this warm front came in.

And it was this weird moment where as I was leaving the close, I realised there was condensation on the outside of the door, which was a bit weird. And got into Central, and it was like Central had its own microclimate, and there was mist in Central, which was bizarre to see. And, yeah, completely amazing, and just fascinating, it’s such a fantastic space, and there’s so many people in it. It is like a city in itself, I absolutely love it, it’s my favourite moment in Glasgow.

Norry Wilson:
And it’s that strange thing, you were talking about the quality of light.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, the light is beautiful.

Norry Wilson:
When I was growing up and coming through Central, it was always dark.

Niall Murphy:
Really?

Norry Wilson:
Because during the War years, they had painted black tar across all the glass ceiling panes, so that it didn’t show light to bombers. And it was only in the early 1980s when they added on the extra platforms and so on that they actually scraped it all off.

Niall Murphy:
I didn’t know that.

Norry Wilson:
And all of a sudden, the place, even on the brightest sunny day, you used to go into Central Station and all the lights would be on because there was no light coming from above apart from the end of the platforms. And it was only when they took that off, all of a sudden you’re just like, hang on, this is how it was meant to be.

Niall Murphy:
I know. One thing I’ve never seen a photograph of but which I really would like to see a photograph of was apparently the champagne bar, the dome over the champagne bar was a stained glass dome. And it’s been turned into a plaster dome subsequently, and that would make sense, because James Miller also did all of the liners, the great liners, and he was using Oscar Paterson for his stained glass on the Lusitania, that was Oscar Paterson did the stained glass on the Lusitania. And Oscar Paterson did the stained glass in Central Hotel as well, and there used to be stained glass panels in each of the windows, which all disappeared when it was refurbished, and I have no idea what happened to them, but they were Oscar Paterson stained glass.

Norry Wilson:
Any idea what period that refurbishment would be?

Niall Murphy:
Well, this was the latest refurbishment, but it was when James Miller added the extension to Grand Central, that’s when Oscar Paterson did the work in it.

Norry Wilson:
No, that’s interesting, because my uncle, I say my uncle, technically a cousin of my mum’s, started off age 14 in the Central Hotel pre-World War Two, and he ended up being the chief barman and worked there until he was 70. And his knowledge of the Central Hotel is just mind blowing. He used to make cocktails for Frank Sinatra and all the rest of it, he met everyone.

Niall Murphy:
See, that’s fascinating, it’s all part of the history of that whole place, and John Logie Baird and the television signal. Fascinating stuff.

Norry Wilson:
And I know that Central Station commissioned, now, is it Henry Bedford Lemere?

Niall Murphy:
Mm-hmm, yes, to take photographs of it, yes, [inaudible 01:23:38].

Norry Wilson:
I know there are some fabulous interior, there must be photographs somewhere.

Niall Murphy:
So, there must be. But weirdly it’s English Heritage that have them and not Historic Environment Scotland. But you would be able to get your hands on them, so it would be worth actually having a look to see whether it was actually genuine, I’d really like to know.

Norry Wilson:
I’d imagine it must have been photographed at some point.

Niall Murphy:
It must have been photographed, because James Miller would have been so proud of it.

Norry Wilson:
Yeah, it would have been a tour de force.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely. I’ll end with there’s this great quote from the American architectural historian, Vincent Scully, he was talking about the loss of Penn Street Station in New York, which was one of the great conservation cases, and just when you see it, it’s an astonishing station, and can’t believe they destroyed it.

Norry Wilson:
I’ve seen photographs, that’s where they built… What’s the huge stadium?

Niall Murphy:
Madison Square Garden. And his quote is that you used to come into, because it was modelled on a Roman baths, and you used to come into the city, “Like a Roman god, and now we come in scurrying like a rat.” And he see’s that quote, who’s going, “The West End is much better than the South Side,” and I’d say, “Yeah, but I get to come into Central Station every morning, I come into the city like a god through this fabulous station, whereas you come in at Buchanan Street Underground like a rat.” That’s why the South Side is better.

Norry Wilson:
Well, I don’t know how long we’ve been going, but it’s been great fun, Niall, as ever, chatting with you.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, Norry, it’s always a pleasure.

Norry Wilson:
And this is the end of the wire, as it were.

Niall Murphy:
It is, yeah.

Norry Wilson:
We’ve hit the buffers and appropriately enough we’ve hit the buffers at Central Station.

Niall Murphy:
Last episode of the second series, so, yeah, it’s been a pleasure doing this with everybody, so, really enjoyed it.

Norry Wilson:
So, thank you for interviewing me, and thank you very much for allowing me to pick your brains.

Niall Murphy:
Turn the tables on me.

Norry Wilson:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
It’s been a pleasure, great fun.

Norry Wilson:
Thank you.

Niall Murphy:
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 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. The podcast is kindly sponsored by the National Trust for Scotland, and supported by Tunnock’s.

Niall Murphy:
Hello everyone. I’m Niall Murphy, and welcome to If Glasgow Walls Could Talk, a podcast by Glasgow City Heritage Trust, about the stories and relationships between historic buildings and people in Glasgow. Today, we’re getting ready for a walk in the park, but as always in this series, we’ll be travelling through time as well as space and in excellent company. It could be a long walk. Glasgow has a wealth of great public parks and gardens. They are much loved spaces that have gained special significance, especially during the last few years with lockdown and the pandemic. Many of us have found a welcome escape from that in Glasgow’s dear green places.

We can be grateful to the visions of the Victorians who invested in landscapes, laid out and planted for citizens to enjoy more than 150 years ago. It was a generous gift, but it made a lot of practical sense. By the 1880s, Glasgow was one of the fastest growing cities in the world, with a rapidly growing population crammed into tenements and factories and people needed work and housing. But as the city leaders saw, they also needed space to enjoy life and room to breathe. So the public parks were designed to be the lungs of Glasgow. But with Victorian belief in self-improvement, they were also filled with opportunities for entertainment and education, learning while having fun. And creative industries rose to the challenge.

At the turn of the 20th century, you wouldn’t walk far without hearing musical shows from a Saracen Foundry bandstand. You might pause for a drink from one of their equally beautiful water fountains, and if by chance it started to rain, you could take shelter in the wonderful world of glasshouses. More often than not, provided by the enterprise and horticultural builders, Simpson & Farmer, of Partick Bridge. Magnificent glasshouses are a symbol of that optimistic era, domes of curved glass in wrought iron-frames, greenhouses filled with exotic plants. They were the product of new cutting edge technology at a time of dynamic change. We see them now in different states of survival on our walks in the parks.

In another era of rapid change, how do we manage this formidable legacy? The designers, engineers, architects and builders of the Victorian and Edwardian eras could count on low-cost labour and cheap materials. That’s not the way things are in the 2020s. So how can we protect and restore our historic buildings? Do we have the skills, time, materials and money to do them justice? These are daunting questions for conservationists, not least Glasgow City Heritage Trust. And I can’t think of anyone better to discuss them with than today’s guest, conservation architect, Fiona Sinclair, who is passionate about the care and repair of historic buildings. Fiona takes particular interest in traditional building materials and the craft required to work with them. She is quite often to be found up scaffolding, investigating structures at close quarters. Lately, she’s been flying drones over Queen’s Park Glasshouse as she prepares a report on this unique building.
So a very warm welcome to the podcast for you, Fiona, and we are really looking forward to this conversation. Okay, let’s begin with the parks. So Glasgow’s glasshouses are a remarkable story, but they need space so they could be built. So Glasgow has a wealth of public parks which provided the space, scope and inspiration for hothouses, greenhouses and palm houses and the winter gardens of the city. So can we start looking at the city’s great spread of parks and gardens and how did that come about?

Fiona Sinclair:
Well, you more or less mentioned in your introduction, the reasoning behind the creation of so many public parks across the city. And it was this sense on the part of the city fathers, that so much of Glasgow in the mid 19th century was being built over very, very rapidly for housing. You mentioned tenements, of course, that wonderful building type that accommodates people from all walks of life, industry, anything related to ship building or engineering. And what that effectively meant was that very few parts of the city were not either covered with buildings or hard surfaces.

And there was a medical officer for health called William Gardner, who on his retirement in 1900 in his retirement speech used this expression, the lungs of the city. And he had been long concerned with the state of the lungs of the city. Now he might not have been the first person who coined that phrase, but he certainly made his point to those who were assembled to hear his retirement. And he actually said that in his early years as a medical officer, he’d been able to walk from maybe four or five miles across the city and not see a blade of grass or any greenery at all.

Niall Murphy:
That’s right. John Carrick talks about that too. It’s in John Carrick’s obituary, which is by William Gardner.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. So it was something that the… It’s interesting, because the city was very good at promoting its achievements in respect of the provision of municipal housing, the provision of, say the production of gas, the production of electricity, transport. Of course, we had a wonderful tram system, there were three tunnels below the river, which they seemed to deliver almost effortlessly, but they didn’t promote the kind of public promise to the same extent.

So I think the city did itself a little bit of a disservice by not promoting them, but round about the beginning of the 20th century, they began to realise that actually they had an asset in the green space that had been created and they did begin to promote how important the parks were and the amount of work that had gone into purchasing the land. Because this wasn’t land that came at no cost, they had to physically buy land. So they bought Glasgow Green, which is the oldest of the city’s parks, once the drained it and formalised it. And then of course, they spent a vast amount of money buying Kelvingrove Park, which of course as we know-

Niall Murphy:
With the various estates pieced together there.

Fiona Sinclair:
And they had to attempt to recoup quite a bit of that outlay, by reserving the crest of Woodlands Hill for that fantastic housing by the great Charles Wilson. And of course, there was an outcry when the first master plan, which Wilson worked on with Sir Joseph Paxton, a massive outcry when this was published, because too much of the land was being set aside for housing.

Niall Murphy:
Right not enough for the park.

Fiona Sinclair:
The public were essentially, “I thought we were getting a park out of this. All we’re getting is housing none of us will be able to afford.” So the housing, it was confined to the area we now see and it was effectively completed, albeit Park Warden of course, wasn’t. But on the back of the success of Kelvingrove Park, the city then began to look further south, and they then felt that perhaps there ought to be a park somewhere in the area where Queen’s Park now exists. And interestingly, that met with more opposition, largely, I think because the city fathers, they remained unconvinced that people would want to walk through the industry and the deprivation of Gorbals and Govanhill, to get to a public park. So it was more of an uphill struggle for the parks committee to persuade the city that an investment needed to be made on the south side. Then it came in the form of Neale Thomson, of the Crossmyloof Bakery, who offered the land of Pathhead Farm to the city.

Niall Murphy:
All that really fascinates me, because when you see how the city gradually marches up to the park, and the fact that they had the foresight to build the park first and then set out this master plan for the edges of the park and how it’s all carefully framed with the two churches on either end, which frame the views. And then you’ve got this great avenue all the way down. Well, it’s not an avenue, but it could be an avenue, Victoria Road, and Eglington Road, and straight into the heart of the city. And it’s also carefully thought about and yet the city wasn’t there yet. And it was actually in separate boroughs, because you’ve got the borough of cross hill, which has spring up right next to it as well. So the city is buying land, but it’s beyond its boundary, which really fascinates me.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. It’s effectively providing a public park for Pollokshaws, Langside, all of these small estates that were owned by visionaries, I suppose, which very, very gradually were absorbed into the city. And of course, when Pollokshaws became part of the city, that kind of brought more land in. But probably most importantly in 1912, when the boroughs of government party were annexed in the city, that effectively brought Victoria Park into the city and Elder Park in, Govan. There’s a tremendous map, I think it’s Bartholemew, which was published to really emphasise how much green space the city fathers had provided. And it’s signed off by AB McDonald, Alexander Beith McDonald, Carrick’s successor. And it’s reprinted in a fantastic book, Glasgow: Mapping the City by John Moore, I think it is.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, John Moore.

Fiona Sinclair:
And it just shows the city in 1900 with these pockets of greenery encircling the city centre. But then of course, what the city also did on top of the production of large public parks, was they created squares and playgrounds. And there are some fabulous little playgrounds, it can’t really be called parks. Warmley Park near Cathcart is one. It’s got some of its original play park equipment.

Niall Murphy:
It does. I would love to see them saved actually, because the swings there are particularly beautiful, but they’re quite vulnerable at the moment.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. And I mean, these are catalogue items that were commonplace and we see very, very few of them retained.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, sadly.

Fiona Sinclair:
And then you’ve got a very, very small Govanhill recreation ground right at the heart of Govanhill. It’s small, but it’s really important.

Niall Murphy:
I really like that one. It’s better than… This is sacrilege coming from you of course. But Maxwell Square-

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes, yes, yes.

Niall Murphy:
… and it’s smaller. So it’s just too small, so I much prefer the Govanhill one. I think that’s a really nice park.

Fiona Sinclair:
And it’s a gap which wasn’t built over with tenements, which is really, really important. And of course, there are some tremendous examples nowadays. Less so then, but nowadays of back court areas that have been developed as kind of pocket parks, almost. And you are right, they came into their own during 2020, during lockdown.

Niall Murphy:
Very much.

Fiona Sinclair:
Very much.

Niall Murphy:
I’m lucky enough to live on one. So where we are on the south side, the blocks I live in was allegedly taken over as officer’s housing in the Second World War and so they removed all of the walls dividing the tenement gardens. So it’s one huge space, which was allegedly a parade ground. Believe that when I see it. But it makes complete sense, because when you look at how those boundaries worked, it must have been impossible to manage these tiny little gardens that don’t align with the tenements. But it’s a fantastic space now, because everyone just uses it for barbecues and playing games and-

Fiona Sinclair:
I mean, communal back courts are fascinating. I mean, they used to be… Well, they provided a bin storage, quite often the wash houses were in the backhoes. Ash pits, of course and drying greens weren’t really intended for people to sit out in, they were very workman like.

Niall Murphy:
No, but we can work them into that now, as part of the kind of green lung of the city.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah, exactly.

Niall Murphy:
At least that’s something we could do now, if we are enlightened about it.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah.

Niall Murphy:
Well, let’s move on to the glasshouses and the winter gardens themselves. When is it they start to appear? And there’s also interesting stories behind some of these as well. Some of them having been built in Glasgow, but others transported to the city from elsewhere. So which came first, and how many can we still see around the city?

Fiona Sinclair:
Well very famously, the first to appear was John Kibble’s palace, that we see in Botanic Gardens at the junction of Byres Road and Great Western Road, of course. And John Kibble, he was a photographer. Apparently he owned the largest camera ever made. It had such a massive lens, it had to be towed by a horse on a cart, on which Kibble allegedly developed the photographs as they were kind of travelling along. He was an astronomer, he was an engineer, a fascinating character. And he had built a house for himself on the shores of Loch Long, at cook port. And behind that house, he began to build a glasshouse, a hot house using the architects, Buscher and Cousland. And James Buscher-

Niall Murphy:
They had a villa next door.

Fiona Sinclair:
They did.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
James Buscher built the family villa next door, and I believe it still exists. I believe it is used as a storage depot by the military establishment at Cook Port.

Niall Murphy:
It’s such a shame that it’s all kind of been taken over by the military-

Fiona Sinclair:
It’s such a shame.

Niall Murphy:
… because it’s such a beautiful setting.

Fiona Sinclair:
Of course, Cooper House has long since been demolished. So in any event, for whatever reason, Kibble offered the glasshouse to the city. He either decided there was too much in the way of maintenance, or he didn’t have time to actually properly use it. He collected statuary as well.

Niall Murphy:
Really?

Fiona Sinclair:
So he offered the glasshouse and the statuary to the city. And he offered it in the first instance to Queen’s Park, and he got a bit fed up with them prevaricating. And apparently it was because he had initially offered it as a lease and then he imposed the condition that he wanted to be able to hold performances in it and charge and to sell refreshments. And there was this notion that those refreshments would be alcohol, which didn’t go at all well-

Niall Murphy:
Didn’t fit with the corporation’s kind of philosophy at all.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. I read last night, it’s a very wonderful book about the Kibble Palace by Eric Curtis, which is a fabulous little book.

Niall Murphy:
Got a copy of it, yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
Eric, of course, was based at Botanic Gardens for many years. And I read just last night that that year that kibble offered it, the city was really short of money and the Lord Provost had to resign because his own company had gone bankrupt or something of that order. So there really was no money. So kibble eventually offered it to the Botanic Gardens, which at the time wasn’t owned by the city, or at least I don’t think it was. It was owned by the Royal Botanic Institution of Glasgow.

Niall Murphy:
Right. Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
It had moved there from Sandyford.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
And I think they had moved to Sandyford from High Street, from Glasgow University.

Niall Murphy:
Right, okay.

Fiona Sinclair:
I think they moved across the city. Yes.

Niall Murphy:
Right. Okay.

Fiona Sinclair:
So he offered it to them. It was dismantled. It was loaded onto a steamer at the pier and cohort, and then it was taken to Port Dundas in a storm apparently, and Kibble wrote about how his statue of Apollo arrived looking like a proper ruffian. It was very badly doted as part of this journey. And then Kibble paid to have the dome enlarged. So what we see today is not the original. It’s much, much larger.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. Yeah. No, I’ve seen photographs [inaudible 00:15:34].

Fiona Sinclair:
And that of course became the first of Glasgow’s glasshouse, these great glasshouses. And it remains the best. And of course it’s in the best condition, because it was huge investment in it. It was effectively dismantled. I believe it developed a bit of a twist.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, it had developed a twist.

Fiona Sinclair:
The dome developed a twist.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah.

Fiona Sinclair:
So it was used for performances, and I think Disraeli and Gladstone both spoke there.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
Both gave speeches there.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
So it was used for all manner of entertainment, less so for the propagation of plants. And that’s why Botanic Gardens has got what they call the main range, which is a much, much bigger and more utilitarian looking glasshouse alongside.

Niall Murphy:
Right, okay.

Fiona Sinclair:
That’s where they actually grew the big palm trees, the big plants.

Niall Murphy:
Right. Because the Kibble was more of a display and performance. Okay.

Fiona Sinclair:
So that and Tollcross… The Tollcross Glasshouses were donated by a counsellor on his retirement, and they came from Adrossan. He had built them for his own use in Adrossan, he donated them to the city and they were re-erected into Tollcross park. And then probably the one that people know best is the Winter Gardens behind the People’s Palace. And they were designed by the Office of Public Works by AB McDonald, this Chap I mentioned. I think they were opened about something like 1898, and by 1900 people were raving about what great asset for the city it was. The interesting thing is, it do kind of look as if where the Winter Gardens added after the people’s palaces were built. But no, it was all… It’s a single holistic design.

Niall Murphy:
It’s interesting because obviously that is the East End equivalent of the Kelvingrove. And yet the Kelvingrove didn’t end up with a glasshouse.

Fiona Sinclair:
Well, interestingly, the Kelvingrove should have had a glasshouse because when Charles Wilson and Joseph Paxton worked on the Master Plan, Paxton proposed a Winter Gardens for the banks of the Kelvin, and it was never built. And there are illustrations of what it would’ve looked like. Had a great dome, of course. There’s a lovely watercolour of what it would’ve looked like. So there was supposed to be a winter garden in Kelvingrove Park, but that wasn’t delivered. And then of course, probably the one that came closest to… The city fathers, referred often to what was called the Great Snow over the Great Conservatory, which was built at Chatsworth by Joseph Paxton for the Duke of Devonshire. And certainly on record, the ease of the Lord Provost or the Superintendent of the Parks Committee referred to as the gorgeous Conservatory at Chatsworth. And that was an ambition, they would have something similar. Of course, they we’re never going to get anything half as big as that, because you could drive a carriage from one end to the other at Chatsworth. But the Springburn Winter Garden is probably the closest thinking to that.

Niall Murphy:
It’s enormous.

Fiona Sinclair:
It’s huge.

Niall Murphy:
Really, really impressive piece of structure. Quite something.

Fiona Sinclair:
And has a mezzanine that none of the others have.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, absolutely. Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah. Two story.

Niall Murphy:
Yep. That concrete mezzanine that wraps around it. Yeah.

Fiona Sinclair:
But there were little glasshouse in places like Elder Park. There were probably a whole series of smaller glasshouse, which have gone. So we’re left really with the Queen’s Park glasshouse, Botanic Gardens, and all its range of wonderful glasshouses. And in Botanic Gardens, interestingly behind the main range, it’s a whole series of really interesting miniature greenhouses where they do lots of very interesting propagation. A lot of very, very interesting kind of educational activities take place there. You’ve got Tollcross, the Winter Gardens behind the People’s Palace.

Niall Murphy:
Which has just been restored.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yep. The Winter Gardens, which were in the papers just yesterday. How do we raise enough money to properly restore-

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely.

Fiona Sinclair:
… the winter gardens?

Niall Murphy:
Which would be good to see.

Fiona Sinclair:
And then Springburn, which is borderline ruins.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. No, I mean there are various proposals also Springburn to get it back into some form of kind of enclosed space, but it’s how you go back doing that. So I think collective architects are looking [inaudible 00:19:36]-

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
… animals for it instead, which would obviously give a very different appearance. But it is kind of the ritual. It’s getting tough.

Fiona Sinclair:
It’s very difficult.

Niall Murphy:
No worries.

Fiona Sinclair:
It really is. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned in your introduction, how do you look after something like that? How do you restore something like that? I think I read somewhere that over seven million was spent restoring Kibble Palace.

Niall Murphy:
Correct. It was.

Fiona Sinclair:
And where do you find that kind of money in this day and age?

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely. It’s a big ask.

Fiona Sinclair:
How can you justify it?

Niall Murphy:
It is a big ask.

Fiona Sinclair:
You can only really justify it on the basis of something is utterly unique, which of course, the Kibble Palace is.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
And that’s a bit of a harder sell for some of the other Glass houses across the city. But the People’s Palace, I think you could make an argument that that is a huge asset built for the city, built for the people of the city and that really… It’s Glasgow’s story, that building.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, very much.

Fiona Sinclair:
And that’s one that really does need our investment.

Niall Murphy:
And in our oldest park. Yes. Quite.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes, exactly.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, indeed. It is a bit of a worry what’s happening with it. Okay, moving on to the present then. Queen’s Park Glasshouse closed due to safety concerns in 2020, particularly with the dismantling of the dome of the centre of it. So can you tell us a bit about its history and what happened that, because that wasn’t the original intended location for the Glasshouse?

Fiona Sinclair:
Well, Queen’s Park Glasshouse, it began life as propagating sheds. No fancier than that. Essentially by that point, the city had a requirement for so many bulbs, flowers, plants, to actually introduce colour into the parks, which is a very, very important part of them, that they needed somewhere to actually to grow these. Now they didn’t own… Or they might have owned Botanic Gardens by then, but there wasn’t sufficient room for them to use any of the sheds there for just bringing on bedding plants and the sort of thing we see in hanging baskets and the kind of movable kind of planters that suddenly appear in George Square-

Niall Murphy:
Creepers.

Fiona Sinclair:
Whenever the Commonwealth Games come to the city. So the Queen’s Park Glasshouses were simple propagating sheds, and there was no expectation the public would’ve access. So they were designed by the Office of Public Works in 1895. It went out to tender Simpson and Farmer, who were horticultural builders. They won the tender. They were built for £3,000. It cost £3,000 to build the Queen’s Park Glasshouse. What could you get now? A couple of bricks?

Niall Murphy:
I know. I know.

Fiona Sinclair:
A couple of bricks and a pane of glass. But interestingly, within a few years it became a park and members of the public had an expectation of entry because of course, a number of them would’ve been aware that… So Joseph Paxton had been consulted on Queen’s Park the layout of Queen’s Park as well and he had proposed this huge winter garden, which John Carrick as city architect had thrown out as being far, far too expensive.

Niall Murphy:
Mr rational and pragmatic.

Fiona Sinclair:
Exactly.

Niall Murphy:
You’re not having that.

Fiona Sinclair:
You’re not having that music hall with promenades and a lot of glass. Paxton believed passionately, of course, that people really needed to remain dry and warm. He interestingly also saw the benefit of Glasshouses is from a health point of view. If you’re walking around a park and you’re cold and there’s nowhere to shelter, then you’re going to become ill. So that was how he promoted glasshouses really, as shelters. But within a couple of years of Queen’s Park propagating sheds being opened, members of the public were clearly turning up and they wanted to see what was inside. So they were extended and the entrance was redesigned so that members of the public could, and then of course plants and public cohabited very successful until closure in 2020 and that was… Well, it was two part, of course. It was closed during lockdown, but the dome had, I think, developed again a tiny bit of a twist. So it was dismantled, but it’s in storage.

Niall Murphy:
Right. Okay. So it can be re-erected at some point.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yep. The curved glass is in storage, albeit it’s outside last time I saw it.the weather vane’s in storage and the framework.

Niall Murphy:
Sure. Yeah, I’m hopeful. I don’t know whether you’ve seen them yet, but they’ve been recently announced plans by Livable Neighbourhoods for dealing with the junction at the monument that’s just in front of it.

Fiona Sinclair:
I haven’t seen that. Yes.

Niall Murphy:
So it’s all about kind of rationalising the street layout there. And there’s a suggestion of doing something with the slope that would take you off the area in front of the glasses.

Fiona Sinclair:
That would be good.

Niall Murphy:
So transforming that and getting the glasshouses fixed would actually be… I think that would be extremely popular move. It’ll have much more access to it. It’s funny, right? I lived next door to Queen’s Park for quite a long time. It took me two years to discover the assets.

Fiona Sinclair:
They’re hidden.

Niall Murphy:
They’re so beautiful.

Fiona Sinclair:
They really are. They’re hidden. And I think it’s the way in which Queen’s Park was laid out because it was purchased in two parts, of course. Neil Thompson sold off Pathhead Farm. Carrick laid it out. The principal entrance, as you mentioned, was at the top of Victoria Road, that tremendous kind of vista. And I mean, it really is a vista. But then when Neil Thompson died, the trustees of the other half of the park called Camp Hill Mansions, it’s Camphill House. They eventually were persuaded to sell that to the city. But of course that happened about the same time, I think as the propagating sheds were built. So I think had they owned the whole park, they might have been in a more prominent position and there might have been a notion that could be used for members of the public as well as plants. And of course, the purpose of the dome, I guess was twofold. One, although these were very utilitarian propagating shades, the intention was that they looked attractive, of course. So the dome would’ve given them a bit of a presence, bit grandeur.

Niall Murphy:
A bit more of presence.

Fiona Sinclair:
But also, allowed them to grow bigger, taller plants by the dome, because there’s huge passion for growing palm trees and bananas and pineapples. And that of course is what drove the glasshouse craze amongst the landed gentry, was this…

Niall Murphy:
We were talking earlier about the chimney.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
Which is also really wonderful feature and also the Pearson Springburn as well.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. Yeah.

Niall Murphy:
So can you talk about that as well? Because to me, it’s really exotic.

Fiona Sinclair:
Well, obviously if you’re going to grow plants undercover in Glasgow, you need heat and ventilation. So the design of Queen’s Park Glasgow is very, very simple. There is a huge boiler system which required a boiler chimney. There was a little kind of office block built out of lovely red engineering brick and just a massive network of heating pipes that ran either underground in trenches or above ground below little kind of propagating kind of planters in all these little sheds. So with such a large coal fired boiler at the time, there was the need for a chimney and there was also a need to feed the boiler water. So this beautiful red brick chimney was designed, which has got a header tank wrapped around it, kind of about two thirds of the way up. And that was where rainwater was collected as well. It was topped up. And it is a very, very fine feature. And yes, it’s repeated Springburn park because of course, they were both designed by the Office of Public Works. So why waste a good detail?

Niall Murphy:
A really talent talented team of-

Fiona Sinclair:
Very talented team. Yes.

Niall Murphy:
designers there.

Fiona Sinclair:
And of course there’s a tradition histo city architects department.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. Indeed.

Fiona Sinclair:
So this is a tradition that’s been passed down.

Niall Murphy:
Turning to who pays for all of this and how do we go about conserving and restoring our historic glasshouses. These are kind of big questions. I’m acutely conscious of this having been involved in Govanhill baths which is by the same office.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
And it’s one of these kind of great legacy artefacts. So how do our communities in Glasgow and charities and the local authority, how do we go about paying for this kind of great Victorian legacy, which comes with all these responsibilities and obviously significant bills to match?

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
So what do we do about that?

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I don’t really have the answer for that. I think that when you have a very unique building such as Kibble Palace, a very strong case can be made that the city, the building owner ought not to have to build those costs because you’ve got something that’s nationally, maybe even internationally significant.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
It’s a much, much harder argument to make and for instance the case of Tollcross, where I think there was a very pragmatic approach taken to the restoration. It wasn’t a full restoration. I think that it’s much more difficult to make that case at Queen’s Park. So the kind of use of the building supported by a kind of community support and a good robust business plan, that’s what typically is needed now to deliver the repairs. But first and foremost, if something’s properly maintained from the outset, and that requires, in the case of glasshouse, these sort of frequent redecorating, because such a lot of it is made of wood that needs frequently decoration. If you can properly look after something from the outset, then your restoration bills or your conservation bills at the end of the day are going to be less.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
But in the case of… Yeah I mean, in case of Queen’s Park Glasshouses, it’s about bringing back… So bringing it back into the public eye now. It’s not that it’s vanished from the public eye, but for instance, there used to be a kitchen, there used to be a cafe. And now of course, that cafe would be in competition with so many other cafes around Queen’s Park. And it’s about delivering something. And ultimately what happens is you have to actually ask the public what they think it could deliver in the first instance and what they would bring to it? And it’s kind of odd one. I was thinking that looking after public parks, you could do that very, very effectively using volunteers because people could be very, very easily trained to look after soft landscaping and to actually work in a park, even doing something as simple as raking gravel or weeding. But looking after a building like a glasshouse-

Niall Murphy:
It’s complex.

Fiona Sinclair:
… is quite specialist.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
And there are not many companies out there like Simpson and Farmer, who did nothing but built hothouses and who did it very, very effectively. So it’s demonstrating a need and demonstrating a need that’s compatible. It’s still used for propagation. It’s got little reptile house as well. But the cafe I think, had been closed long before the pandemic.

Niall Murphy:
Right. Okay.

Fiona Sinclair:
So it’s just actually… It’s this whole story. They’ve got it at Pollok Park for instance, with the Burrell being reopened and providing great lunches and fantastic coffee in a lovely setting. Pollok House, which used to provide fantastic lunches in a great setting, is now struggling-

Niall Murphy:
Really? I didn’t know that. They do wonderful scones.

Fiona Sinclair:
They do have fantastic scones. But there is this whole thing of over provision and how do you hit something that actually allows you to attract funding from… And of course that’s the thing that Glasgow City Heritage Trust have traditionally been able to assist with. But you don’t have the sort of funds that can tackle-

Niall Murphy:
Not to tackle something on that scale.

Fiona Sinclair:
You have to part funds something that’s supported by all manor of other funders, including the community. And there’s a very, very good example of community interaction and raising of funds not far from the Glasshouse. And of course, that featured in one of your podcasts last year or the year before. And that’s Camphill Gate.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
Where wonderful tournament, and the owners really got together and drove the refurbishment of that building with of course help from Glasgow City Heritage Trust and Glasgow City Council, both of whom have been fantastic. They’ve been a great, great help to the owners. But it was driven by the owners.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. It’s getting that kind of-

Fiona Sinclair:
And you need somebody to take ownership of an idea or a building.

Niall Murphy:
Getting that grassroots and encouraging that, it’s difficult to do.

Fiona Sinclair:
It’s very hard.

Niall Murphy:
Because you need people who are going to actually be the leaders in all of that and have the tenacity to be able to bring it off and deliver it.

Fiona Sinclair:
Like Govanhill Baths.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, absolutely. And the same with Camphill Gate.

Fiona Sinclair:
And sometimes these take years. I mean that’s 10 years, that it took to get Camphill Gate near completion.

Niall Murphy:
Very much.

Fiona Sinclair:
And most projects of that nature have got a very, very long lead in time and it requires people to support it, and it requires a lot of voluntary effort.

Niall Murphy:
Very much. Okay, Shifting away from that, but touching on the urban aspects of this. Obviously the Victorians were really inspired by glass and the size of glass’s technology improved. But particularly in Glasgow with it being such a rainy city, Glasgow had numerous arcades and shopping centres, stations with enormous glass roof’s. And of course Greek Thompson even had his plan for Arcaded streets so that children could play outside without having to worry about the rain. So is there hope for such kind of inspiration now?

Fiona Sinclair:
No, I’m not sure we’re quite as ambitious as the Victorians were. I don’t think we are. They were architects, engineers, and I guess you could call them funders. The city, so much more bold during the period when we saw the great glazed train sheds and all of these fantastic shopping passages covered in glass. I think we are probably less… Well in fairness, we are required to comply with much, much more in the way of legislation. And of course with glass comes energy loss. And you get this very complex task that has to be tackled because of course, as you see, the city recognised the benefits of glazing shelter and natural light and made wonderful use of it. And really we’ve come… Interestingly, I think we came close with Princess Square.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
Which was a very bold intervention for its time.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, very much.

Fiona Sinclair:
Very successful. Wherever you think about the size of the structural members, which are much bigger than the Victorians of course-

Niall Murphy:
Much hefty.

Fiona Sinclair:
… would’ve used. Wherever you think about that, that was inspired.

Niall Murphy:
It’s still a wonderful structure. Yeah, absolutely.

Fiona Sinclair:
It’s very, very successful.

Niall Murphy:
Much more successful in the St. Enoch Centre, which is an ambitious piece of engineering, but it’s how it fits into its surroundings. And particularly that kind of south flank to it where it’s just blank, facade which is such a shame.

Fiona Sinclair:
It is.

Niall Murphy:
And in some ways, it is a shame if the St. Enoch Centre is to be completely rethought and turned into a much more urban area-

Fiona Sinclair:
I think the original design for the St. Enoch Centre was far, far better than what was actually delivered.

Niall Murphy:
Really? I have not seen that.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah. There were some very, very early drawings that suggested that inspiration was being drawn from the old engine shed.

Niall Murphy:
Right.

Fiona Sinclair:
But yes, the glazing didn’t really deliver. And of course, yes, it’s not one that you would cite as being particularly good example.

Niall Murphy:
No.

Fiona Sinclair:
We come back to the Burrell. It of course, is a wonderful example-

Niall Murphy:
Very much.

Fiona Sinclair:
… of the use of glass.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, it does. It works really successfully. And how it integrates with the landscape. And particularly when you come through that whole sequence of rooms and that kind of the architectural promenade through the space and to that back gallery over overlooking the woodland. And there’s this connection between all of these manmade artefacts inside and then nature directly on the other side glass-

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah. It makes wonderful-

Niall Murphy:
Really beautiful moment.

Fiona Sinclair:
Very, very wonderful use of glazing. And so there are some really very good examples, but of course the Burrell itself required fairly some major works to-

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, significantly. Somewhat by £70 Million for the cost for refurbishing that. So it’s not cheap and-

Fiona Sinclair:
Ten times the Kibble Palace.

Niall Murphy:
… part that was how do you handle the energy issues of glass and make that more efficient? So effectively had to be re-skinned.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
So that’s considerable expense to that.

Fiona Sinclair:
It’s interesting. I noticed just the other day a tiny project in which I’m involved where permission was given to double glaze windows in a Georgian townhouse. But the windows, because they’re required to be energy efficient, I’ve got coating on them and that coating is quite visible. There’s a colour to it which is unexpected and-

Niall Murphy:
You really notice it.

Fiona Sinclair:
… you notice it.

Niall Murphy:
I don’t know whether that’s just people like us.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
I think we’re too picky, but it’s-

Fiona Sinclair:
Because I was saying to the owner, you’ll be able to use this for filming. It’s a perfect little Georgian townhouse, now it’s been restored. And then I thought, but they’re going to have to tone down the colour of the window glass. But yeah, you mentioned Alexander Greek Thompson. He worked for a period for the architect John Baird, and he was the very first, in my view, to properly use glass in the city.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
Because he is the architect of the Gallowgate.

Niall Murphy:
That whole period as well is really fascinating to me, is that when you look at the Charles Goad insurance maps of the city-

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
… which are fascinating.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. Yeah.

Niall Murphy:
And you see within them the number of glazed courtyards versus touch on Princess Square, the number of glazed courtyards which have been lost from the city centre. I just do demolition or just obviously it was too much to maintain them and they’ve disappeared. And that you realise that once upon in a time, there must have been that you could look across the roof. There must have been hundreds of these kind of glazed in arcades.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
That they would need for part of handling fabric or the goods, but do it in the dry sense rather, but still light them for the building somehow. And yet all that’s disappeared over time.

Fiona Sinclair:
It has. Yes.

Niall Murphy:
Which is a great shame.

Fiona Sinclair:
Royal Arcade had a fountain in it, I believe. There was one called Wellington Arcade. There are one or two very, very good articles on Glasgow’s shopping arcades. There have been many studies done. It is fascinating, as you see. It’s lovely looking at an ordinance survey map, because glass is typically delineated as a lozenge type of hatching.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
So you can immediately spot who’s got a conservatory because of course there are some very large ones in Pollokshields.

Niall Murphy:
Oh, absolutely, [inaudible 00:39:15].

Fiona Sinclair:
And some very important ones out the West End.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
I think Redlands house on Great Western Road, which this is designed by James Buscher, of course.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely.

Fiona Sinclair:
It had the most-

Niall Murphy:
There’s a very nice one in Newlands.

Fiona Sinclair:
There is.

Niall Murphy:
Which is not in a happy way at the moment. Shame is being propped up at the moment.

Fiona Sinclair:
Oh, is that the one by Thomas Baird?

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
Thomas Baird Jr.

Niall Murphy:
That’s Thomas Baird. Yeah, exactly.

Fiona Sinclair:
That there is an application to rebuild it.

Niall Murphy:
Oh, that’s good.

Fiona Sinclair:
To restore it.

Niall Murphy:
And then there’s a fabulous one that’s on Eaton Road in Pollockshields.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
I’m sure it’s happened with that one at the moment. So I’ve been quite concerned about that, and I did try and get onto the buildings of risk register, but it’s not a good fit because there’s nothing wrong with the villa.

Fiona Sinclair:
No.

Niall Murphy:
The problem is the glasshouse.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. Glasshouse.

Niall Murphy:
So you need somebody with deep pockets to be able to handle something like that.

Fiona Sinclair:
You do. Yes. there’s a fabulous one in Helensburgh, which was painstakingly restored by the owner.

Niall Murphy:
That’s one you can see from Sinclair’s road.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. You come down Sinclair Street to the and it’s on the right hand side, and it is just… But it was restored over a very long period of time by the owner.

Niall Murphy:
I remember it being covered in tarapaulin for years.

Fiona Sinclair:
Fabulous. Absolutely fantastic. And that’s really what it needs.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely. Okay, going back to green spaces and Glasgow’s special relationship with its parks and glasshouses. They offer beautiful views to buildings overlooking them, but what happens when you are on the inside looking out? Have the views from the park been managed at all?

Fiona Sinclair:
Well, in the case of Queen’s Park… They’re all, they’re subtly different, of course. I mean, Kelvingrove Park is very heavily contoured, of course. You’ve got that great granite staircase taking you up to the housing from which you get the most remarkable views. So you can’t really manage the views from Kelvingrove Park because they’re so distant. You’re effectively looking to the Erskine Bridge. You can’t really manage that sort of view. And similarly, Queen’s Park of course, has got the viewing mound with the flag pool.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, which is wonderful.

Fiona Sinclair:
And I mean, you can see the Kilpatrick Hills.

Niall Murphy:
At the same time, you can see how… And there’s a fantastic Tom Sandon photograph taken from Glasgow University’s spire and the early 1900s.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
And you can see how camera in particular, controlled the heights of buildings.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes, yes.

Niall Murphy:
And how rigorous that was, this kind of four-story, tenemental city with the sparks of the church is kind of poking out above and you’re not really getting any big structures other than the chimneys.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes, of course.

Niall Murphy:
Industrial journeys. And that I think is really fascinating. And yet Carrick does that with Queen’s Park, with the churches, how it frames the views to the north with the two churches, and then you’ve got this whole kind of very level cityscape opening up.

Fiona Sinclair:
Carrick famously made requirements of the tenements that were built at the end of Victoria Road at the north entrance into the park. They also required that all churches had spires, so he was clearly looking for something that was quite scenic. And of course, famously Alexander Thompson completely ignored that requirement because he had this legendary dislike of the Gothic style. And of course he created a Thompsonian equivalent at Queen’s Park Church, which was an elongated dome.

Niall Murphy:
Oh I know. Wonderful, and such a loss.

Fiona Sinclair:
And such a loss.

Niall Murphy:
Yep.

Fiona Sinclair:
But yes, view views out in the case of interesting Glasgow green, of course is very, very flat. And so it ought to be possible. But the interesting thing about the views out from Glasgow green is, they’ve changed so much because you’re looking towards the Gorbals.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely. And so much has been demolished. But then you’ve still kind of this really kind of idea of how grand it could have been with Templeton’s Carpet Factory, but the loss of its equivalent, the-

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes, on the other side of the road.

Niall Murphy:
On the other side of-

Fiona Sinclair:
The river.

Niall Murphy:
River Clyde.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah. Yeah.

Niall Murphy:
That major loss, because you can appreciate how that was this Renaissance’s kind of cross facade looking into Glasgow Green. And the two would’ve kind of worked with each other. And look, again, Matif Rowe-

Fiona Sinclair:
Oh, wonderful.

Niall Murphy:
The kind of complete demolition fat.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes, absolutely.

Niall Murphy:
And when you see that as a whole sequence and how it’s this very kind of level classical facade that kind of wrapped around the facade-

Fiona Sinclair:
Well, that’s right.

Niall Murphy:
At the end of Victorian era. That’s all been removed.

Fiona Sinclair:
Well, I mean green head street has some wonderful tenements.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, it still does.

Fiona Sinclair:
There are still some left.

Niall Murphy:
Wonderful little school.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
[inaudible 00:43:50].

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes, that’s right.

Niall Murphy:
Which is really beautiful.

Fiona Sinclair:
Charcles Wilson.

Niall Murphy:
Exactly. Perfect for a park setting.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. Yep.

Niall Murphy:
Okay. So then what next? What can we learn from that kind of Victorian can-do spirit? And as a kind of society, we face these kind of huge challenges on every front, but lockdown did reveal that communities, institutions can achieve what they can achieve when they work together. So we’re living through this age of incredible change and new technology. Are there any reasons to be cheerful?

Fiona Sinclair:
Oh yes, I think so. I think what needs to be done is if there is a building for instance, or a space that is in need of work but there aren’t the funds to do that work, it’s just important not to allow the deterioration to continue and to prevent the loss of any sort of authenticity. And that’s my main worry at Queen’s Park. There have been some very major alterations that were carried out simply to allow to function better for use as a kind of propagating centre. But now of course the plants are imported. They’re brought in, they’re not grown at Queen’s Park. They get delivered.

Niall Murphy:
I appreciated that.

Fiona Sinclair:
They do grow some, but most of them… When I was there carrying out the drone photography, there’s this huge delivery of bedding plants, which had come from probably Poland. I’m pretty sure it was out with Glasgow. It certainly was. So I think there’s been the loss of a number of the sheds that have been brought down. There used to be five on either side of a great corridor. Quite a few of those have gone. There’s a couple been replaced by poly tunnels. A lot of the beautiful bridging cast iron bridging along the tops has gone. It’s important to just stop that so that if there is a building that has no practical use at this point in time, that’s not to say it won’t have in the future. It’s a bit like the buildings at risk register. Which when it was set up and Mary Myers was in charge, it was a dating agency for buildings. These are buildings in need of an owner. Is there an owner out there? And it’s kind of the same with buildings like Queen’s Park Glasshouse.
There will be a use and that use will come, and the funding for that particular use will probably come because it changes year on year, what funding is made available for. And of course, levelling up funding has been an opportunity that has allowed public stables, for instance, to be properly restored. But of course that funding wasn’t made available for the Winter Gardens, the People’s Palace, which is a huge disappointment to the city.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely.

Fiona Sinclair:
So it’s about what are the other funding opportunities? And it will be driven by things like energy wellness, kind of wellbeing. And you just have to seize those opportunities.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely. Well I hope that the levelling up front, that it’s possibility for getting into a further end of that. And if the bids already been prepared then you know, can recycle it for that. And fingers crossed that most of those should be able to qualify for something like that. But when you look at what’s happened with Govan graving docks the other day-

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes, great news.

Niall Murphy:
And the idea of using green space and parks.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
That’s a good step forward. And that’s good to see something like that happening with that space.

Fiona Sinclair:
And actually, you mentioned something quite interesting, which is if you’ve got a piece of land that’s been vacated because a whole series of industrial buildings where we’re demolished, why do we need to build on that piece of land if it could provide more green space for the city?

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
I mean there’s a site opposite Govanhill church where the new bridge is being built on the other side, the North Bank of the Clyde. And I imagine there are plans for housing, but it would make a fantastic foil to the church across the water, and that could be developed. Because in Partick where my office is, there are little tiny spots of greenery with trees and they’re being cleared for housing. There are trees with-

Niall Murphy:
That’s the two blocks [inaudible 00:48:01]

Fiona Sinclair:
There are trees with ribbons around them just off the express way, because-

Niall Murphy:
I’m not surprised if people feel so strongly about it.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah, they do. They do.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah. People really feel emotional boundaries.

Fiona Sinclair:
You really need these. We’re still in danger of overdeveloping.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
And we’ve lost a lot of small public parks. Phoenix Park has gone completely in the Cowcaddens.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely.

Fiona Sinclair:
It’s probably lost under the M8.

Niall Murphy:
A park somewhere under the M8 now.

Fiona Sinclair:
It does.

Niall Murphy:
Which is a great shame.

Fiona Sinclair:
I’m sure it does.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah. I recall seeing interesting proposals kind of around the time of the city of culture for this kind of homestead like series of parks across Glasgow, and basically covering a lot of the space, which had been where buildings had been obliterated and removed as a consequence of de-industrialization of comprehensive development area policies. And the accepting that the city had shrunk in size and that you instead gave that space back to green space. And with everything we know about climate change now, maybe those aren’t bad ideas.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yep. Yes. Yeah. And I think it’s also… Interestingly, it’s quite important to recognise that trees have a shelf life. The west end of course, as we know it’s got all these wonderful communal gardens, Athol gardens, Huntly gardens, all these fabulous shared spaces that came into their own during lockdown. And there are a lot of trees planted on streets Sauchihall street for instance. But they’re getting too big. So there needs to be a sort of cycle of anticipation of what will it look like when that actually goes? What will it get replaced with? There has to be an ongoing kind of-

Niall Murphy:
Yeah. We used to talk about this in Pollokshields a lot because of all the street trees in Pollokshields, and then what would happen if there’d been an accident or a tree became diseased and it got removed? How do you go about replacing that and how do you think in the longer term about our parks and particularly sequences of views or avenues, trees which have gotten really old or were never meant to be that height?

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah, yeah.

Niall Murphy:
And it’s funny because when you actually look at the original photographs of a place like Pollokshields, a lot of the trees hollowed it. They’re quite small scale and the gardens are very ornamental. And now it’s completely different.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah.

Niall Murphy:
It’s a scene.

Fiona Sinclair:
I mean, Maxwell Park, you could see pretty much from one end to the other because the trees were not yet mature.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. I mean, I love trees, but I think we are slightly over precious about some trees in some places and sort of…

Niall Murphy:
What we could do with trees and others.

Fiona Sinclair:
People need to, but I mean, gosh, we could be growing our own trees and a patch landing Glasgow for transplantation.

Niall Murphy:
That’s what Olmstead did with Central Park-

Fiona Sinclair:
Exactly.

Niall Murphy:
New York. He encouraged people to do that. But it made sense to set their own nurseries and it’s cheaper.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. And allotments.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
The waiting list for allotments in Glasgow-

Niall Murphy:
Is ridiculous.

Fiona Sinclair:
… are ridiculous.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah.

Fiona Sinclair:
There should be far, far more allotments.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. We could do that.

Niall Murphy:
Within walking distance.

Niall Murphy:
… decontaminated. Actually could do that.

Fiona Sinclair:
Definitely. Yeah.

Niall Murphy:
So that would definitely be worthwhile thing to do as well. The other thing I really would to see accelerated, but again, it’s all down to funding, is the Avenues Project.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. Yes.

Niall Murphy:
Getting trees and gardens through the city centre and really improving the immunity of the city centre, I think that’s absolutely crucial. It’s funny, I had a student who came in here about four years ago and asked me, why is there no trees from Glasgow City Centre? And I’m like, possibly, because it was like a market industrial city and there was no space for that because there were 700,000 people living within a couple mile of the city centres and there was just no space for them. But possibly that’s split. But that is a project for the future. And kind of see greenery at the city centre is actually something really worthwhile.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s a chap Duncan McClellan, who is the superintendent of Parks and produced this wonderful book called Glasgow’s Public Parks. And of course it was more about his legacy rather than it was about promotion for the city. But he in the late 19th century went to Europe to look at how the urban parks in other cities across Europe were actually being developed. So we need to look at how other great cities-

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, and apply those lessons here.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes. Yeah.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely critical.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yep.

Niall Murphy:
Okay. Turning to our final question then, which is completely loaded. What is, and be true to know this one, your favourite building in Glasgow. And it doesn’t have big glasshouses obviously. And what could it tell you or us, if its walls could talk?

Fiona Sinclair:
Well, my favourite building isn’t in Glasgow and that’s Saint Conor’s kirk which I’m sure you love. No, that wasn’t the question, but I do like to get a little plugin for that wonderful-

Niall Murphy:
Oh, it’s beautiful.

Fiona Sinclair:
… wonderful church. It’s wonderful.

Niall Murphy:
It’s such a lovely setting.

Fiona Sinclair:
It’s fabulous.

Niall Murphy:
And kind of all the carving on it is so intriguing.

Fiona Sinclair:
It’s wonderful. Yeah, that’s a very, very special building. And I’m not sure if I’ve got a favourite building. I’ve got a favourite building type, if that counts.

Niall Murphy:
Oh, go on.

Fiona Sinclair:
The tenement. You cannot beat the Glasgow tenement.

Niall Murphy:
I love the tenement. Yep.

Fiona Sinclair:
All shapes and sizes, all colours.

Niall Murphy:
Yep. Massive fan.

Fiona Sinclair:
I loved the photograph you tweeted the other day. It was beautiful tiles, I didn’t know existed. Yes. I love the classical Tenement.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. Yeah. Probably bad at me, but it’s Kirkcaldy Road, the tenement is [ion Kirkcaldy Road. So yeah, kind of is nobody ever goes down there because it’s kind of tucked away slightly.

Fiona Sinclair:
Tremendous building type.

Niall Murphy:
Really good houses.

Fiona Sinclair:
Yeah. What’s my favourite building? I was torn between anything by Charles Wilson, I’m a big fan. The Queen’s rooms on La Belle Place. Absolutely remarkable design.

Niall Murphy:
I’ve never been inside.

Fiona Sinclair:
No, it’s been burnt out. I don’t think there’s anything to see inside.

Niall Murphy:
Such a shame.

Fiona Sinclair:
But what a monumental sculpture scheme on that. How brave-

Niall Murphy:
Fabulous.

Fiona Sinclair:
… to say, “Okay, this is going to be a big box with hardly any windows. Let’s just put a sculpture scheme on it.” But interestingly, and of course the Burrell, I’m a massive, massive fan of that. I came down to the Old School of Architecture on Rotten Row from the 60s designed by Frank Fielden and Professor Frank Walker. And it was the most wonderful building. What it said on the tin, it was designed for young architects, the training of young architects and it’s still… Of course is no longer architecture faculty for Strathclyde , which is tragic.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
But fantastic building and made great use of light, of course. Whole series of north lights.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely.

Fiona Sinclair:
Bays with side lights.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Fiona Sinclair:
Great building. Lots of lovely timber inside.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. It’s listed now, isn’t it?

Fiona Sinclair:
It’s listed.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah. Quite right.

Fiona Sinclair:
He listed.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, I know.

Fiona Sinclair:
And a fantastic concrete mural. I can’t remember the name of the sculptor, but he’s exceptional. As you come into the building, there’s tremendous concrete mural of course, next to the lecture theatre. Brilliant. Great design. And great building to train an architect.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. Sacrilege from me, I went to the Mac.

Fiona Sinclair:
He will, sorry.

Niall Murphy:
But I much prefer Strathclyde’s building.

Fiona Sinclair:
Strathclyde got the better building.

Niall Murphy:
He definitely did.

Fiona Sinclair:
He got the better building.

Niall Murphy:
I always like going to a show him there because it’s just quality of light. It was really good.

Fiona Sinclair:
Quality of finishes.

Niall Murphy:
Really lovely spaces.

Fiona Sinclair:
Very, very typical of that period, of course.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. Yeah.

Fiona Sinclair:
Of which I’m a big fan.

Niall Murphy:
It’s funny because when you see them on plan, they are very similar building types.

Fiona Sinclair:
They are.

Niall Murphy:
But-

Fiona Sinclair:
Yes, it was delivered-

Niall Murphy:
was just so much better.

Fiona Sinclair:
Delivered much better at at StrathClyde.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. Sorry.

Fiona Sinclair:
Sorry, Bourdon Building.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely.

Fiona Sinclair:
Which the advantage of scalping over a road, it could’ve been so much more exciting.

Niall Murphy:
I know. I know.

Fiona Sinclair:
In fairness, it probably looked pretty smart. The Bourdon Building, when it was completed.

Niall Murphy:
I suspect so. But it was obviously a difficult period because it was going at the end of the oil crisis, and they really had to slash the budget when they were building it.

Fiona Sinclair:
But yeah, and also used a beautiful blue engineering brick instead of kind of shattered concrete. But no, thinking it through, I think that’s probably my-

Niall Murphy:
Very interesting choice.

Fiona Sinclair:
… favourite building. Yes. Not an obvious choice.

Niall Murphy:
Well thank you very much, Fiona. That was an absolute pleasure talking to you you as always.

Fiona Sinclair:
Thank you.

Niall Murphy:
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. The podcast is kindly sponsored by the National Trust for Scotland and supported by Tunnock’s.

Sulman Map, 6 A4 pages, (50MB, PDF)

If the above file is too large you can download the pages individually below:

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6

Knight Map, 6 A4 pages (51MB, PDF)

If the above file is too large you can download the pages individually below:

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6

Niall Murphy:
Hello, everyone. I’m Niall Murphy, and welcome to If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk, a podcast by Glasgow City Heritage Trust about the stories and relationships between historic buildings and people in Glasgow. Now, if you follow me on Twitter, you will know how much I enjoy walking around Glasgow. When you know where to look, there’s probably no better way to connect with the history of the city and the hidden stories of the great unsung heroes and heroine’s who have made it. But there’s a catch, unless you know how and where to look, those hidden characters are likely to remain well hidden and not least the heroines. So in this episode, I’m delighted to be following the evidence uncovered by the wonderful Women Make History detectives of Glasgow Women’s Library. So Women Make History, those three words might challenge a more mainstream view of the world and the way that we see the built environment.

For instance, and this is very much a perception issue, that cities like Glasgow appear to have a distinctly muscular and masculine look, and grand historic buildings and others that are less grand and every day were invariably designed, constructed, and almost always owned by a man, or at least that’s the perception. The issue is, well, is that actually the case? So it’s that whole idea that we live in this masculine environment that gave rise to Glasgow Women’s Library more than 30 years ago. As their website explains, Glasgow Women’s Library came into being partly as a response to the overarching masculine narratives in Glasgow’s approach to being the European city of culture in 1990. A pioneering project then known as Women in Profile, set out to show that women were very much part of Glasgow’s social and cultural history, and it has been a remarkable success story. So Glasgow Women’s Library has grown from a small community venture in Garnethill, run by volunteers with no funding to become a nationally-respected institute. So it is the UK’s only accredited museum devoted to women’s lives, histories, and achievements.

The library is now housed in their splendid East End premises in Bridgeton, which is a former library which Glasgow City Heritage Trust help grant fund repairs to. It is a treasure trove of artefacts and archives with a team of expert paid staff, but there are also volunteers who work there. So volunteers are fundamental to the work of the library with its aim of empowering women in every walk of life. It’s the volunteers, Glasgow Women’s Library’s very own Woman Make History detectives who research and lead the walks revealing and celebrating the lives and achievements of the many women who have made history in Glasgow. So to tell us how it’s done, let’s meet today’s special guests, Gabrielle Macbeth, who is the volunteer coordinator working with the library’s dedicated volunteers, and Anabel Marsh, a former librarian who after 10 years is now one of the libraries longest serving volunteers. So very warm welcome to the podcast for you both.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Thank you. Thanks for that great introduction.

Niall Murphy:
It’s good to have you both on board. So first off, let’s dive in with our first question for you. There’s a lot of ground to cover here, and there’s many years of history to look at too, but perhaps we should begin in Glasgow’s West End. So in 2007, Glasgow Women’s Library made history by creating the first Women’s Heritage Walk, a groundbreaking walking tour, which set out to focus on women who had helped shape Glasgow’s history.

So can you tell us how that came about?

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Yeah, sure. So there’s always lots of interest in women’s history in the Women’s Library. At the time, I think we were becoming really aware of people saying, “Oh, we need to do something. We need to do something that’s reaching out to people outside of the Glasgow Women’s Library that engages people with women’s history.” So 2006, 2007 was the team at that time decided, “Right, well, we’re going to do something. We’re not too sure what that could be,” but we convened a group of women who were interested together and started to think, “What kind of activity could we offer that would highlight women’s diverse and multiple contributions to the city?”

I think there were some pamphlets from the council’s Heritage Walks lying around and they were picked up and it was a case of going, “Oh, well, women are really absent in these.” So it was a quite logical jump to then think, “Oh, well, how about we create our own alternative version of this that forefronts women’s contributions?” That’s where it began, and we got together a group of women who were interested in doing some research who hadn’t necessarily done much of that before but were keen to uncover it.

Niall Murphy:
Right.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
So after some research and that process, the West End Women’s Heritage Walk was born and it was launched in 2007 and we ran it as part of the West End Festival for quite a few years.

Niall Murphy:
Brilliant.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Then over the years, other walks were researched and developed.

Niall Murphy:
Okay. Can you tell me something about any of the characters that emerged from all of this research that you were doing?

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Anabel, do you want to jump in?

Anabel Marsh:
Yes. Yes, I can. Well, we’ve definitely got six walks that are all available in the library as leaflets, or you can download them from our website, womenslibrary.org.uk, and you can have them as audio files as well. Then in the summer, we guide the walks maybe six or so every season.

Niall Murphy:
Right.

Anabel Marsh:
We’ve got some longer trails that we don’t offer as guided walks, but can also be downloaded. So we’ve got two for suffragettes and one for LGBTQ history.

Niall Murphy:
Okay.

Anabel Marsh:
So there’s all sorts of characters. Gabby was talking about the West End Walk, which was our first one. So you get people like Big Rachel who was part of the Partick riots, well, part of controlling the Partick riots. We start at Kelvingrove on the West End one, and we talk about how there is art by women in there, but most of the art is through a male gaze. If you look up at the top of Kelvingrove on the roof line, there are lots of images of women, sculptures of women, but they’re muses, they’re not real women. There are only four actual women in Glasgow named women to have statues, so we try and bring out who they are.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, because all of them is fascinating history.

Anabel Marsh:
Yeah, one of those is Isabella Elder, for example, who is the … Well, if she hadn’t given the money for Queen Margaret College, that would’ve been really difficult. She was one of the people who made higher education for women a priority. So we talk about her on the West End Walk. We talk about some of the first women graduates like Marion Gilchrist. She was the first doctor to graduate in 1894. The university had been there since 1451, but it wasn’t till 1894 that they actually gave women some degrees. A very touching thing to me is that Marion Gilchrist was then the doctor who signed Isabella’s death certificate when she died in 1905.

Niall Murphy:
Tell me something, I’m interested to know. Isabella Elder, ’cause it’s something that really annoys me that her monument in Elder Park has Mrs. John Elder on it, which-

Anabel Marsh:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
… to me, it really grates.

Anabel Marsh:
I think that’s what Isabella wanted, really.

Niall Murphy:
Oh, really?

Anabel Marsh:
Yes.

Niall Murphy:
She did want that, okay. That’s fantastic.

Anabel Marsh:
As people did in those days, she saw herself as Mrs. John Elder, and there’s the Elder Park Library, there’s Elder Park itself. There’s Elder House.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Anabel Marsh:
All these things she was really doing in memory of her husband, who was, of course, John Elder who owned the Fairfield Shipyard. So when he died quite young, she was left with a lot of money and that’s how she chose to use it as a philanthropist in her own city.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, absolutely. She does enormous good works in the city, which is very interesting. There is another, it’s not a statue, though, there is a rundle on a building on Govan Road, which is to Jane White Brown, which I try and point out. I’ve pointed it out on Twitter before, and that was Jane White Brown was really interesting because, again, she’s a major Govan figure that she ran the Govan Newspaper notionally with her husband, but he again, died quite young. She had to manage that newspaper for 36 years after his death, which is why she’s commemorated on that building. But you’re it’s absolutely right. To me, I’ve done a lot of work on George Square, and it comes up every time I do a walking tour of George Square, it’s complete imbalance between men. There’s a whole 50% of the population that’s completely missing from Glasgow’s story in that square, which I just think is outrageous.

Anabel Marsh:
Unless you’re Queen Victoria.

Niall Murphy:
Well, absolutely, but Queen Victoria is only there because she is the monarch. That’s it. Otherwise, she would not be there either. That, to me, is disgraceful. I think we have to tell that story better, and it’s a whole missing aspect to our story, but the city, I think needs to address.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
It’s worth checking out, Sarah Sheridan’s book, which gives this fictionalised account of what Scotland would look like if streets and places were named after Women. She introduces so many incredible women who we should know more about.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely. Yeah. Teasing out those stories is absolutely critical to me.

Anabel Marsh:
Of course, statues aren’t the only thing, and we are getting a bit better at other kinds of memorials. One of the things that we pass in the East End, for instance, as the memorial to the girls that were killed and they were girls. They were as young as 14, some of them, in the Templeton Disaster. When the factory was built, the wall blew down onto the weaving sheds, and outside Carlton Community Centre, every single girl or young woman has her name and age recorded on there. So people might walk past that and not even know it’s there.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Anabel Marsh:
It is a memorial. It’s not a statue, but that is the sort of thing that we want to bring out and draw to people’s attention.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, very much. Do you think that the walks have had a good impact in that regard, that you’ve been able to use the walks to uncover stories and get that message out to people?

Anabel Marsh:
Well, I think so. As we’ve done them over the years, people tend to be less surprised by some of the stories, so you get the feeling that they have heard them before. For instance, we always used to get gasps when we revealed that St. Enoch as a woman, because a lot of people didn’t know that. But-

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Anabel Marsh:
… Now I think that is less the case. For those that don’t know, St. Enoch is another name for St. Thenew who-

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Anabel Marsh:
… is possibly the earliest woman we talk about. She was a fifth or sixth century princess who was the mother of St. Mungo, so effectively the mother of Glasgow. There is a wall plaque at the back of the St. Enoch Centre that lists all the different variations of her name from Thenew to Enoch. But still, it is a surprise to some people that they’ve been walking through this memorial to a woman-

Niall Murphy:
And have no idea.

Anabel Marsh:
They’re doing their shopping for years-

Niall Murphy:
Yes. Yeah.

Anabel Marsh:
… and they have no idea.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, I didn’t know about that, that back art. I’ll have to go and have a look at that.

Anabel Marsh:
Yes, it’s back of the food court.

Niall Murphy:
Right, okay. Oh, very interesting. Right, okay. I’ll need to look at that. Yeah, it’s fascinating because to me it’s this whole hidden history that needs to be teased out. I find it really objectionable that this has been concealed. Things like, I don’t don’t know whether you knew her at all, but Cordelia Oliver, her archive is now up in the Glasgow School of Art Archive in the Whisky Bond. She was the arts correspondent for The Herald. This was in the 1950s, she could not use her own name. She had to be referred to as the arts correspondent because they couldn’t have a woman writing for the paper, and yet she’s talking about all this great art in Glasgow, and she’s not allowed to use her own name.

It’s just bizarre. So I find those kind of things really frustrating, and I’d really like to see those stories emerging and being told that somebody who had … She was instrumental in helping set up things like The Fringe in Edinburgh, which she always joked about because she was a Glasgow girl and the Fringe really should have been at Glasgow, but well, nevermind, it’s over in Edinburgh. She was also instrumental in Citizens Theatre, and stories like that need to be teased out somehow and made clearer to people.

Anabel Marsh:
No, I didn’t know about that one. But yes, there are still lots of stories that we don’t know about that. The walks are always developing and growing and we add things in as people tell them about us or we change the route slightly as we find out about other people.

Niall Murphy:
Okay. Well, can you take us on a walk then or round say one of your tours and say for instance, your groundbreaking tour at the West End, where does it lead?

Anabel Marsh:
The West End? One is possibly the one that most relates to the built environment because we basically go around the perimeter of the university. When you get to the Gorbal’s walk for instance, it’s been flattened twice since the things that we’re talking about. So you have to use a lot of imagination, whereas the West End, everything is there. As I said, we start at Kelvingrove, we go down to what was Anderston College where we talk about the higher education of women. Then we can also talk about the education of women when they were children, because there’s still Church Street Primary School there. So we can compare and contrast what a working class girl would’ve learned there with what the middle class girls in the private school up the road would’ve been learning. They would’ve been getting achievements and refinements and piano playing and French and the other girls would be learning how to be wives and mothers, that sort of thing.

Niall Murphy:
Sure. Absolutely.

Anabel Marsh:
We talk about the suffragettes because, well, we talk about the suffragettes in two places on this walk because, oh, over 20 years ago now on International Women’s Day some of the students got up early and they renamed all the buildings at Glasgow University after women, because they’re all currently after men. So-

Niall Murphy:
Yes,

Anabel Marsh:
… they chose a lot of suffragettes, and we talk about that. And then we also then go past the Isabella Elder Building at Glasgow University, which was the first one to be called after a woman. It’s not a very pretty building, but it is called after Isabella.

Niall Murphy:
Good.

Anabel Marsh:
We talk a lot about her. We go past the Macintosh house, so we can point out that Charles Rennie McIntosh was very famous, but Margaret McDonald, his wife was a very well-renowned artist in her own right.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, they’re a complete artistic pairing and that should really be respected. It’s not just him, and he totally acknowledges that in all of his letters to her that this was a full relationship and a full partnership.

Anabel Marsh:
“I have talent, Margaret has genius,” was basically what he said. Then we finish off at the Suffragette Walk at the top of University Avenue, well, Kelvin Way, University Avenue, that junction-

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Anabel Marsh:
… which was planted in 1918 by suffragettes after the first women got the vote. Despite the best work of Storm Ophelia a few years ago, it’s still standing because it did lose a lot of its branches and had to have a lot of attention. It wasn’t entirely clear that it was going to survive, but it has.

Niall Murphy:
Great.

Anabel Marsh:
In 2015, the library nominated it as Tree of the Year, which duly won.

Niall Murphy:
Fantastic.

Anabel Marsh:
We’re very proud of our Oak.

Niall Murphy:
Very good. Okay, so your walks are full of fascinating stories and there are 12 stops on each guided walk. So obviously that’s a lot of background research that you have to do. So what does it take to become a Women Make History detective? How do you plot the routes and seek out the woman on each trail?

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Well, so our history detectives come from all walks of life, I think. As I said earlier, we’re not necessarily looking for people who have tonnes of research experience. Each time we’ve developed a walk, we’ve put a call-out, so anyone interested, anyone from this area maybe who lives there want to come and join our team. We’ve always had someone who’s facilitated the research and been able to guide people, so where you go and find this information. So yes, it’s drawn lots of people, local women who are just like, “Oh, I’ve lived here all my life. I want to learn more,” or, “I know lots already,” people who are maybe new to those areas or new to the city who are using this as a way of finding out about Glasgow.

But the process usually yields a lot more information than we can actually include in a two-hour walk, which goes to show it’s not difficult to find this information if you go looking for it. So the process always then involves a lot of pairing it down and deciding what works as a trail, as a walkable route within two hours and what are the stories that we think are going to engage audiences the most. I think there’s probably some wrangling that goes on as well ’cause some people are like, “But I really want this woman’s story in.” It’s like, “Well, we can’t include everyone,” so a bit of diplomatic work goes on, but that research doesn’t get lost. We hold on to it.So it can be used in other ways.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, I’ve had similar experiences doing walking trails on the south side and there’s some really interesting stories, but they are just off what would be a potential route, they’re just too far away to make it feasible within a certain timeframe, and that it can be hugely frustrating that when you’ve got a really juicy nugget sitting there, but there’s nothing you can do about it.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Yeah, it’s a shame. It’s an iterative process because each time the walks are delivered, the guides say, “If anyone’s got any additional information, please contribute that.” So we’re always updating the scripts and adding new information as it comes to life, and I think audiences really value that that we’re recognising their local knowledge as well and are able to incorporate that.

Niall Murphy:
So it sounds like a real labour of love. Do the volunteers make strong connections with women on the trail? Is it difficult therefore to choose whose story to tell?

Anabel Marsh:
We certainly do. As you’ve probably gathered from what I’ve talked about so far, one of my favourite women is Isabella Elder. She was the first one that I fell in love with if you like, mainly because of what she did for higher education for women, and also because she built a library, and I’m a librarian. She gave money to the engineering department at Glasgow and what became Strathclyde, and my husband’s an academic engineer, so she just seemed to really speak to me. So I’m very happy that we’ve got her in the West End walk. We also talk about her in the Necropolis walk because she’s buried up there in the Elder family tomb.

Niall Murphy:
Right.

Anabel Marsh:
But she’s been superseded in my heart. My favourite woman is now one called Jessie Stephen. Well, she’s probably the only working class Scottish suffragette that really know anything much about. She was born in 1893, so she was quite a young suffragette.

Niall Murphy:
Okay.

Anabel Marsh:
What she did was she worked as a domestic servant, and she took part in the pillar box outrage as the Glasgow Herald put it, where the suffragettes would put ink or acid into the pillar boxes. She was able to use her working class identity as a shield for that because as she said, she was in her uniform, black dress, lace, captain cuffs. Nobody was going to look at her, much less think that she was a subversive about to attack a pillar box. I don’t know, she was just an amazingly feisty woman. When she was 16, she was vice chair of the Independent Labour Party in Maryhill.

Niall Murphy:
Wow.

Anabel Marsh:
She was very concerned about the conditions that she and other servants worked with, so she set up the Scottish Domestic Workers Federation in 1913. So remember she was born in 1893, so this was when by the time she was 20, she’d done all this.

Niall Murphy:
Wow.

Anabel Marsh:
Then she was headhunted by Sylvia Pankhurst during the First World War, went off to work for her in London and never really lived in Glasgow again, but she grew up here. She’s one of ours. She’s just amazing. I think she gives an interesting contrast to Isabella in terms of the built environment because with a rich woman like Isabella, she’s pretty much in control of her legacy. She’s left buildings, her house is still there.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Anabel Marsh:
She’s on the gates, the commemorative gates at Glasgow University. She has a statue. There’s a portrait over her in Kelvingrove. She’s obvious.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Anabel Marsh:
But Jessie, you have to more tease out her relationship with the city, but she’s still there because you can identify, I know two of the houses that she worked in as a servant. From that, I’ve become a bit obsessed with post boxes, so I’ve been looking around what post box could it be that she used?

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Anabel Marsh:
It’s an amazing amount of Victorian and Edwardian post boxes still about the place, and there’s one-

Niall Murphy:
Indeed.

Anabel Marsh:
… just opposite one of the houses that she worked. So I post my letters in there and think, This is where Jesse stood.”

Niall Murphy:
That’s amazing. Which houses did she work in?

Anabel Marsh:
Well, she worked in the West End. I don’t want to give addresses particularly, but this one is one of the terraces off Great Western Road, and there’s a post box just on the other side of Great Western Road.

Niall Murphy:
Right. Okay. So what happened to Jessie? Obviously she went off down to London. What happened to her? How did you manage to find her history?

Anabel Marsh:
Well, as I say, she’s one of the few, if not only Scottish suffragette that we know anything about, but she has actually been quite easy to find out about because she left record. She wrote her own autobiography. It was never published, but it is now available online through the Working Class Movement Library in Manchester. She was interviewed in the 1970s by Spare Rib and also by a man called Brian Harrison, who interviewed as many surviving suffragettes as he could find. There are several hundred of them actually, which is quite surprising, but she’s one of them. So there’s about two hours of Jessie talking right online through the Women’s Library in London.

Niall Murphy:
Oh, that’s fantastic. You can hear her.

Anabel Marsh:
Yeah.

Niall Murphy:
That’s amazing.

Anabel Marsh:
So she wasn’t difficult to find out about and also because she never married, so she didn’t have the responsibility of her husband and children. So she wasn’t as reticent about getting caught or being very opinionated.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. Yes. She had less to lose.

Anabel Marsh:
She was a counsellor in several different places. She toured North America lecturing about socialism and the labour movement and-

Niall Murphy:
Oh, that’s fantastic.

Anabel Marsh:
She never became an MP, but she mixed with people like Barbara Castle and Tony Benn who were at funeral.

Niall Murphy:
Hugely respected then.

Anabel Marsh:
An amazing person, but not that much known about.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah, no, that’s fascinating to hear. Handily enough, it brings me on to my next question, and it’s something of a theme for this podcast that we look at housing issues in Glasgow. So one of the things we’re really interested in is the rent strikes in 1915 and how Glaswegian Women helped to change the history because that was a national event that started in Govan and then spread right across the UK and resulted in as government at the time stepping in. So is that something that you explore in the Heritage Walks?

Anabel Marsh:
We do. We don’t go to Govan. We don’t have a walk there, but we do have a section on this in our East End walk, and we go to Glasgow Green ’cause of course, Glasgow Green has been the site of hundreds, thousands of protests over the years. So we talk there about the suffragettes rallied there, the Glasgow Women’s Housing people that you’re talking about, people like Mary Barbour, Helen Crawford.

Anabel Marsh:
But they also were part of the Women’s Peace Crusade as well in 1917, so we link all that together. So we talk a lot about activist women and not just the very historic ones. There are other women in the later part of the 20th century that we talk about. We’ve got people like Betty McAllister in the Carlton who was an activist there and who famously told Margaret Thatcher when she came to visit that she could stick the poll tax where the sun don’t shine. Betty Brown, who was the leader of the community council in Garnethill in the ’80s and ’90s, and so took the place by the scruff of the neck, and both of those women working class women, Betty McAllister worked in a fish shop. Betty Brown was a cleaner at STV, but they created such a lot for their own communities, and both of them were actually named Scot’s Women of the Year in different years. So they were acknowledged and we tried to acknowledge them in our walks as well.

Niall Murphy:
That’s fantastic. Okay, next question then. Glasgow and the city, it’s obviously always changing all the time. So after more than a decade of doing Women’s Heritage Walks, are you seeing any signs that Glasgow is becoming a less masculine city?

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Like Anabel said, I think some of the things that our tour guides reveal get slightly less of a gasp than I think the women’s libraries played a role in highlighting women’s roles. But I don’t think we can take all the credit. I think there’s generally a better understanding of how much women’s history has been overlooked and sidelined. But there are clearly so many more stories to be uncovered. It’s been said that only I think, now 0.5% of recorded history is about women, right?

Niall Murphy:
Yeah.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
There’s still plenty to uncover and record. I sometimes think our tour guides and our history detectives sometimes rescue information from literally dropping off into the abyss and then it’s lost forever. There are things that are fragile. So-

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
… there’s definitely a need to be continuing to do this work and to do it with a sense of urgency. So it’s great to see other groups doing really great work as well. The protests and suffragettes group have done a huge amount of work, obviously focusing on the suffrage movement. We’ve also worked with a group called Thistles & Dandelions, which is a Heritage project.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. Yes, I know them. Yes.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
They look specifically at unearthing and making visible the stories relating to ethnic minority women in the city. So there’s still definitely a lot to be done, but I like to think that well, less masculine sides of Glasgow are becoming more visible and we’re getting a more rounded view of-

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
… who’s made the city and contributed to it.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, absolutely. I did three walking trail leaflets of Pollokshields, and one of my big regrets as part of that, ’cause it covered both the east and the west sides of Pollokshields on the south side of Glasgow and also who had developed the whole area. But my big regret was I always intended there to be a fourth walking trail leaflet, which was about Asian experience of Pollokshields, because obviously it’s one of the most multicultural areas in Scotland and neighbouring Gover Hill and a voice hoped that somebody at some point would begin to tell those stories because they’re a core part of Glasgow’s story as well. So that diversity is so important-

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Absolutely.

Niall Murphy:
… in capturing that too.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Yeah, absolutely.

Niall Murphy:
Yeah. Everyone has a right history.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Yes. That’s it, and there’s so much missing from the mainstream.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
… narrative.

Niall Murphy:
But it’s about empowering people to be able to tell that story. You can’t go out and tell it for them because somebody asked me, “Why didn’t you do it if you felt so strongly about it?” It was like, “Because it shouldn’t be coming from me.” That wouldn’t be appropriate.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
I think that’s true. I think that’s what we loved working with the Thistles & Dandelions group. They actually came on three or four of our walks to get a sense of how we do it and had chats with various tour guides. But it’s just so great to see them thinking, “Well, we have our story to tell as well,” and having pride in that and sharing it with more people.

Niall Murphy:
Very much.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
I think it’s very heartening when we see men come on the Women’s Heritage Walks, because I feel really strongly that this isn’t just women’s history that’s aimed at women. I’ve had to learn about men’s history my entire life, so-

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
… and that’s never been questioned. I think the same as our responsibility as a white person to learn about the history of Black and minority ethnic people in our city.

Niall Murphy:
Absolutely. This is a wee bit funny, though. It was back in 2017, I helped out with as a leaflet woman war in the West End, and it was sponsored by various funders. A part of it was there had to be a walking tour for it and they couldn’t find anyone to do the walking tours and eventually, asked me. I was like, “Okay, well this is slightly awkward, but if you’re really struggling I’ll do it for you.” It was really fascinating learning the history about that. Again, I just think it’s obviously my mother brought me up the right way, but I think it’s really important to know that because it gives you a proper rounded view of the history of the place, not just the one-sided one or whoever was on top at a particular time. Okay then. What is next view on the horizon for the Women’s History Detectives, and is there anything you would like to develop and what gives you the most pride so far?

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Wow, multi-part question. Well, on the horizon, so we’re continuously reviewing our trails, so that’s ongoing work. We recruited seven new volunteer guides last summer-

Niall Murphy:
Wow.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
… which, yeah, it was great to see that so many people were keen to get involved and lots of young women as well.

Niall Murphy:
Good.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
So yeah, they’re learning the scripts and learning the ropes, and we’ll be delivering those walks from April onwards. We’ve got a few walks planned for the next few months. We’re working in Denniston and we’re not necessarily going to develop a Women’s Heritage Walk in that area because it depends what the group wants to do. But we’ve just started a series of workshops there to uncover the hidden histories of women in that area and that’s a year-long project. So looking forward to seeing who we uncover and what becomes of that information. I heard murmurs of a Women’s Heritage Walk, it’s very early days, so I don’t want to commit any of my colleagues to doing that. Anabel, I don’t know, do you want to answer the question about that?

Anabel Marsh:
Well, I was going to say, I think the pandemic made us look at everything in a different way. Again, we had to find a different way of still engaging with this material and people that wanted to know about it. So we did a series of Twitter walks. We did all our walks on Twitter.

Niall Murphy:
Right. Okay.

Anabel Marsh:
Not literally. This is one I prepared earlier because it’s quite tricky to get meaningful information into a tweet, but two of us, myself and another volunteer, Louise, we divided them between us and they were really popular.

Niall Murphy:
Good.

Anabel Marsh:
They went down very well. Another volunteer, Melody, made some trailers for the walks. So we used the time that we couldn’t take people out actually into the environment by doing it virtually.

Niall Murphy:
Sure. Yes. I did one or two of those myself. Yeah, it’s quite good fun.

Anabel Marsh:
As Gabby says, we’re always revising and changing the routes. Again, it’s pandemic related, but the Friends of Glasgow and Necropolis have renovated three historic stones to nurses and as a tribute to the NHS, we did that after the pandemic. So now we are looking at our route to how we can redesign that to take maybe one or two of those in. So that’s another project to just make sure we don’t get bored.

Niall Murphy:
Who comes on your walks in terms of, is it people from outside of Glasgow with people within Glasgow? How does that work?

Anabel Marsh:
Both. It’s a mix. Yeah. I think the furthest I can remember having somebody is from Australia. Quite often we get people who are just here on holiday or visiting family or something and they come on the walks, but we’d say it’s mostly fairly local people. But we do get quite a lot of people from other countries, which is nice that they’re going to go home with this view of Glasgow.

Niall Murphy:
You get good feedback at the end?

Anabel Marsh:
Always. Yes. Yes. The negative ones are things like, “Well, we could have had a cup of tea,” but we just don’t have time to get a cup of tea. No. Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that most people enjoy it and they’re very complimentary about the guides, which is nice. That makes you feel quite good about it.

Niall Murphy:
When I did the Women, War & The West End once, we always ended in the pub, so it was in Webster’s Theatre. There’s a pub at the back of Webster’s Theatre on Great Western Road. So that was really nice ’cause it was round about the time and so they’ve got fantastic roaring fire in there and you could end up with having a really good chin wag with folks you wouldn’t otherwise ordinarily meet, so really, really enjoyable experience. So I find doing walking tours really rewarding ’cause it’s not just you telling people the stories, you’re getting their opinions and their stories too out of it. So really, to me, it’s a brilliant educational tool in both directions.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
We’ve done tours for closed groups as well, and we sometimes get asked to offer a tour as part of someone’s conference. So they might have a gathering of feminist academics visiting, coming to a conference and we are offering them a tour. I love the idea that those people are leaving the city having had a real women’s focus on the city, and that’s what they’re coming away with.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
People really engage with it. Our guides are brilliant at presenting the information in ways that are accessible to people who might have quite a lot of background in Glasgow and Scottish history and then adapting that for people who don’t ’cause sometimes, I suppose we do assume that people know who St. Mungo is if we’re talking about St. Enoch. We’ve also started offering shorter walks because our walks are typically two hours long, but we recognise that that can feel like a long time for some, so we trialled a one-hour walk the East End last summer and we’re planning on doing that again and offering it in two shorter sessions.

Niall Murphy:
Yes, I did that one year for Doors Open Day rather than doing long walking tours, which I had been used to doing. I did half-hour lunchtime tours instead throughout the week, so in just around little parts of the city centre. The idea was to give somebody who was stuck in the office a chance to get out and go for a break and see a bit of the city while we’re at it and explain the city while we’re at it. So those were quite popular, which was quite interesting. Okay, so this is the final question then, and this is a completely loaded question because we ask, everybody who comes on our podcast this, which is, what is your favourite building in Glasgow on or off Women’s Heritage Walk, and what would it tell you if its walls could talk?

Anabel Marsh:
Who goes first? I’ll go first. I’m going to go off the Women’s Library walks because I also have a Women’s Heritage Walk in Maryhill-

Anabel Marsh:
… that I do out at Maryhill Burgh Hall, so I’m going to choose it as my favourite building.

Niall Murphy:
Nice choice.

Anabel Marsh:
I think what it tells is also the developing role of women because its unique selling point is the set of 20 stained glass windows that were made for the opening in the 1870s, Stephen Adam.

Niall Murphy:
Yes.

Anabel Marsh:
Unlike when you normally get stained glass windows, it’s religious scenes or classical scenes or whatever, it’s of ordinary working people going about their lives, doing their jobs, and of those 22 show women.

Niall Murphy:
Right

Anabel Marsh:
Now, okay, Stephen Adam just showed what he saw. That’s fair enough. Then you look, they have display a picture of the original opening of the halls and it’s just this sea of men everywhere-

Niall Murphy:
Right.

Anabel Marsh:
… rows and rows of men. Then next to it they’ve got the picture of the opening after the halls had been renovated in 2012, and it’s just such a lovely mix. There’s lots of women involved there. So I think that you can see that that is showing the progression of women and our increasing role in society. I have to say, I thought when I was asked to do a Women’s Heritage Walk there, I thought it might be quite difficult to turn up stories, but it wasn’t. They’re there if you look, and you’ve just got to think a little bit laterally and tease them out.

Niall Murphy:
What about you then, Gabrielle?

Gabrielle Macbeth:
I’ve chosen to talk about the building the houses Glasgow Women’s Library. I spend a lot of time there and I do love it, and I love turning up to work. Some mornings it’s even more beautiful than others. For those who you haven’t visited, it’s in Bridgeton and it’s a Carnegie Library, so-

Niall Murphy:
Yes, it’s beautiful.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
It is beautiful. We’ve been there almost 10 years and have done a lot of work to make it fit for our purposes and to look after it as well and done quite a lot of repairs to the roof and the stonework. We’re now working towards making it-

Niall Murphy:
We helped out with the stonework and the roof, so.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Yes. Yes.

Niall Murphy:
Being up the a scaffold is fantastic except the carvings are really beautiful, aren’t they?

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Yeah.

Niall Murphy:
But you also appreciate how much the pollution in Glasgow must have damaged the building because obviously it’s all been stone cleaned now and it looks lovely, blonde sandstone now, but some of it is really badly weathered because of all that pollution.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
There was damage, but to me, I think it’s if the walls could speak, they would talk of the importance and the power of public libraries and of free, accessible public spaces. It’s been at the heart of Bridgeton for 120 years almost, and it’s now home to the Women’s Library. It’s a really wonderful dynamic and loved and cared for space that offers opportunities for women and others to come and learn. We have a beautiful new sign by an artist called Rabiya Choudhry.

Niall Murphy:
Oh, I’ll have to go and see that.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Yes, please do. It’s brand new and it’s part of a wider project by the Common Guild, and the sign it’s borrowed the flame motif, which was Carnegie’s emblem and it has the words of an African American civil rights activist called Ella Baker, and it says, “Give light and people will find the way.” I think that’s-

Niall Murphy:
That’s beautiful.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
… a really beautiful phrase, but the project is, it’s got, there’s four other artists who have been commissioned as well to reflect on public libraries and the importance of public libraries past and present and future.

Niall Murphy:
Right. I loved your previous sign as well, by the way. I was a real fan of that too, but that is very nice, and I must go make the visit to see it. Completely agree with you, Anabel, about that, Maryhill Burgh Halls and Stephen Adam’s stained glass, which is really superb. He was a really good artist and how he manages to capture the woman’s role there as well is incredibly important. That reminded me of a story Dr. Nina Baker tells about the City Chambers. She does a really good talk about the City Chambers, one of which was how badly designed it was from a woman’s point of view, which was when they held the opening, a banquet and dance. All of these men obviously brought their wives along too.

The toilet provision for women was next to non-existent. There was one toilet in the basement and everything else was for men and they’re like, “Uh.” It sums up Victorian because nobody planned for that kind of thing at the time. You’re thinking, “How did you not know to anticipate this that you wouldn’t design for 50% of the population?” Really shocking. But it’s all of these spaces end up getting adapted over time for everybody. That’s the key thing, and it’s teasing out that history so everybody’s history is recorded. What’s so important about this. But thank you very much. That was a really enjoyable talk.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Thank you.

Anabel Marsh:
Thank you.

Niall Murphy:
Yes. I’m so glad to meet people who really enjoy doing walks as well, as much as I do, so it’s fantastic. It’s a really rewarding thing to do. It’s a thing I enjoy the most.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
Well, so do we.

Niall Murphy:
Well, thank you very much for your time. It’s much appreciated.

Gabrielle Macbeth:
No problem. Thank you very much.

Niall Murphy:
Our pleasure.

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. The podcast is kindly sponsored by the National Trust for Scotland and supported by Tunnock’s.

Niall Murphy:

Well, good evening everyone, and thank you very much for joining us. My name is Niall Murphy, and I am delighted to welcome all of you to this very special live edition of If Glasgow Walls Could Talk. It’s the first time we’ve done a live podcast recording like this, so please bear with us, because normally, we do this in the comfort of our own homes via a Zoom-like interface, so actually, doing it live is obviously very different. But we will give it a go and see how it works.

So, right. To talk about where we are at the moment, this is a new museum which was opened in May by the Friends of Glasgow Royal Infirmary. And what we are doing here, obviously now, is to launch this new series of podcasts with Glasgow City Heritage Trust. And as part of this is obviously a new experience for us, and it’s also good to be in what appears to be this new space and is looking very swish, this new space. But obviously as we were discussing when I arrived here, this was the original main entrance into the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

So it’s fascinating to see this kind of reopened up again, because this had been subdivided up to store spaces for the building. So it’s great that this space by this great Glasgow architect, James Miller, has been liberated once more and been put to this fantastic new use. So it really is a great setting for our first podcast, which aims to explore the stories and relationships between historic buildings and people in Glasgow.

And so what we want to talk about in this particular one is if these walls in this new museum and this magnificent and important hospital within the city, and in Scotland, what would they say if these walls could talk? So this welcome museum space celebrates this extraordinary history of Glasgow’s oldest hospital in this great East End location within the city centre. It’s much loved across the city, and it has a reputation that is genuinely global for the innovations in medicine that have come from it.

It’s also, when you consider its context within the city as well, and when you approach it up Castle Street, which is what I normally do, and you see the sheer scale of it and how impressive it is as a set piece within the city, it really is quite something, particularly when you can compare it in its setting in the Cathedral Precinct, next to Glasgow Cathedral. And there’s obviously all these great connections with both the Cathedral and with Glasgow Necropolis as well. And there are these connections between all three great institutions within the city.

So the original hospital building on this site, and this site was originally the bishop’s palace, this fortified castle. So everyone kind of wonders where Glasgow’s equivalent of Edinburgh Castle was. Well, we’re roughly sitting in it just now. So this was the original site of what was here. But the original hospital building, which was first started to be planned in about 1791 and opened in 1794, was built on this site by the great Scottish architect, Robert Adam, and executed, because he had died in 1792, by his brother, James Adam, who came out of retirement to finish this building.

So it was here to meet the needs of what was a really rapidly growing city at that point. And the growth of Glasgow has obviously been a major issue in the city, particularly over the course of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century. And the hospital has obviously had to keep expanding to keep up with those needs and to adapt to the industrialization and the swelling growth of the city and the constant pressures, particularly in this area, of poor and unsanitary working and living conditions in both the houses and the surrounding factories, because Glasgow was such a dense city.

So for more than 200 years, the Glasgow Royal Infirmary has risen to these challenges of industry, epidemics, poverty, war, and pandemic. And in that time, there had been many medical discoveries with a global impact which have been made here. And the walls of this museum, if you look around you, bear witness to both the remarkable women and men whose innovations, dedications, and discoveries help change the course of medical history, both in Glasgow, Scotland, and further afield in the world.

So you have men like Joseph Lister, who is incredibly important. So you can see his portrait over there, which interestingly enough, and I appreciated that when I walked up to it earlier, is by the great American illustrator and artist Norman Rockwell. And that was a tribute to him on the centenary of his discovery, so right at the top of Rockwell’s career. So it’s fascinating to see something like that. And he, of course, Joseph Lister, was this great pioneer of antiseptic surgery, and revolutionised his craft while working here at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

And what he was doing was taking… He was inspired by Louis Pasteur, and so he was taking those ideas… And this is one of these great Glasgow things. You see it through various people in Glasgow. They take ideas from elsewhere, they adapt them, and then they revolutionise them. And Lister had the same mould. What he does is by washing and dressing surgical wounds with carbolic acid, he thereby introduces this new concept of cleanliness in surgery, and thereby saves thousands, countless lives across the world. And it’s the basis for modern infection control.

So then you’ve got other people like Rebecca Strong, who was the Glasgow Royal Infirmary’s first Matron, and who trained under Florence Nightingale, so incredibly important and is important for establishing the whole idea of how you train nurses. And all of that was done here. And there’s a great interview with her on her centenary in the Glasgow Herald and she describes herself as a troublesome woman. Because when she got her teeth into a problem, she kept going with it and looking for the next solution beyond here.

So she’s extremely interesting too. And she was important for both the training nursing, and also because of the fact that she insisted on the building of a separate nursing wing as part of the hospital. Because prior to that, the nurses would just have to have sleep in amongst the patients. So again, that’s absolutely key in the development of nursing. And other things, the more that we understand about how much these walls could tell us, it’s all of these other uplifting stories from our disturbing times, reminding us of human enterprise and ingenuity and what that can achieve.

And so, to help peel back some of these layers of history and tell the story of this great hospital, it is a privilege and a pleasure to introduce our two speakers this evening, Dr. Hilary Wilson, who is a consultant rheumatologist, so you’re dealing with joints, nerve conditions, and Dr. Kate Stevens, who is a consultant nephrologist, I pronounced that correctly, good, which is specialising in kidney diseases, both of whom work at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and are trustees of the Friends of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, a charity which was established in May, 2020, so during the first lockdown.

So just two years later, they opened the Friends of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary Museum, who officially launched on the 31st of May, 2022. So you can almost smell the paint, obviously. So the space that we are in celebrates the contribution that the Glasgow Royal Infirmary has made to medicine, surgery, and nursing throughout the world. So there’s going to be a great deal to talk about as we work our way through the podcast.

And we also want to give you, the audience, a chance to ask questions too, which we will do at the end of the programme. And hopefully we’ll learn a little more about the inspiration for the museum itself. So first off, question number one, the charity was established early in the pandemic, and work on the museum began in earnest during lockdown. So how did that come about, and would you like to tell us how and why you both became involved in this?

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

Well, I’ll take this question first, Kate. So the Royal Infirmary is an institution that’s been around for 228 years, so of course it’s got an enormous history behind it. And when Kate and I walk around the hospital, there are numerous dedications to the people that have walked these corridors before us. There’s the brass plaques in the central block entrance for Lister, Macewen, Strong, and MacIntire. We have buildings named after pioneers in the hospital.

And if you look a little more closely in the hospital, there’s some more unusual items to reflect a bygone era. So in our sub-basement, we still have the original hooks for the horses. There’s the old oxygen tanks in the basement. And if you venture up, and some of my juniors have been up to the seventh floor, there’s the old consultant dining room, where consultants were served wine and beer with their lunch and dinner, with tablecloths and silverware. That doesn’t happen anymore. So basically, there’s an amazing history associated with this building.

So about seven or eight years ago, John Stewart, who’s a former chief nurse at the Royal, and one of our trustees, he came up with the concept of Friends of Glasgow Royal Infirmary, because he felt it was important that we should share this history with the rest of the world. And Morven, myself, and Kate joined in with the campaign to try and bring Friends of Glasgow Infirmary to the fore.

And initially when we talked about the museum, people thought we were a bit mad trying to open a museum in a working hospital. And people gave us great support and encouragement, but it was really hard to get it off the ground for the first few years. And then in 2020, we thought, “Well, let’s register Friends of GRI as a charity with the regulators,” because as a charity you can get funding from other resources that weren’t available without being a charitable status. So that was what we did first of all. And then we embraced social media. Kate is our chief Twitter and Instagram feeder. I think she’s tweeted as many tweets as we have followers, about 2,800. So that really catapulted us into people wanting to know what we were about.

And because of COVID restrictions in 2020, we couldn’t really have in-house, face to face celebrations of our former staff, so we ran some virtual events in the form of webinars, and a virtual tour, and a webinar celebrating Lister and the various women that worked at the Royal. And we were overwhelmed with the support and interest that we had at that stage.

We then got some funding from the Scottish Society History of Medicine, Friends of Glasgow Museums, and the endowment fund in the hospital very kindly gave us the funds to refurbish this space. So what we’re in just now, what you’ve said is this original medical block entrance, but it then moved over to the centre block entrance, and this room really became a storage area for medical records. And it was really in a very poor state of repair when we found it. And it’s just lovely to be in it now with people who are interested in the history of the hospital. And as you say, we opened on the 31st of May, 2022.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, fantastic. I mean, it’s great because you have such a wonderful view of the Cathedral Precinct from here, so it’s so funny to think that this would just have been a storage room. Yeah. Particularly when there’s a statue of Queen Victoria right bang over your entrance. It does seem kind of a bit of a wasted opportunity. Okay. So tell us about the hospital itself, and how did it grow, and what does a historic hospital say about life in the city? Glasgow Royal Infirmary is a landmark with physical and symbolic significance within Glasgow. And maybe we can explore some of those key developments in 1794 and how they relate to what was happening in the rest of the city. Do you want to talk about that?

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Yes, sure. With the caveat that I’m not a historian, I’ll do my best. So yeah, I mean, you’ve touched on some things already. So in the 18th century, Glasgow as a city grew rapidly, and there was an urgent need to build an infirmary or a hospital to accommodate the expanding population. There was also a desire to have a hospital beside the university. And at that stage, the university was beside the cathedral. So a group got together, so men, as was traditional in those days, no women, so they were the founders, and they planned this new infirmary.

So it was funded by subscribers. So subscribers could be wealthy city merchants, or businesses, or the Royal College of Physicians, and surgeons in Glasgow. And the first meeting was in 1787. So at that point, they didn’t actually ask Robert Adam to design the building initially. They asked a man called William Blackburn. So William Blackburn was a famous architect who designed prisons. And he fortunately or unfortunately died and so was unable to design our hospital. I’m not sure what it would’ve looked like if a prison architect had designed it.

So Robert Adam was brought in, and he designed this, or his designs were very grand, they were very ambitious for the Royal Infirmary. And it’s said that there was a degree of one-upmanship, because the other Scottish infirmaries in Aberdeen, Dumfries, and Edinburgh were nothing as grand Robert Adam’s designs were here. So the old Glasgow-Edinburgh rivalry was true even back then. So the first designs were deemed to be a little bit too impressive, and modifications were necessary. They were too expensive. But despite that, the finished article was really magnificent.

So exactly as you’ve heard already, this is where the Adams building was, and it had this wonderful entrance bay looking out onto Cathedral Precinct. And the piece de resistance was the dome on the top of it. So it had this huge dome, and it was 40 foot from the floor to the ceiling in the dome. And housed under the dome was the operating theatre. So you had lots and lots of light coming in through this dome onto the operating table, which was great for the surgeon who was doing the operation, but maybe less so for the patient who, as you’ll hear as we move on, was usually awake. There was no anaesthetic. So they were lying there, full daylight. I’m not sure it was great that they could see everything that was going on.

And the other thing about the dome is that, so it was at the top of the hospital, the operating theatre, and Monday to Saturday, it was a functioning theatre. Patients were carried on these gurneys up the stairs, screaming often, no pain relief. Presumably part of the reason it was on the top floor was because maybe the rest of the hospital couldn’t hear if they were at the top. And then on Sundays, it became a chapel. So it went from being a horror house to a serene chapel on Sundays. So the other big point of excellence that’s often commented on is the fact that there was iron bedsteads in the new Glasgow Royal Infirmary, but there was only wooden ones in Edinburgh, so that was a marker of pride.
So the hospital, as you say, opened in 1794. There were eight wards with 12 beds. There’s never enough beds. The same is true today. Half the wards were unfurnished when it opened up initially, so there’s a lack of funds, a lack of beds, a theme that I’m afraid is fairly consistent even now. So gradually, over the years, lots of different wings were added to the hospital. So in 1829, they added a detached block, which was the fever hospital. So dealing with outbreaks of infectious diseases in a very overcrowded city was a massive problem for the managers. It’s hugely challenging.

And they had these great plans to design this separate fever hospital. But there was lots of hiccups. There wasn’t money. And so, a little bit like what happens in today’s world, there was temporary accommodation put up to deal with epidemics. At one point, there was a shed in the grounds of the hospital. But eventually, although they had to scale back their original plans, they planned 220 beds, but eventually got 120, they managed to get this fever hospital up. So it sat detached from the rest of the hospital, but in the hospital grounds. And actually it wasn’t big enough, and during subsequent epidemics, they had to put more temporary accommodation up in the grounds.

So in 1842, they managed to attach it to the main hospital. And then in 1861, they opened this new surgical hospital. So it was all singing and dancing. It had these coal fires, it had a day ward for patients to convalesce in, and it had this huge operating theatre, again on the top floor. And in the operating theatre, they had a tiered sitting area, where more than 200 people could watch operations. That was for education, for sport in those days. So that’s where Joseph Lister made his groundbreaking discoveries in 1865. And whilst Lister was working exhaustively on his theories of antisepsis in London, Florence Nightingale had embarked upon her great mission to open up or establish a training school for nurses.

So it’s kind of important to understand that nursing was not a profession in the early 1800s. It was basically… It was a means of employment for people who were also-rans, prostitutes, fallen women. It was not viewed in any favourable light whatsoever, alcoholics, basically people who couldn’t get a job anywhere else. And society was incredibly judgmental. And it wasn’t cool to look after sick people as a woman, particularly. A few sick people were men. The night nurses were the worst. So they basically used to come in, steal from the patients, drink themselves into a stupor, and have to be carried out the back door in the morning.

So in 1860, Florence Nightingale opened up the Nightingale Training School for Nurses at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. And she was a middle class, respectable woman, so she gave nursing a bit more respectability. And then in 1867, so just after Lister had made his discoveries, Mrs. Rebecca Strong enrolled in the Florence Nightingale Training School. So Florence Nightingale had a very high opinion of Rebecca Strong, and ultimately, via the military hospital at Netley and Dundee Royal Infirmary, Rebecca, or Mrs. Strong, I think as she would prefer to be known, found herself here at Glasgow Royal Infirmary as the very first matron in 1879.

So you’ve alluded to this already, Niall. She was relentless in her goal to improve standards. She perpetually sought to improve patient care. She was a single mother, and what she achieved was remarkable. She was highly principled, and when they refused to build the nurse’s home, she resigned. Didn’t think for a second of staying. “No. I’m going if you won’t build a nurse’s home.” So she left. She felt that if her nurses were to give the best of themselves at work, they had to have somewhere comfortable to stay. So I guess probably with their tails between their legs, the managers in 1887 built the nurse’s home. So you can still see it. It’s across diagonally from here. It’s now the procurement building.
So it had 85 rooms. It had a tennis court, a recreation room, and it linked to the main hospital via what was commonly called the chicken run. So chicken run was essentially a large conservatory. It was 180 foot long, made of glass, and it connected, as I said, the nurse’s home to the main hospital. And it’s said that matron would sit in her flat above the glass conservatory, looking down, watching the nurses when they came home to make sure that, A, they were on time, and B, they hadn’t brought any men with them. And she would also make sure that when they came into the hospital for work, that they had their hats on, apparently.

So William Macewen, who we’ve not yet mentioned, was a huge ally of Rebecca Strong’s. And together, they developed this block training scheme for nurses that basically meant that nurses had dedicated time off the ward, where they got lectures and tutorials and were educated, and then they had other blocks of time on the ward. So the Proprietary School for Nurse Training opened in 1893, and this block training method has now been adopted throughout the world. So I think probably up until this opened, Rebecca Strong was more celebrated elsewhere than she was in Glasgow, where she did all this.

Niall Murphy:

Classic Glasgow.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

I know. Classic Glasgow. But we’re big fans, so we’re hoping to spread the word.

Niall Murphy:

Good. Good.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

So I mentioned William Macewen. So William Macewen worked under Lord Lister, and he was heavily influenced by Lister’s theories of antisepsis. He was one of the most innovative surgeons of his time. He performed the first successful brain surgery operation. So if you think now, I mean, you get CT scans, you get MRI scans. If there’s a problem in somebody’s brain, you see it in those images.

But what he did was he had a girl who had epilepsy, and he looked to see where the twitching was, which part of the body of the twitching was coming from, and then used anatomy and physiology to identify from that where the tumour was located, went in, removed the tumour, and she survived for, I think, eight or nine years after that. That’s pretty remarkable.

He also invented bone grafts. He founded Erskine Hospital and invented the Erskine artificial limb. And he was also a police surgeon. So before A&E, he was a police surgeon. And then one of the other really important things that he contributed was photography. So he would take photos of cases before and after, so surgical cases, or even just cases that he saw in the wards. And in those days, unlike now, and beautifully scribed histories, if you like, so taking people through pages and pages of the actual history of a patient, they must have had lots more time than we do. And Macewen would keep these photographs with the cases, which beautifully illustrated and helped to educate others.
He also loved animals. And there’s a couple of stories that Hilary and I are both very fond of, both being dog lovers. So he had a dog called Leo, and he used to bring Leo into the hospital with him. So first example of a therapet. So one day, poor Leo got stolen, so there were dog stealers, and he stole poor old Leo. And Macewen was upset, but somebody gave him a tip off and said that they thought that Leo was in the shop with two women. So Macewen went down to the shop. Sure enough, there was Leo and the two women were there. And they bought the dog from one of the dog stealers.

So a policeman was called. And the policeman basically said, “Okay, so if the dog comes to you, Macewen, you can have him. If he doesn’t, he stays here.” So of course the dog went over to Macewen, Macewen took his dog, came back to the hospital. And a few days later, one of the women came to see him and explained that her sister was unwell, they bought the dog, and she was really missing him. So William Macewen gave them the dog back. So that was nice. He had a big a heart.

However, he didn’t get on with all of his colleagues, so I think he caused big disruptions in the hospital. So Sir George Beatson, he was a pioneering oncologist, so The Beatson, you’ve all heard of The Beatson. And so, it comes from Sir George Beatson. So pioneering oncologist, and he also was involved in St. Andrew’s ambulance and the Red Cross. And Macewen, in an extremely derogatory fashion, used to refer to him as that ambulance man. So they both worked for Lister. I don’t know whether or not it was a bit of rivalry because of that.

So I mean, there’s lots and lots of other key developments that we can talk about. We don’t have time. So I guess that, towards the end of the 19th century, the older buildings were falling into a state of disrepair. And then coinciding with the Queen Victoria, James Miller, as you said, designed this building, built on the site of the Adams building. There’s a lot of controversy in 1927 when they pulled down the Lister wards. So still, to this day, we’re both a bit bitter that they pulled down the Lister wards.

Niall Murphy:

So is that when… The plaque dates from then?

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Yeah.

Niall Murphy:

It’s just the most difficult plaque to see.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Yeah. I know. It’s such a shame.

Niall Murphy:

It’s tucked behind the bus stop, behind the railings. It’s such a shame, because it’s beautiful.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

I know. I know. So they built a lecture theatre, which is no longer use on this site. But there was international outcry when they said they were going to pull down the Lister ward, but they pulled it down.

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

A lecture theatre is our next big plan.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Yeah, that is our big plan. We’re going to have a Lister avatar in the lecture theatre.

Niall Murphy:

Classic.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

So then in 1948, the hospital became part of NHS Scotland. The second reconstruction started in the 1970s. And over the course of the years, various bits have been added and removed. So I guess there’s a couple of other people that it’s important to mention. So James McCune Smith, so he’s the first African American to get a medical degree. So in America, they refused to admit him to medical school, so he came to the University of Glasgow, and he got his degree in 1835. No, 1935. 1835?

Niall Murphy:

1835.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

I told you I wasn’t a historian. 1835. So he spent time as a medical student here. And then MacIntyre established the very first x-ray department in the world. This opened in the late 1890s. So right here in the Royal Infirmary, this was the very first x-ray department in the world. Ian Donald pioneered the use of ultrasound.

Niall Murphy:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Very interesting story behind that.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Yeah. Exactly. So he helped use ultrasound to diagnose foetal abnormality the 1950s. And then, we are proud, I guess, because we know, Jackie Taylor, so she, in 2018, became the very first woman president of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. So a long time coming. So we were delighted to when that happened.

Niall Murphy:

Great, fantastic. I mean, obviously the Adams building was sacrificed to build this. But how did this building survive? Because obviously you’ve got… I mean this is where the Glasgow Royal Infirmary is interesting, because it’s had three great Scottish architects involved in it. You’ve got Robert Adam, then you’ve got James Miller, and you’ve got Basil Spence, who does the blocks to the east. But how did this survive? Because when given the surrounding area with the exception of the cathedral, it’s pretty much levelled for the motorway ring road coming through, and then the wholef of town head just disappears. How did this get spared?

Dr. Kate Stevens:

So do you know… I don’t know how it got spared, but I’m pleased it did. And I think you’ll find us chained to the railings if you say they’re going to take it down. Yeah. So I think probably partly because they just kept adding bits on. So at no point did anybody decide to reconstruct this part.
I think initially they had much grander plans for Sir Basil Spence’s building, but that didn’t materialise, so they did bits of it. Hilary will tell you a bit more about that in a second. But they did bits of it. And then, the plans didn’t come to fruition, probably because they ran out of money. And so, they attached this part of the hostel with a link corridor. It was kind of like a floating corridor, which attaches this building to the newer buildings, and we’re still here.

Niall Murphy:

I suppose it’s a testament to James Miller’s skill as an architect. He never built a hospital before he built this. And he’d obviously mastered his brief so well that it’s still in use more than a century later and still functions perfectly fine as a hospital, which is quite a tribute to the man, of his skill.
Okay. Going back to other issues. Obviously it’s called the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. So can you tell us more about the links to royalty? I mean, obviously Queen Victoria, this is the Jubilee building as part of it. So she’s sitting above the doorway in this great rather stern sculpture by as Albert Hemstock Hodge, who tended to collaborate with James Miller quite often. And there are also links to Edward VII as well, who opened the hospital. But can you tell us more about the connections to the royals and the impact they have on medicine as we come to the 21st century?

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

So you’ve already mentioned that the site of the royals, the previous site of the bishop’s castle from the 12th century. And William Wallace spent some time at the bishop’s castle. And Mary Queen of Scotts and her supporters tried to take the castle in 1570. But the Royal itself was given its royal charter in 1791, and this bit of land was granted to the hospital by the crown. So that’s probably the earliest link with the royals.
So basically, 1914, King George and Queen Mary officially opened the Miller building, and they opened the former Children’s Hospital York Hill at the same time. And the story goes that when Queen Mary came in to open the hospital, she was meant to turn left to go ward one, but she turned right and she opened ward two instead. So this is why the Royal doesn’t have a ward one, because you didn’t want to correct Queen Mary for turning the wrong way. And Queen Mary also gifted this beautiful bookcase to the hospital containing some books. I don’t know what happened to the books that were in the bookcase. And this is why we use this bookcase to illustrate some of the connections with the royal family over the years.

So in 1986, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, they came and opened the Queen Elizabeth building off Alexandra Parade. And in the bookcase, we have the visitor’s book with Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth’s signatures. We’re quite proud of that. And the Princess Royal Maternity opened in 2001, having moved from Rottenrow. And the Jubilee Building, which houses A&E and plastic surgery following the closure of Canniesburn Hospital, was named for the Golden Jubilee, and that opened in 2002.
Now, more recently this year we were awarded a Queen’s green canopy tree to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee. So the hospital’s going to receive a native tree to Scotland. I’m not sure what it’s going to be. I hope it’s not something too huge, like a Douglas Fir or something, because we plan to plant it out in the garden just to the right of the steps, so that you can actually see it from Castle Street, and we’ll have a plaque telling the public what it’s all about. And then, as you said, Queen Victoria, she watches over all of us that come into the museum. And last year, we restored the lighting outside, so that we can light her up in different colours at all times of the year.

Niall Murphy:

Very good. Okay. So next up to touch on royalty brings us to obviously one of the key figures in the history of the development of the hospital, Joseph Lister himself. So in later on in his life, he will become the senior surgeon to Queen Victoria, and also Edward VII. But his pioneering work in Glasgow transformed the survival chances of any patient undergoing surgery. So can you tell us how Lister made medical history in 1865 with his treatment of James Greenlees, this young boy who most unfortunately had this compound fracture because of a car going over his leg. So can you tell us all about this great breakthrough which ends up being so reported in the lancet?

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Yep. So I think that you have to go back to Victorian times to understand the significance of this. Because I think that we all brand about Lister developed a theory of antisepsis. It’s so important. I mean this would be such a different world if Lister hadn’t made those discoveries. So if you think about, particularly after COVID, if you think about a world where there’s no hand washing, there’s no gloves, there’s no cleanliness, so in Victorian times that was the reality. And people thought that infection came from miasma or bad ear. And the dirtier and bloodier a surgeon’s gown was, the more lauded he was and the prouder he felt.

Niall Murphy:

That’s just a horrible thing.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

So they used to wander about the place with these absolutely filthy… They were filthy, these people. But that was a real mark of, “He’s a great surgeon.” And this is in a year where there wasn’t anaesthetic, and so a surgeon’s skill really came down to how quickly he could work. Because remember, they didn’t have lots of these modern treatments that we have, so often, they would be amputating things. So Lister, when he was a student, watched another surgeon, Robert Liston, so a similar name.

So Liston was a bit of a performer, and he considered himself to be the fastest knife in the West. So Lister was in an operating theatre watching him with other people, and he would, Liston, theatrically got out his knife, this poor man who’s conscious, about to have a limb amputated, and you said, “Time me, gentlemen,” before he chopped the leg off. And I mean, it took seconds, which I guess is what you wanted at the time. That’s not what happens now, I can assure you.

So Lister, he married a lady called Agnes Syme. So Agnes Syme was the daughter of James Syme, a famous surgeon from Edinburgh, and they worked together. So Agnes doesn’t often get as much credit as we think she should, but she was really crucial to Lister’s experiments and his research. So they did lots of experiments and research together. So one of the things they did together, as a slight aside, was they took chloroform and administered it to each other to see how much was the correct dose of chloroform. It’s pretty sporting of Agnes. So Agnes was a botanist to trade, and she would do these beautiful illustrations of the experiments that they did and these lovely notebooks, so I think she was fairly instrumental to his discoveries.

So Lister was always fascinated by science and medicine, in particular microscopy, which he’d learned from his father. And he looked at inflammation. So it was fairly well known that inflammation preceded many of these postoperative complications that they saw, including sepsis. So as you’d said, he was introduced to the work of Louis Pasteur, and that highlighted that living organisms caused putrefaction. So Lister used that information along with the word that he had undertaken, and he realised that contamination was the vector of infection.

So he realised that there was contamination from people’s hands, from instruments, from their gowns. And although he didn’t appreciate the full extent of germs, he didn’t have any concept that there was lots of bacteria and viruses and things, he did realise that these things were contaminated, and in order to try and reduce post-operative gangrene and sepsis, you had to get rid of this contamination. So he basically started using phenol or carbolic acid, and he invented this thing called the carbolic acid spray. So the original apparatus for that, the Hunterian Museum have in Glasgow. And he essentially started spraying everything that came in within-

Niall Murphy:

Is that what’s in the background of-

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Yes. Exactly. Of the picture. So everything that came within a few centimetres of Lister got sprayed by this carbolic acid spray. So his first documented success was James Greenlees. So James Greenlees was a poor wee 11 year old boy who was on High Street and got knocked down by a cart, and had a compound fracture on his leg. That basically means that the bone was sticking out through the skin. So Lister got his carbolic acid spray and meticulously applied it to the wounds, and the dressings, and the dressings were cleaned.

So bearing in mind that previously dressings would often be reused between different patients, this was very out there. So basically, after six weeks, wee James Greenlees was cured and walked out the hospital. So Lister then started instructing everybody who worked with him to wash their hands pre and postoperatively, to use the carbolic acid spray, to wear gloves. All the instruments were washed. And he also cleverly realised that the porous handles of the instrument were probably also harbouring bugs, so he got rid of them.

So that all sounds like, “Wow, imagine anybody thinking otherwise.” But he was completely mocked. So people thought this man is nuts and he was heavily criticised. But he did have some supporters, fortunately for I think all of us. And so, very gradually, as his work was replicated, it became clear that, as it says up there, that he was the greatest surgical benefactor to mankind. So he completely revolutionised mortality rates, surgery, and the practise of medicine throughout the world.

Niall Murphy:

Incredible. So what about… You’ve got all of these other pictures, and people on the walls, and we’ve touched on some of them. What about the other pioneers who passed through the buildings on this site? So you’ve mentioned John McIntyre and the world’s first x-ray department, and you’ve mentioned William Macewen, who carried out the first successful brain surgery, Rebecca Strong with the training of nurses.

So can you explain why Glasgow managed to produce so many great pioneers? And I think all of this is related to industry in the city as well. With all the great pioneers in the industry, Glasgow just seems to have been able to do some of that. Can you explain why they’re able to do that? Because they’re great disruptors of their age, Lister very much being this disruptor. Can you explain that?

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

Yeah. I can’t, actually. I mean, I think their achievements speak for themselves, and they were so sure about what they believed in that they just carried that through and it all came to fruition. I think there’s a couple of other people that you can add to the list that you’ve mentioned. One of them is a doctor called O.H. Mavor. And his illustrations are on this wall over on the side of the museum. So O.H. Mavor, he worked as a resident at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, but he also is called James Bridie. He’s works under the pseudonym James Bridie. And he’s a playwright and a caricaturist.

And what’s interesting about, O.H. Mavor, or James Bridie, is that he was the co-founder of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, and he also invented Daft Friday, the big ball in Christmastime at Glasgow University. So he did lots of these illustrations of characters who worked at the Royal Infirmary. As I say, we’ve got four up there, but we actually were given a selection of 14 of them. And they highlight the quirks and sometimes the disagreements with the managers at the Royal of that time. And I had a very nice meeting with the Friends of Glasgow Museums who’d given us a grant, and they came in and told me that their founder, Tom Honeyman, was also a co-founder of the Citizens with O.H. Mavor. So that was a nice link.

The other person worth mentioning is David Cuthbertson. So we have a brass plaque of David Cuthbertson in centre block entrance. And he was a clinical biochemist, and he led the Department of Clinical Biochemistry at the Royal Infirmary, but also worked at the Rowett Institute, which looked at the investigation of human metabolism and nutrition. He wrote lots of books, published lots of scientific articles regarding the metabolic response to trauma and infection.

And he was quite good at performing experiments. And one of the ones that was very interesting was he wanted to assess whether the metabolic response to trauma was due to the trauma itself or due to the fact that you were confined to bed for all the time that you were recovering. So he recruited medical students to stay in bed for two weeks with their legs splinted, and he paid them two pounds a week to do that. So I don’t know whether that would pass the ethics committee now, or I don’t think medical students would do that experiment. But he loved his job so much that even when he retired, the Royal Infirmary created an honorary position for him up until the day he died at 89.

Niall Murphy:

Fascinating. I wonder whether it’s because, not just the world, but Glasgow in general, that it’s a node for attracting people who are interested and are enthusiastic and passionate about their subject and are willing to engage in the broader world. Because with Lister, part of that whole connection with Louis Pasteur is he’s talking to the chemist, Thomas Anderson down at the university because they’re walking into work together every day, and that’s where it comes from.

And it might be something to do with soft networks like that. Because it’s a similar story with the ultrasound. And it was Donald McIntyre going to a factory. And it was because one of his patients saying, “Why don’t you come along and see what my factory can do and things like that.” And that’s the connection. I wonder whether it’s eureka moments like that and those soft networks that you actually need.

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

And I think this soft networking is so important, even in today’s modern medicine. When you walk down corridors, you meet your colleagues, you share ideas in a informal setting. And I think we’ve lost a little bit of that with the fact that everyone’s on their emails and Teams meetings. So I think that would be useful, to get that back.

Niall Murphy:

Yes, very much. Absolutely. Okay. Can we talk about the exhibits? Because you’ve got some fantastic exhibits here. I’m particularly admiring these… Are they cathode ray tubes? I seem to recall stuff like that from my chemistry days in school. Which are rather impressive. So you have this kind of fantastic collection, and every good museum is founded on good collections. But where did you go about finding all of these artefacts? How did you bring them all together, and what were your sources for doing that?

Dr. Kate Stevens:

So a few sources. So people have donated things, which is very kind. So lots of people who have worked here or who have had relatives who’ve worked here have come forward and offered us things. So we’ve got old badges, we’ve got old TENS machines, we’ve got one of the first machines used to deliver electroconvulsive therapy in psychiatry. So lots of people have come forward with things which has been great.

We are well known in the hospital, myself, Hilary, Morven, and John, for wandering about and taking things that we think that people maybe aren’t aware of how important they are. And we may have, one December, put on high vis jackets, hard hats, and torches and going creeping about in the attics of the hospital and identified several quite interesting things that some of which are now on display in here.

I think there wasn’t really somewhere for all these nice things to be kept. So there’s lots of things lying about the hospital, paintings, et cetera, that we’ve managed to amass, archive, and let people see. And we’ve also been known to have a wee look at eBay, and we get some things in here that people perhaps didn’t realise the significance of them. So we have one of the original programmes from the university with all the different lectures, including Lister and various other people. So we got that on eBay for 10 pounds. So it’s now here. It’s a better home than someone who didn’t appreciate its value.

Niall Murphy:

Very good. The other thing that interests me as well, when we’re looking at exhibits and everything, is the links between the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and other hospitals or medical institutions within the vicinity. So you’ve obviously got the blind asylum, which still survives up the way with Europe’s only five-sided clock, which is now incorporated into the car park, but used to be part of the hospital campus. So you’ve got that. And then you also had the great Rottenrow Hospital, which was the Glasgow Royal Maternity Hospital, and it’s the exhibit sitting at the back, which is that fantastic fireplace. Can you tell us a bit more about that? And also, I’m wondering whether you can answer a question which we were discussing in the office, which was how on earth did the Rottenrow Hospital end up on that site? Why would anyone build a maternity hospital at the top of such a steep hill? It seems incredibly selfish.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Men. Men built it at the top of a steep hill.

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

Yeah. Well I don’t know if I can answer the second question, but I can tell you a bit about the fireplace.

Niall Murphy:

Please do.

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

What happened was we’re quite pally with all the porters and the security guys now in the hospital, and it was one of them, a guy called Ziggy, who said, “Dr. Wilson, I’ve got something you might like up in the seventh floor.” And he brought down this old dusty fireplace. And I said, “What on earth is it?” And it was the fireplace that was at Rottenrow Hospital before it was demolished in 2001.

So what it has is it has the signatures of all the people that worked at Rottenrow, dating way back to 1918. And we’ve also got some door frames with similar etchings. And what we’d really love to do is to get a research student to look at all these names, because I think some of them have gone on to be very famous obstetricians of their time.

We also have an original letter awarding Rottenrow a royal charter. And we’ve also got several pieces of medical equipment. The very nice lady called Belinda who gave us the O.H. Mavor caricatures, she is the granddaughter of Professor Munro Kerr, and he was a very prestigious obstetrician in Glasgow who was the first muirhead chair of obstetrics and gynaecology. And as well as these lovely caricatures, she also found somebody that owned his original top hat and a lovely brown leather case with his initials on it. So we’ve got that as well.

Niall Murphy:

Very good. Okay. So that brings us back to the whole kind of topic and the role of historic hospitals and medical museums. And the role is obviously still in use, but there are many historic hospitals around the country and in Glasgow particular which are no longer in use. And obviously a key issue in this kind of day and age with climate change is how do we go about retrofitting buildings like this to give them a further use in the future?
And what can we do to encourage people to adapt buildings like this that have these fantastic histories, that you don’t necessarily want to lose? I mean it would be criminal if this building was demolished, but we have, in the city, things like the Victoria Infirmary. I was quite heavily involved in the campaign to try and save as much of that as we could. But unfortunately, we were totally at the mercy of the developers, because it had no statutory protection for the entire campus.

With the exception of the one administration building which was B listed, everything else was up for grabs. And so it was very much at the whim of the developer as to whether or not it was going to be saved, which was kind of a shame when you look at things like the Royal Samaritan Hospital for Women in Govanhill, which is such a beautiful campus, which has been entirely saved, thankfully, and put to a new use. So what can we do to encourage people to look after and maintain these buildings in longer term? Any thoughts about that?

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s difficult. And as you’ve said, we’ve lost the Victoria, we’ve lost the Western, we’ve lost bits of Stobhill. Although obviously Stobhill, when it was gifted to the city, the deal was that it had to be a hospital on the campus. So some of the old buildings are still there and there obviously is a new hospital on site, but it’s very much a modern building. The Western, when it was pulled down the deal was that the university got the land back, and so they’ve done what they have with it.

So I guess in an ideal world, we would keep all of these buildings, we would have lots of money, and we would have them all in a condition where people could go and use them as whatever they were repurposed as. So you might have some as nice restaurants or meeting areas or whatever. But I guess that’s not practical. But in Glasgow we do have the Royal, and the Royal is a functioning hospital, and it’s got to serve its population effectively, and so things need to progress. If things didn’t progress, we’d still be sitting in a room with an surgeon wearing a dirty gown, and using a dirty knife, and asking someone to time while they chopped off your leg. So progress is not a bad thing.

But I think you’re absolutely right. We do have to try and make sure that, particularly for us, this space, so it’s parts of the hospital are B listed, although are ways of getting around the B listing, if places are not safe. I mean, there are some parts of some of these hospitals that we’ve mentioned that were in such bad states of disrepair that it was going to be virtually impossible to restore them without more money than we have. And sometimes, I think it’s a balance. So healthcare is important, NHS is great, it’s free at the point of delivery. And probably if you ask most people, whilst maybe your heart would say, “Oh, I want to keep the Victoria Infirmary,” if the choice was that or it was having better facilities within a hospital to treat patients, it’s quite hard to justify then.

Niall Murphy:

It is. It is a difficult one. I think what I’m interested in is where the NHS goes with things like this. Because I know that the NHS is interested in things like local place plans, and this is where I’m very interested in the work of Harry Burns. And he thinks that a lot of what happened to Glasgow in the 1960s and ’70s, with the demolition of whole parts of the city, had a real bad impact on the psyche of the city and Glaswegians in general, because you’re seeing your city being destroyed and it’s dislocating. And suddenly having that whole loss of memory and associations with places that you grew up and were attached to actually really does damage the psyche of the people. And so it’s how you deal with issues like that. So there is perhaps something to look at there. I don’t know.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

No, I mean, I think that’s definitely true. And I think if the Royal was to become a victim and this building was to be demolished, I think it would affect a lot of people.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, absolutely. It does… Something about the building or buildings in general, people have an affection for, and it seeps into the feel of a building as well. You can tell how loved something is. So yeah, something like what you’ve done here is an example of how much you love the building.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

And we’ve got grand plans.

Niall Murphy:

An even bigger museum. That’s what it could be adapted to. Okay, so bearing that in mind, what next? And I’m really impressed by your logo, which is really beautiful logo, and I’d love to know who designed it, because they’ve done a really fantastic job on it. But obviously it circles around the bee in the centre, and by the entrance you’ve got a jar of honey, which is a big clue. So can you tell us more about your plans for a bee garden and the idea of the walkthrough health, heritage, and honey. Sounds really fascinating. Can you tell us something about

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

Yeah. Well certainly in terms of the future of this museum, as you said, we’re only open two days a week for two hours on a Tuesday and a Thursday. And although we’ve been open for seven weeks, we are number 73 on Trip Advisor out of 466 things to do in Glasgow, so that’s not bad. And we’re hoping maybe to go for a museum accreditation at some point with the assistance of Ross McGregor and Morven at the Royal College Heritage Committee.

And we’d like to extend our opening hours to match the other tourist offerings in Cathedral Precinct. But because we’ve got volunteers that run the museum, that’s going to take a bit of time. So we’re hopeful we’ve got this far, and I think we’re confident we’re going to get there. We’re going to have quite a lot of events. So this is the first of the evening events that we’ve done, and we’re quite pleased with the way that the acoustics are and the seating and everything.

So we’re going to have some other events, including Ian Bone, who’s a retired neurosurgeon. He’s going to talk about Macewen. And we’re also going to have a nice lady coming and talking about the medicinal benefits of honey in November, on the day before our honey sale in November. So she’s Nicky Bitas from Napier’s, and she’s going to come and give us a talk. So we’re going to extend by having events, not just having people coming into the museum.

And then obviously, the bees, they’re really exciting. In terms of the design of our logo, it was Graven Images. And Graven Images very kindly did the logo for free for us, a girl called Jillian. And our bee is at the centre with the medicinal plants surrounding the bee, because we felt we wanted the logo to look a bit more modern for the more junior members of the hospital, it would be more engaging with them rather than just sticking with the original GRI logo, which is quite old-fashioned now. So initially, we had two beehives, and they were owned by two professional beekeepers, and then a third beekeeper came on board, who is Dean Parker, who is the chef at Celentanos, the restaurant on Cathedral House.

Niall Murphy:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Which has a fantastic reputation.

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

Yes. So he was delighted to have his hive here. So if you go and have a meal there, you might get GRI honey on the menu. And then the fourth hive is Kate and I. We’ve just become beekeepers by doing our course at the Ayrshire Beekeeper Society this summer. So yeah, so we’ll have a nice event with lots and lots of honey for sale in November. And I’m going to let Kate talk about the walk, because this is our big grand plan for extending the museum offering.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Yeah. So we want to create what we’re calling the Royal Walk: A Stroll Through Health, Heritage, and Honey. So essentially, you would come out of the museum… So it’s a small space and we plan, as Hilary’s said, to have rotating exhibitions and things. But we’d like to have a more permanent, larger exhibit. So we come out the front, onto Cathedral Precinct, and at the side we’ve got two reasonably sized areas that we’re going to transform into medicinal herbs and plants, and have herb gardens.

We’ve had a bit of input as mentioned from Lisa at Botanics. So she’s head of the horticulture course there, and she’s been really helpful. Our queen’s green canopy tree is going to go at the front there for everybody to see. And we’re going to have some benches and things where people can sit. So you’ll come out, and you’ll turn left, and you’ll go down, start with the cathedral on your right-hand side, and you’ll go around, come up beside our bees, which are, I guess, this way, so diagonal from here, our four hives. You can see them, but you can’t get in. Don’t want anybody to get stung. So you’ll get to see our bees at work.

And then you’ll come up this side of the old chicken run, so you remember the conservatory. So we’re going to call that Rebecca Strong Alley. And you’ll then be able to go around the back of the hospital, where you have other areas that we’ll do with probably a wildflower meadow, other trees, medicinal plants, et cetera, come out onto Wishart Street, go along past the Necropolis. There’s lots of incumbents in the necropolis who have links to the Royal Infirmary.

So what we’ll do with this walk, which will finish back in Cathedral Precinct, is we’ll have plaques. So talking about the history of nursing, probably, initially. Because there’s a lot to say about the history of nursing. We’ve only touched on a little bit of it. So starting off with that, then attribute to the North Parish Washing Green Society. So that was essentially a charity that’s still in existence today. You can become a lifelong member for 50 pounds. And they essentially give money to people in need.

And they had a washing green where people who could come and do their washing. So that was just adjacent to where we are just now. So they’ve been in to see us, and they would like to commission a big plaque, so we’re going to have that as part of our walk. We’ll have information about the herbs and information about the flowers and things on the way around. We’re hoping to have an orchard. We’re hoping that we’ll be able to have some plum trees, some apple trees, and maybe we’ll expand from honey to chutney and other things, cider.

Niall Murphy:

Would Rebecca Strong approve of that?

Dr. Kate Stevens:

I’m sure she would. I’m sure she would. And then we’re also going to mark out with step counts, so people know roughly how many steps they’ve done to try and promote… I guess one of the things, not only for the staff, but for the city, it’s nice to have somewhere where you can go, you can learn a little bit about the hospital, also you can get the physical activity, and it’s not strenuous, and have a wander around. And outside the Necropolis, we’ll have information about the people who are linked with hospital. That’s our plan.

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

And then it comes straight back into Cathedral Precinct. And then the final link is with Peter Lowe, who’s the founder of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. His tombstone is just over at the side of the cathedral. So it’s a nice link that brings everyone back in.

Niall Murphy:

Great. Right. Sounds wonderful. Okay. Right. Bringing you to our final question at least, which won’t be the final question, but this is a totally loaded question, and we ask this of all our guests. So what is your favourite building in Glasgow, and what would it tell you if it’s walls could talk?

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

I’ll go first, since you’ve just done a lot of talking there. So yeah, I think my favourite building is probably the Kibble Palace. And so, I live close to the Botanic Gardens, and I’ve always loved the Kibble Palace because it’s somewhere that you go in and you’re in a different world, with the temperature, the smells of the beautiful ancient ferns.

And I think what amazed me was that the Kibble Palace was a privately owned glasshouse for Sir John Kibble. And when he wanted to give it to Glasgow, I think it was due to go to Queen’s Park, but he had some argument with the town council and-

Niall Murphy:

They knocked him back.

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

So we got it over in the West End and the Botanic Gardens. And so it remained there obviously until it went down south to get repaired in 2004. So it’s been on a couple of journeys. It came up to the Botanic Gardens from Loch Long, from John Kibble’s Garden on a barge. And then it went down south as a construction to get redone over the two years, with multimillion pound cost.

And I think it’s like everything. You don’t really realise you miss something until it’s not there. And I remember the couple of years the Kibble Palace was away, I kind of thought, “Oh, I can’t wait for it to come back.” I had nice memories of the Orchid Fair. I would go with my parents. My dad was into orchids. And that was a really nice memory, going in with friends and walking our dog in the park. And it’s just always a building that I associate with really happy memories.

Niall Murphy:

Right. Kate?

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Okay, so I’m going to tell you my favourite building is a building that’s not there anymore, but just bear with me. So I think my favourite building, it’s quite a difficult question, but I think it’s a Western Infirmary. So obviously the Western Infirmary is now razed to the ground. So a bit like the Glasgow-Edinburgh thing, you were either a Western doctor or a Royal doctor. So I spent most of my former years in the Western. I was very much Western through and through. I’m not now. Now I’m Royal through and through.

So I spent many years there, and I’ve got lots of fun memories of going between the old buildings and the new buildings, along this filthy corridor with all manner of creatures in it that shouldn’t be there, ghosts. Terrified as a responsible doctor, running through the corridor, because I was scared that something was going to get me.

And then there are bits of it that are still there. So there’s the Alexander Elder Chapel, so built in 1925 is listed. And I’m not particularly religious, but often you’d have these terribly busy night shifts. A&E would be over in the new building. And we quite often sit for 10 or 15 minutes in the chapel. So the chapel’s beautiful. It has beautiful stained-glass windows, and it was built as a tribute to nursing and medical staff that lost their life during the war. So I’ve got lots of fond memories of there.

And I think if it’s walls could talk to you, I think there’s lots of things that the Western Infirmary would have to tell you. But one thing I like, which links in with here, so why Macewen moved to the Western after he worked here, we already alluded to him maybe being a slightly difficult character with that ambulance man. So in the Western, he wanted to operate, and there was no space in the operating theatre. So nowadays, surgeons might stamp their feet and go off, and sulk, and have a coffee. But not William Macewen. William Macewen got out his drapes, got his table, set up an operating theatre in the corridor, and just carried on. So I’m sure that there are lots of tales like that, that the Western could tell you.

Niall Murphy:

Thank you very much. Okay. Right. We’re going to open it up to the floor, and if there are any questions from the floor. So this is a special edition, now’s your chance.

Audience Member:

I worked here a few years back as a junior doctor and there was always rumours that there are tunnels from the sub-basement leading to all sorts of bits of the city, including George Square and even further afield. Is that remotely true or is that junior doctor rumour?

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

I don’t know. I’ve heard these rumours as well, including the one where there’s a tunnel and a pipe going down to the dry gate that pumps beer into the doctor’s dining room in the seventh floor. I’m sure that’s not true. I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody else in the audience would know anything about that.

Niall Murphy:

There is a tunnel between the city chambers and it goes somewhere into George Square. But the shelf that takes you out of it is blocked, so nobody knows where it goes to in George Square. So we had a theory when we were looking at this, I did a conservation management plan for George Square, that it might take you into the Cenotaph, and the Cenotaph was in fact a mini rocket ship that was the escape route out if the city chambers were ever besieged or anything, but possibly not. Any other questions?

Audience Member:

During the pandemic, having the big open Nightingale wards wasn’t very conducive to preventing COVID spreading. There was a lot of chat at the time about this building was not fit for purpose and they’re going to rebuild the hospital on the same site. Are there any active plans to do that? Or is that not the case anymore?

Dr. Kate Stevens:

So I think there are plans to modernise the Royal Infirmary. I don’t know that there’s plans to rebuild on this site. Like we said earlier, they’ll have to take Hilary, and Morven, and John, and I out to do that. So I think there are modernization plans. But as far as we know, I don’t think there are plans to rebuild exactly here.

Audience Member Q:

Thank you very much. That was an absolutely fascinating series of talks. I have two quick questions. You painted a very compelling picture of the infirmary as a place where people were free to be radical and experiment, and brought about really significant innovations in medicine. How easy was it for women doctors to come through the infirmary? Was the infirmary place that was early in opening its doors to young women who wanted to be doctors? And then quickly, my second question was, you spoke about how the original infirmary was funded, its opening. How was it funded through the 19th century? I mean, I gather it wouldn’t have got state funding. Was it a charitable? Was it in receipt of city charity?

Dr. Hilary Wilson:

I think in relation to your first question, there is a nice piece of work that one of our committee members, Rosa McMillan, did about the pathology department at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. And they were very forward-thinking about employing women pathologists. And she’s done a nice thesis on that work. So yes, certainly in pathology, they were very supportive of women in that department, far more than any other hospital at that time. So Morven has a-

Morven:

Hi, I’m Morven. I’m one of the trustees. So the first woman resident in the Royal was in 1899. And actually, the permanent resident was Ann Louise McElroy, who’s quite a famous obstetrician. So the first female resident, that was before quite a lot of other places. We’re doing a bit of work at other early women pioneers as well, so watch this space. There might have been other expressions in other people.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

She was the first woman professor in the UK as well.

Morven:

Yeah. Yeah.

Niall Murphy:

Fascinating.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

She worked with Munro Kerr, that I mentioned. And then, so your second question, subscriptions. So until it became the NHS, it was subscriptions. So individuals and companies would subscribe. And so, we have a subscription receipt actually on the wall over there from one of the mineries, I think. And so basically, your company would subscribe, and if your company was a subscriber, then you could make use of what was on offer in the Royal Infirmary.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah. That was one of the things that I felt quite emotional about with the Victorian Infirmary, because it had been built by subscriptions from people right across the south side of the city, and therefore it belonged to the people from the south side of the city. And I felt we should have some say in what happened to it, and it just didn’t really work out like that unfortunately.

Dr. Kate Stevens:

Yeah. I kind of wish that we’d got into all of this before so we could have gone and had a look at the Western and the Victorian, tried to least salvage some things.

Niall Murphy:

Yes. I think it depends on the NHS board and how they handle it. So Edinburgh seems to be a lot more progressive than Glasgow does. But I’m hoping that Glasgow and Clyde will learn from those things and will be more thoughtful about how it handles some of these fantastic estates. We’ll see.

Morven:

There’s some nice plaques round about the Royals, as well, from some benefactors, if you ever get into the Royal to have a look. But David Dale, he was a famous person from New Lanark, sort of a philanthropist. He was involved in the Royal initially, for several years, until his death. So he actually helped set up the funding. He was chair of the funding committee for the Royal Infirmary initially, in the 1780s and onwards. But you should have a look. There’s some quite interesting plaques about how things were funded, and they funded beds, and they funded wards, and different things as well.

Niall Murphy:

Any other questions? Now’s your chance. Okay, well, shall we wrap this up then? Well, Hilary, Kate, thank you very much for your time. Absolute pleasure talking to you both. And I wish you every success with the museum, and I hope it goes from strength to strength, particularly with your walk, which sounds fascinating. And I hope everybody joins me in thanking both Hilary and Kate for their time this evening.

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. The podcast is kindly sponsored by the National Trust for Scotland and supported by Tonics.

Niall Murphy:

Hello everyone. I’m Niall Murphy, and welcome to If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk, a podcast by Glasgow City Heritage Trust about the stories and relationships between historic buildings and people in Glasgow. Some stories are harder to find than others. History can be revealed or concealed in buildings and street names. What happens to the collective memory of the city when buildings are removed and street names changed? A sense of loss has become a recurring theme in conversations on this podcast. Demolition and displacement have been part of Glasgow’s story for considerably more than a hundred years. So in this episode, we explore the invisible history of a shifting landscape. In the rapidly changing city of the 21st Century, there are few clues to Glasgow’s radical past, no maps to show where battles were fought and sometimes won in the working class struggle for decent housing at a fair rent. That struggle has never ended, as recent headlines have reminded us.

History seems to be repeating more than 100 years after Mary Barbour’s Rent Strike victory. Tragically, we seem to have learned little from Cathy McCormack’s tireless fight against dampness and mould in 1980s Easterhouse. So are we destined to keep making the same mistakes? With housing emergencies growing in every city, a new project aims to share and learn from Glasgow’s proud campaigning history. So we are delighted to welcome today’s guest, Joey Simons, co-founder of the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive, which aims to record, share, and discuss the past and present of working class organising in the city.
Joey is a member of the National Committee of Living Rent, Scotland’s Tenants’ Union, which has more than a thousand active members. He’s also an artist and writer working on projects with the Centre for Contemporary Art, the CCA, Platform, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, the Edwin Morgan Trust and The Travelling Gallery.

He uses words to good and often creatively provocative effect. In January this year, Glasgow City Heritage Trust hosted Joey’s talk, Gizza Hoose, which looked at how housing struggles have shaped and been shaped by Glasgow’s ever-changing housing stock. It was a stimulating hour and it began with thoughts on how city design, the layout of streets and buildings might enable or deter riots. And ended with a poem by Edwin Morgan, casting a critical eye on Scotland’s favourite bard. And this was on Burns Night. So we’re now looking forward to another stimulating discussion with you, Joey. And perhaps we might start by funding out what led you to co-found the archive, and this is kind of coming from your Burns Night talk, which revealed quite a depth of housing history. So can you tell us a bit more about yourself and how you became involved in the Glasgow housing struggle?

Joey Simons:

Sure. I’ve mainly had a background in political organising and campaigning in Glasgow since a pretty young age. And that was actually 20th anniversary of the big marches against the Iraq War. And that was maybe the start of my involvement in political organising, campaigning in Glasgow. But especially over the last five years or so, I’ve been heavily involved in tenant and housing organisations through Living Rent, which is our tenant’s union organising against evictions and for rent controls, public housing across Scotland. And I was involved in helping to set up the first branch of the union in Glasgow, and Living Rent is involved in a day-to-day activism and campaigning. But I’ve always had an interest in Glasgow’s history, and working class history in particular. And through Living Rent, is trying to connect those past struggles and dig into a bit of the history and the tradition of different housing movements to provide more context to the day-to-day organising we were doing in the union.

So through a couple of personal projects myself as well, and it was seeing how history was easily lost and getting buried in amidst Glasgow’s constant redevelopment. So one thing I was involved in was up in Easterhouse through the Art Centre platform, looking at the life and work of Freddy Anderson, who was an Irish poet and playwright and writer and tenant activist in Garthamlock. He moved to Glasgow after the war. And I first came across his name basically an event around radical theatre in Scotland. So looking at the work of Glasgow Unity Theatre and 7:84, someone mentioned, “Yeah, this guy Freddy Anderson, he’d written a play about John Maclean,” the great revolutionary organiser in Clydeside around the time of the First World War. I was just quite amazed that I hadn’t heard of this guy, Freddy Anderson, at all, despite all my interests, despite thinking I’d read everything around this kind of thing.
So I started digging into him in the archives in The Mitchell Library, then just meeting people in libraries and at funerals and at buses and mentioning Freddy’s name and people giving me their own archives and their own stories, and eventually republishing some of Freddy’s work in a collection called Let Us Act for Ourselves. And it was really interesting in the context, Easterhouse, this whole period of radical culture and political organising in the scheme from the 1960s right up until the 1990s was basically not part of any public narrative. Now there’s major regeneration, redevelopment happening in Easterhouse, but the story of people’s own fight for what they fought for across the decades is not part of this narrative of what the future of the scheme is going to be.

So now through different personal projects around aspects of working class history, and through my involvement in Living Rent as well, I just started to see how important it was to try to collate some of the elements of Glasgow’s housing struggle history because I’m not an academic, it’s really just things I’ve learned through other people, other discussions, and that history is out there, but it’s quite hard to find. So I was in the Mitchell Library, I’ve been going up to Glasgow Uni Library and you get a special pass. So you’re just trying to find these out-of-date or out-of-print books and just thinking how can we share this history? What is the form in which that information can be more easily accessible?

And during the first lockdown, I was working as a tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association, and I had a chance to design and deliver an online course on Glasgow’s housing history. So over the course of eight weeks, different Living Rent members kind of ran this course looking at eight different post-war housing struggles in Glasgow. They’re finding and sharing resources and linking it into the kind of day-to-day campaigning we’re also involved in. So through that course, through discussions with different housing scholars in Glasgow, like Neil Grey and Valerie Wright, and also with other archives. So for example, the Mayday Rooms Archive in London and the Spirit of Revolt Archive here in Glasgow. Just really had the idea to try to create a space online initially at least where all these different housing histories could be shared, could be critiqued and put into wider historical context. And in a way, kind of challenge some of the narratives of that history that are current at the moment.

So one thing we used in the course was a Glasgow City Council have an official illustrated timeline of Glasgow housing change. And that whole history is just told basically through a series of legislative acts. There’s a brief nod to Mary Barbour in 1915, but the story kind of ends in housing stock transfer, the elimination of Glasgow’s Council housing stock, the rise of private ownership. And yes, we really wanted to challenge that narrative. And even there’s a Shelter Scotland as well have a really useful resource on Scotland’s housing crisis over the past 150 years. But even in that approach, tenants and political movements that fought for good housing over the years are quite marginal to that story or appear mainly as victims rather than as agents of change.

So all of those parts of this story are true and part of it in terms of the legislation, in terms of that constant crisis. But there’s also this entire hidden history of tenant movements and housing struggles that have shaped Glasgow as a city and continue to do so. And I’ve also shaped it in their defeat at various times or their marginalisation. So yeah, I think the idea was just to provide a counterpoint to that, to connect what we’re doing today in Living Rent to past struggles, and at least to recover and share that history and then people can decide in a way what to do with that and add to it. So I guess it’s come from lots of different angles, but yeah, I think it’s just fundamentally though, it’s just always an interest in Glasgow and walking around the city and trying to figure out what the hell is actually happening here.

Niall Murphy:
How it all came about. Yeah, that’s what fascinates me about Glasgow too. Yeah, digging into all those hidden aspects of Glasgow’s history. And it’s teasing out those stories because they’ve been edited out of the official narrative, but they actually are part of our total history, and we need to somehow figure a way to feather them all back in again so history can be properly told from all perspectives. So, fascinating stuff. Okay. Your archive doesn’t occupy a physical space as yet, but the website does open the way to parts of the city that have disappeared or changed beyond recognition. So can you tell us about the aims of the archive? Who is it for, how it’ll be used and developed over time?

Joey Simons:

Yeah, so I guess starting out we had a few different aims for the archive, and definitely is a project to develop over the years. So one was just this space where tenants and community groups and housing organisers can more easily access the information, the text, the histories that do exist about Glasgow’s tradition of radical tenant struggles. So not necessarily even finding new primary documents or creating this physical archive, but to centralise the information that does currently exist, but which has spread across a number of physical archives, and it’s quite difficult to access. So there’s not one book, for example, that you could go get out at the Mitchell Library on the history of Glasgow’s tenant movement.
So one aim is just to centralise and to try and collate the information that exists.

Another aim is to place the housing struggles of today in that wider historical context to draw lessons from a hundred years of campaigning, demonstrations and occupations and rent strikes, to look at the tactical and strategic solutions that tenants have come up with in different situations over the past century and look to apply them or learn from them where possible in today’s struggles. And another one was just to also provide a space for activists and union organisers, historians, scholars to contribute documents and photographs and critical reflections on housing history to provide a space for people to write up contributions, to share things they’ve written before. And almost a space as a little training ground where we can get better at doing these kinds of things.

And the last one was to also start to document and archive the history of Living Rent itself is a tenants union. So over the past five years it’s gone through a huge number of changes and it’s very quickly that that story can get lost, especially there’s not a lot of time in the day-to-day organising to sit down and record and to collate documents and reflections. So those were some of the main aims from setting out. But started as a project with myself and Frances Lingard who designed the website with support from the WEA and the Lipman-Miliband Trust. But we’ve done a lot of different events, we’ve spoken with a lot of different groups, and we’re looking this year to establish a kind of collective that can take hold of the archive and decide how we want to resource it, and what we want to do with it going forward.

Niall Murphy:

Sure. It’s really interesting because it’s quite topical for me, I’m, with one of my other hats on, I’m the chair of Govanhill Baths Building Preservation Trust. But I was, for a very brief period, the chair of the Govanhill Baths Community Trust, and they have their archive, which is all to do with working class struggles as well and is headed up by archivist, Paula Larkin, I think is absolutely core to that project. And the fact that this all does need to be properly documented; what happened in Glasgow. It’s this fascinating history and it’s got to be put down somewhere. So that to me is absolutely central to what we’ve been doing at Govanhill Baths.

Joey Simons:

Aye, aye. And I think with Paula, yeah, look, I’ve known Paula for a long time and she’s been kind of invaluable as a resource support for the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive. So she led a great workshop for us at the Deep End space. We’re not trained archivists or professionals, we’re coming at this from a different angle. So Paula gave a great workshop on digitisation, on scanning, on record keeping that we did. And recently I had two other people involved in the Housing Struggle Archive went a long to an oral history training session that Paula and the Community Archives Heritage Group put on. So I think also that idea of gaining these skills and sharing these skills so people are able to engage in oral history.

Niall Murphy:

Document the history.

Joey Simons:

Document things properly, and just to make that a public resource rather than just kind of something in the hands of specialist only. So Paula’s been invaluable.

Niall Murphy:

She’s a great mentor. I have tonnes of time for Paula. I really like her.

Joey Simons:

Aye, because another thing that they had their 20th anniversary, the Govanhill Baths occupation.

Niall Murphy:

Yes.

Joey Simons:

So they had that Occupy Occupy Occupy event. So we spoke at that on post-war squatting movement in Glasgow. So in 1946 to 1948, the mass occupation of former Army camps, and then the occupation of abandoned mansions and buildings, press offices in Glasgow after the war, which again, is just a bit, understand your own history. I knew a bit about the Scottish movement in London, for example.

Niall Murphy:

But not up here.

Joey Simons:

Famous example of yeah, Kensington Mansions being squatted. But the Glasgow side of it, just the main thing I’ve read about it was in this unpublished PhD by Charles Johnson. So we were able to examine some of that history to share it at the Occupy Conference, and then it was turned into a part of this graphic novel that came out from the conference. So it was really amazing, it was a comic book artist took each of the presentations at the Occupy Conference and transformed it into this 50-page comic book.

Niall Murphy:

I didn’t know about this, this is fascinating.

Joey Simons:

Really amazing. So you can get it, I think, through the Govanhill Baths Community Trust website.

Niall Murphy:

Okay.

Joey Simons:

So it was the Lee Jeans Occupation, like a Castlemilks Claimants Union, like this whole history of occupation. So yeah, we’ve been able to do things like that in terms of using the idea of the archive to speak about different aspects of housing history. But this question of a physical archive, documents, storage, record keeping, that’s a huge issue. We’re definitely not in a position to do that yet, but it’s more about building connections with existing archives and collections that relate to this history and finding a way to maybe share resources across existing archives to look at this one particular aspect around housing. So we’re trying to figure it out.

Niall Murphy:

All right. Well, turning back to housing then. And the next question is, much of Glasgow and how we live in Glasgow has been shaped by housing struggles, and yet for many of us, that’s a hidden history. And ironically, we seem to know more about all these radical campaigns during the past, such as Mary Barbour’s 1915 Rent Strike. And so can you bring us up to date in terms of all that housing struggle in the subsequent period? And how does the timeline run in the housing struggle archive?

Joey Simons:

Aye. It’s kind of a complex question.

Niall Murphy:

I know, sorry.

Joey Simons:

Trying to figure it out. So yeah, I guess one thing that we’ve looked at is, in particular, these post-war housing struggles from 1945 onwards and within that framework, urban industrial change in Glasgow. So we’ve kind of got our timeline that we’re building that we’ve looked at a different number of, so for example, 1946 to 1948, the squatting movement that took place in Glasgow after the war in that period, you had a hundred thousand people homeless, a hundred thousand people on corporation waiting lists. And this mass squatting movement led by different tenants associations, elements of the Communist Party, but also just homeless families themselves in Govan and Gorbals in the East End was desperate for anywhere to live.

And again, that framing, sometimes it’s scene in a bit like this Ken Loach The Spirit of ’45 narrative where the Labour government gets elected and suddenly this utopia emerges from on high this mass programme of council house building. But when you look at it, there was constant struggle from below to put pressure on the Labour government on the state and the local state in Glasgow to push forward where housing demolition, some demolition, and were new house building. There was different conflicts. The Labour government was criminalising the squatting movement. So it was kind of different dynamics at play that maybe even within left wing history it’s important to look at again.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, it’s a really complex period then. Trying to understand and tease it apart is quite complex too, because you’ve also got the progressives in the council who were actually the conservative party and more right wing elements and who came together and they were really pro things like the high rises in the city. So it’s quite fascinating to see that as well. Everybody seemed to be focused on housing numbers and really generating the housing numbers, but not actually giving much consideration to the shape and form of the city that they’re actually developing.

Joey Simons:

Yeah, and I think in a way that even the progressives and conservative forces were forced to have that concern with housing construction because of the pressure, just the basic material public health pressure, because the situation was so appalling, but also because the working class movement had a clear set of demands on housing that couldn’t be ignored by no matter who was in power in the local state. But yeah, so that’s kind of the next section, after that squatting movement’s high point, maybe 1946, 1948, the progressives getting power in Glasgow Corporation in 1950, 1951. And that huge campaign around the proposed selloff of council houses at the Merrylee scheme in the southside of Glasgow. So that’s one of the kind historical struggles we’ve looked most at is this kind of huge coalition of mainly, well really led initially, by building workers, by the workers who were building these council houses themselves.

Also had tenant associations with women organising and also with the wider industrial labour movement in Glasgow that came together to demand that there was no selloff of this new high amenity scheme that had been built in Merrylee. So that’s quite an amazing period in a sense. I think one aspect that’s most interesting is you had the building workers themselves really feeling that they had built these houses, that the houses belonged to the people of Glasgow. And this context of mass squalor and homelessness and overcrowding that was still the situation six years after the end of war. That the idea that these council houses were going to be sold off for private rent provoked this fury in the movement in Glasgow.
And there’s amazing scenes described at the first demonstration in George Square where… There’s accounts in Charles Johnson’s PhD of people talking about it being like storming the Bastille, that women, they broke into the city chambers, that they were like flinging dead rats at the Councillors as they were talking about selling off the houses, and this huge movement that developed across the year, that was eventually victorious, the Labour council got voted back in.

And they were forced basically to be voted back in, in this single issue, refusing to sell off the houses. So two of the leading figures in that movement were Ned Donaldson and Les Forster, who were construction workers and communists, who had a long history of organising in Glasgow, and were central to that campaign. So yeah, we were involved recently in helping to republish the pamphlet that Ned Donaldson had put together, partly at the time, and also in the 1990s through our project Transmission and Ned Donaldson’s daughter, Annie Donaldson, is a professor at Strathclyde Uni.

Niall Murphy:

Right.

Joey Simons:

We worked very hard to basically, and the Scottish Labour History Society to republish Ned Donaldson’s account of the Merrylee Housing scandal in 1951 with new contextual essays by Valerie Wright and also James Kelman.

Niall Murphy:

Okay.

Joey Simons:

Who knew Ned and Les and looked at the other tradition, communist tradition in Glasgow.

Niall Murphy:

Yes.

Joey Simons:

So that’s been really, that’s the thing that’s really exciting to be involved in, that we’re republishing these pamphlets, the proceeds of the sales of that publication all go to Living Rent. So yeah, that’s been a really good project. You can get copies of it, if you get in touch. It’s still there.

Niall Murphy:

I’d be very interested to read that. I mean, because that brings us onto to my next question, which you’re talking about this incredibly radical time. What you’re describing basically another riot in front of the city chambers, completely fascinating.

But does that happen now? Has Glasgow become less radical as a city and what happens to cities when communities are displaced, street names change? It’s that poverty which used to be really obvious and clear has become more hidden as it’s been moved to the other areas of the city that it’s been dispersed into parts of the city that are more remote.

So how do you handle stuff like that? And looking at your 2022 exhibition in Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery, which you called The Fearful Part of it was the Absence, which is a really fascinating title. What does it tell us about Glasgow’s housing struggle and perhaps its relationship to the built environment?

Joey Simons:

Yeah, so I mean, I think just to go back briefly to that timeline, housing struggles. So I think if you look at that campaign around the house in Merrylee in 1950 1951, ’52, in a way that’s the last moment of that particular coalition that had existed in Glasgow since the early 20th Century. In terms that around this housing struggle, you had mass involvement in building workers, you had the threats of industrial action, you had engineering yards. So for example, the workers at Weir’s Yard and Cathcart threatened to withdraw their labour if that the sale went ahead. This huge list of working class organisations and industrial trade unions and workers committee. So in a way that never happened again in Glasgow. Potentially a little bit around the Poll Tax, but subsequent housing struggles from the late 1950s onwards are in a way much more localised, much smaller scale in a way, and really took place without this wider support of a labour movement or the threat of industrial action.

So the rent strikes of tenants in the Hutchesontown E flats in the Gorbals in the 1970s and 1980s, the campaign of the residents in Easterhouse around damp mould in the ’80s and ’90s, like Jeanette McGinn and the campaign for Rehouse and the Family and Castle Milk the nineties. So kind of incredible stuff going on, but in a completely different context than say 1915 or even 1950, where you have this huge working class labour movement that provides this possible background threat of industrial action to force action, house and different dynamics there. Yeah, I think it’s not like, it’s difficult to say as a question Glasgow becoming less radical. I mean, you’ve got huge processes change across the 20th Century, 21st Century that are affecting every city in every country in Britain and in Europe in terms the decline of Labour and Socialist movements, and I guess in Glasgow as well, through the extremes of de-industrialization urban redevelopment, that the basis of the communities that had fought these struggles is constantly been broken up, is resources attacked and it’s history taken away.

So I think it’s, yeah, it’s difficult whether a place has become less radical. I mean, yeah, I don’t know. It’s a difficult way of framing it maybe. But I think that the thing I was looking at for collective in that quote around the fearful part of it was the absence came from Lord Coburn, Henry Coburn observed in the huge demonstrations around the Reform Act in the 1830s and being on this demonstration in Glasgow and being frightened in a way of the silence. The fear full thing was the absence of riot and this feeling that any moment the shocky electricity could run through and explode. But the scary thing was that it didn’t, and I took that idea to look at aspects of the history of rioting in Glasgow. And in particular the riots that didn’t happen. So for example, in the 1980s, these explosions in Brixton and Handsworth and tox in different cities down south didn’t happen up here.

It didn’t happen up here. And there’s an amazing documentary called Whose Town Is It Anyway? Easterhouse: People and Power from 1984 and includes interviews with a journalist from the Voice from the local community paper up in Easterhouse. And the guy talks about these police from London and from Belfast all coming to Easterhouse after these explosions in the mid 1980s to go, why didn’t that happen in Easterhouse? What can the state learn? Why was it successfully avoided here? These riots and this resistance? And the journalist says that the cops were obsessed with race, with this racist explanation saying that there was no black people in Easterhouse at that’s how there was no riots. And he says they toured the scheme and they kept coming back. They’d kept trying to get a local community to take this standpoint. But the journalist said that the reason there was no riots in Easterhouse was because there was not a single bit of private property and the whole scheme that people could riot from one end of Easterhouse to other, and it wouldn’t be called a riot because there was nothing of value in terms of private value to destroy.

And that the only thing people could attack in a way was themselves. So it’s interesting because these are even further, back in the 19th century as well, there was attempts to portray the docile Scottish worker as different from rebellious Irish workers that had come into the city. And skipping forward to 2011 again when there was riots in London and Manchester across England, that same thing didn’t happen in Glasgow. And again, you had these journalists, credible article on the Daily Record where they brought on these different academics and journalists and officials to opine about why the riots didn’t reach Glasgow. And again, as had one academic, Sterling was saying, yeah, because there was fewer ethnic minorities in Glasgow and Scotland. That’s why the riots didn’t, I mean, this is in 2011 saying that.

Niall Murphy:

Sorry, I’m bobbing my head in astonishment.

Joey Simons:

It’s incredible in this way saying that they’re in England, they patronise and condescend ethnic minorities, they’re not strict enough with, just this incredible, openly racist explanation.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, yeah, quite.

Joey Simons:

But there was other interesting ones though. One explanation was that the miner strike was not as serious in Scotland as in England. So this rupture between police and communities taking place during the miner strike was somehow less bad.

Niall Murphy:

I don’t see how that’s related.

Joey Simons:

So the other thing was saying that, yeah, people in Scotland somehow had a more meaningful connection to their own history compared to England. That also the urban structured was different as well because, and Glasgow and Edinburgh, the rich and poor didn’t live cheek by jowl. So somehow this meant that riots were less likely to occur. And what’s the stuff about the rain that, because it was raining up here, that that was the main explanation why there was no riots. And again, looking back in the 1820, you had this, the Scottish insurrection, this uprising in weavers and other workers across the west of Scotland that took place in 1820. And there’s an amazing account of one of the Dragoons that was involved in suppressing the uprising. And he talks about how in a way, all the military preparations and repression was far less important than the fact that it just rained the heavens. It down poured that day in 1820.

Niall Murphy:

And stopped people gathering.

Joey Simons:

So it’s just these incredible cycles of repression, but also how that history is seen and also in a way that those absences have also shaped the city. Because obviously, in the wake of it, Brixton, you had the Scarman report, you had these major investigations about what was happening in England’s inner cities that had led to these riots and explosions. And a way, because that didn’t happen in Glasgow schemes in Edinburgh. In a way it’s like everything’s fine in Scotland, we’re better than England, that there’s no reason to.

Niall Murphy:

But it doesn’t explain things like, I mean, going back to Mary Barbour’s strike, which is obviously the most well known one that starts in Glasgow. The rent strike starts in Glasgow and it spreads nationwide from Glasgow, was the method of how they organised that strike in Glasgow is completely fascinating. But how would you do the same thing in some of the English towns and cities where you had a completely different architectural form, you’ve not got the tenement, which down in England is associated with poverty, whereas in Scotland it covers all classes. So you don’t have the same structure of say eight different families living together collectively in a close and having the same collective responses to the pressures that they were under.

Joey Simons:

Yeah. Although I guess it’s like, yeah, people find a way no matter what and that, yeah, like you say, it is the specific forms of house and struggle are to a greater or a lesser extent going to be shaped by that physical environment. So in that account of the 1915 Rent Strikes Joseph Mellon talks about that how this enforced collectivity of the tenement was crucial to how the former, the 1915 rent strike took place in terms of tenement committees, kitchen meetings, back court meetings, and you had that physical setup in a way. And that this idea yet in an industrial strike, you’re locked out, but in a rent strike, you’re in the fortification. The women held the houses against the factors, and there’s the famous accounts of the factors being attacked with peas and soup meal and everything when they come and trying to evict people. But I think also, oh sorry.

Niall Murphy:

No, no. I was just wondering could it be the after, I mean the point where you’ve got your rights in the 1950s and then beyond that from the 1960s onwards, you get the comprehensive development area policies and the tenement as a structure that helps structure working class communities is smashed and you get a whole load of working class neighbourhoods that are cleared, completely cleared, obliterated as a consequence of that. And the soft networks you need in all of those communities to tie the society together is obliterated as part of that. And people are scattered to the four winds across the city and end up randomly in neighbourhoods on the external edges of the city. So those ties are all massively weakened by that. Could it be something to do with that?

Joey Simons:

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that, and it’s this debate to what extent with these developments and post for some clearance and urban regeneration and comprehensive redevelopment.

Niall Murphy:

It’s much more extreme in Glasgow than it is in any of English cities.

Joey Simons:

And in a way that also though the housing situation in Glasgow is more extreme, so forth, and that Charles Johnson’s PhD does this amazing little table about the percentage and different Scottish and English cities of people living in one room houses without internal bathroom. And the numbers are crazy. I mean, in Glasgow, the 50% of population living in one or two rooms in 1951.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, yeah, shocking.

Joey Simons:

The next equivalent city Leeds or Manchester is about 3%, 4%. So the levels of overcrowding are just incomparable to anywhere else in Britain. But I think it’s why it’s interesting to go back that it’s like we look back now and I think it’s a bit this Romanticisation about could we have saved the tenements and this nostalgia that is a bit taken out of context. And if you look at Harry McShane and other leading figures in the Clydeside workers movement, they were constantly saying that slum clearance wasn’t proceeding fast enough. The new scheme building wasn’t proceeding fast enough. So yeah, I think that emergency.

Niall Murphy:

The pressures from both sides. I’m really fascinated by this because it was one of the things we touched on one of the previous podcast, and I was speaking to Reverend Dr. John Harvey of the Gorbal’s Group, who’s in his late ’80s, but still as sharp as a tack and still completely open-minded and what to know about stuff. And it was about his experience in the globals at the time and how they sent delegations to the council and to say, please don’t destroy the area. Don’t do it. It was the first of the comprehensive development areas. Don’t destroy the area. What it needs is reform. What it needs is investment in the buildings. It needs infrastructure, but you don’t necessarily have to bulldoze the entire thing and scatter the community while you’re at it. And they just weren’t listened to. And for me it was really fascinating to discover that the city had sent delegations when they were looking at the Motorway network and recreating it.

So the white heat technology stuff, great leap forward for Glasgow is that you completely re-geared this Victorian Edwardian city to something that’s fit for the future. And this great leap forward is going to solve all of our problems because we’re going to shift the emphasis onto to the car rather than a walkable city. And they send these delegations to the States to look at it. And for me, that’s completely fascinating because you get people like you ever come across Dr Mindy Thompson Fullilove, in the States who’s she’s really interesting. So she writes on this as a neighbourhood in Pittsburgh, and funny enough, Glasgow sent a delegation to Pittsburgh to find out what they’re doing with their expressway there. And one of the expressway carved its way right through an African American neighbourhood, which was incredibly culturally interesting, really rich and vibrant African American neighbourhood, and completely destroys it, replaces it with this expressway and a huge conference centre.

And the community are scattered to the four winds. And she wrote this book in it called Root Shock. And it’s all to do with the impact on that community and how it destroys the integrity of the community. It completely undermines their spirit and it creates a sense of eunoia in the community that they’ve lost a sense of purpose because their surroundings have been completely destroyed. And you look at that and you look at what happened when they were creating the inner ring road or wanting to create the inner ring road in Glasgow. And I just look at it and I see all the parallels there. It was this community that people were embarrassed about because they thought reflected badly on Glasgow so it was the worst slum in Northern Europe. And it was like, right, okay, let’s not try and fix the problem. Let’s just obliterate it and or forget about it.

And it’s that that really, really disturbs me those parallels that what we’ve done, if you look at it now, you think, why would you have done something so incredibly racist? And it may be not racist here, but we’ve done the same thing in terms of class as of move. Yeah. We’ve wiped out a working class community that everyone was slightly ashamed of, and yet with some with a really interesting, fascinating culture.

Joey Simons:

Yeah. Because it’s interesting because there’s a Oscar Marzaroli film, Glasgow 1981 that was made in 1971, that’s this propaganda version for what you were talking about. No, its amazing, it’s a great film and the jazzy music and the car going over the Kingston Bridge and this brave future women are playing squash. And I don’t know, it’s like we’re all working in these high-tech industries, but there’s William McIlvanney, the so author of Laidlaw wrote their introduction to Marzaroli’s collection Shades of Grey, and yes, one of my favourite piece of writing about Glasgow. And he mentions, he talks about this slum clearance and the post-war redevelopment and the fact that changes had to be made, but they were made by people with all the imagination of soldier ants. Yeah. So these labour officials that should’ve known better, the idea was that working class aspirations stopped at an inside toilet and that nothing would be lost basically by unstitching and demoliting these communities that had built a way of life over centuries.

And that this malignant implication was no such thing as working class culture. So nothing would be lost by destroying things in this way. Yeah. I mean I think that is even more so the case now in the sense, at least for all the mistakes was made, that is the first time when you had this mass programme, a council house building overwhelming concern whether despite all the contradictions that everything that happened was a concern with how do you provide decent housing for the majority of people in the city for the first time that it’s going to be publicly owned and basically all right for people.

And I think what is happening now in the city is worse in a sense, is that the demolitions and social cleansing we’re seeing, and this highly unequal urban development is only aim is to privatise the remains of social housing to sell off land for private speculation and development to break apart what was achieved in the sense that the housing is not what it was in 1945, but we’re starting to see more and more those inequalities in our housing condition. And it’s an unaffordable rent.

Niall Murphy:

It’s depressing.

Joey Simons:

And overall development that is not like for what end, at least to that period in the ’50s and ’60s, they’re dealing with extreme crisis. And also that was the demands from the slum dwellers themself in a way was for clearance. Obviously there was battles fought over how that happened. But I think, yeah, that point though about you were saying about this delegation, I think is really interesting and that appears at certain points.

Niall Murphy:

It does. It does.

Joey Simons:

Glasgow corporations. Yeah. So when the talk that in the mid 19th century before the city improvement acts in the 1870s, this delegation from the corporation, go and visit Paris and Baron Von Haussmann.

Niall Murphy:

Yes. Yeah. Lord Provost Blackie and Dr. William Gardner and.

Joey Simons:

Exactly. Yeah.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah. John Carrick.

Joey Simons:

Yeah. Exactly. And there’s lots of debate about Haussmann and what that meant for Paris, and it’s militarization of the boulevards.

Niall Murphy:

Totally, there’s a great Èmile Zola novel on this La Curée, which is the Kill, and it’s all about the speculators making all the money on the back of what Haussmann’s doing because they’re able to get access to his plans and they’re buying up the land. I mean, unofficially get access to his plans and they’re buying up the land along these great avenues and just speculating and making an absolute killing on it. And it’s the cynicism of it. And I do wonder, I’d love to see a Glasgow equivalent of that if there were people doing the same thing in Glasgow, because I expect there probably were in various parts, that they knew that these things were coming not just in the 1860s and ’70s, but also in the 1950s onwards, that people knew and they were speculating.

Joey Simons:

And well, much more recently in that you were seeing, you’ve had Chris Leslie and Mitch Miller on, and obviously they were involved in different projects in the Commonwealth Games in 2014. They were held in Glasgow, and there was Neil Grey and Libby Porter and others ran the Glasgow Games monitor to try to take a bit of a critical eye on this mega event in the East end. And yeah, Chris documented the eviction of Margaret Jaconelli by hundreds of police from her flat. And the games monitor documented these, I don’t know, seemingly extremely corrupt land deals that were happening around the East End in terms of the council selling land very cheap around the East End to certain developers and speculators, who then sold it back to the council for tens of millions of pounds more. So I think you can see… But in a way, though, that is our standard model of regeneration. That’s nothing to be ashamed about.

Yeah, and this compulsory purchase order was used to evict Margaret Jaconelli, but not to take any of the land that was needed around the East End from developers. But I think to go back to your point about what was that kind of way of life and networks that were built up over hundred of years and then people being scattered to the four corners.

But then you look in Easterhouse of Castlemilk, Drumchapel, like people did, it took a long time, but in those environments, people did again, start to recreate the basis for collective organisation in the schemes and yeah, it’s interesting like WEA pamphlet, Castlemilk People’s History Group, the big flip, where yeah, just talk… People obviously didn’t, the only spaces where the churches initially, and also community gardens, for example, Castlemilk, that was the only place people could physically come and meet. But over the decades they built up the tenants associations, the residents associations, and then around The Poll Tax and the claimants unions and Easterhouse, you had the Easterhouse Summer Festival, you had rent strikes and big campaigning around the Rent Act in the 1970s. You had a whole radical culture, that people forged and forced the authorities to take stock in the extreme conditions that the houses were falling into.

Then, yeah, we had an event last night, the CCA with Living Rent and the Worker Stories project. We showed six different housing films in memory of Cathy McCormack, the Easterhouse activist. And Gary, her son, spoke really beautifully, just about her legacy and his experience as well of growing up in those conditions and the process of self-education that Cathy went through in order to gain the knowledge and the power she needed to fight for a radical change in the housing conditions and in Easthall, and the campaigning they did for these new sustainable houses there, a struggle that she was fighting until the very end of her life.

So, I think people did find a way to come together. And it’s interesting compared to 1915, there was a big, you were fighting in a city where 90% of housing stock is owned by private landlords. Seventies and eighties, “Your new landlord is Glasgow Housing Department.” But in a way, it doesn’t matter who the tenants, everyone is going to keep fighting for a basic dignified life.

So, I think we were coming back… So, on Saturday just there, we had an action. With Living Rent in Dennistoun, and one of our members, Pierette is living in a private let. She’s been there for 11 years with her four children. And I don’t know if you’ve seen any pictures, but the level of mould, the entire house covered in black mould, no heating upstairs until a few months ago, walls crumbing and collapsing, and Letting Agency blaming Pierette for breathing too much. “You’re taking the hot showers, you’re not opening the windows.” But this is exactly what Cathy McCormack and also the Dampness Campaign fought against this. The first thing is to take away this shame, this individualised shame where people are blamed for their own conditions. And those are-

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, totally. It’s straight back to kind of Victorian era Dickensian stuff. A warm home, it should be a human right.

Joey Simons:

Yeah, but I think in a way, what I was saying about this thing about things repeating, or lessons being learned, without the pressure of a housing movement, then the regression to the mean is for private interest, and even the state to exploit housing to the maximum degree to extract the most from it while investing the least.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah.

Joey Simons:

Yeah, so it was just interesting because we’ve done this stuff with House and Struggle archive. I sat down with one of the Living Rent organisers before the action. We were reading Cathy’s book, the Wheel of Butterfly. We were looking at the account of the rent strikes in the Hutchie E in the 1980s and the Dampness Monster.

Niall Murphy:

Yes.

Joey Simons:

The slogans they were using, the demands, and applying them quite directly to this situation we were in today. So yeah.

Niall Murphy:

It brings me onto my next question, which is all about what you’re doing, it’s about, in order to avoid falling back into those traps again, you need to know your history. And so it’s all about unearthing and then recording these hidden histories and bringing them back out into the light. And obviously lockdown has helped with some of that, because it’s given people the time and space to explore some of that. And during lockdown, and this is certainly something I did, was able to explore the streets of the surrounding area that I thought I knew and then was discovering all the stuff while I was doing it. And guided walks can reveal even more. But what you’re doing with the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive, is exploring this kind idea of a different kind of city walking tour. So can you tell us anything about that and how you’re going about doing that?

Joey Simons:

One thing I’ve been looking at is the work of Neil Grey, who’s a housing scholar and activist based in Glasgow. And yeah, it’s been evolved over, for example, in the Glasgow Stock Transfer campaign, and has done masses of work into the politics of regeneration and urban development in Glasgow, especially in the East End, around the Commonwealth Games and in the north side of the city as well.
So, one idea he’s taken, sorry, is this idea of the territorial inquiry. So, emerging from these workers inquiries that took place in Italy in the 1960s during the hot years of strikes and resistance and the kind of industrial towns in Italy in the 1960s in the huge car factories in Turin. And of really trying to have a close investigation of what is the real material, social, economic, cultural consciousness factors within a factory, within one industrial unit, and what are all the technical connections, the political connections, and using this real investigation and knowledge as the basis for your political organising, rather than just abstract generalities.

So, a lot of Neil’s work has been about how, especially in Britain, that the main sites of capital accumulation now are less in industry, but really in land and in property. This is how capital is accumulating at the moment. This is the main ways how it passes through the built environment, how land is regenerated, how rent gaps are closed. So, on that basis, shifting this idea, the workers inquiry and the factory into the territory, like the neighbourhood, and a kind of spatial composition of capital. So, he has been developing this idea of the territorial inquiry, just a way of walking through space in your city and really trying to think what is happening there.

So we did one in Partick, I think… I can’t remember if it was before or after the first lockdown. But really walking through Partick, like the new build-to-rent accommodation, the student developments down by the Clyde, Glasgow Hardbar, the older tenement parts, and each person… So I was looking at some of the radical history in Partick. Other people had investigated the international investment funds that were involved in building different aspects of the student housing. And other people looked at how the former land along the river, and they’re owned by the Port Authority, is now in the hands of these speculative companies. And it’s just really a useful way to actually physically just walk through a space, to go from one end to other and think, “Yeah, who owns the land? Who was here before? Who owns it now? What are the conditions of the houses? And what are the points in common between all the different tenures here? What are the differences?” And kind of recording that walk, writing it up, leading to further points of investigations.

So yeah, that’s something we’re hoping to definitely do more of, and to do in different local areas. And then the results of these investigations can be recorded through the House and Struggle Archive and maybe… Yeah, you meet people, you speak to people, new things emerge, new things, connections come up.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, I love doing walking tours. So, big fan of that. Because it is a great way to connect with people and it’s a great way to explain facets of the city that are not necessarily obvious, and explain how cities changed over time and what the implications of that are, and how cities are always changing. So it’s trying to get that across to people, I think, is a really, it’s worthwhile way of doing it. It’s a great way to connect. And it’s a challenge too. I mean, one of the things haven’t led many walking towards, there’s nothing worse than somebody’s eyes glazing over what you’re talking to them.

Joey Simons:

Just cross the road.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, it’s like, “Okay, okay, that’s boring. Next.” Yeah, it’s a bit of a challenge, but…

Joey Simons:

But the thing is, like another project I’m involved in just now with the Edwin Morgan Trust, is looking at the life and work of James McFarland, this kind of 19th century peddler poet who was born in the Calton. And he wrote a lot of, I mean, he’d lived in abject poverty his entire life. It’s the usual Glasgow poetic life. He walk from Glasgow to London on foot to get some of his poems published by Dickens and came back up the road here, was totally not… Anyway, but yeah, he wrote a lot about the attics and garrets where he lived, and this incredible apocalyptic poem called The Ruined City, where he just presents this hell-scape vision of Glasgow in the mid-19th century.

So, it’s looking at his work and also the work of Edwin Morgan, the 20th century Scottish poet and his Glasgow Sonnets, I think one of the best bits of writing, trying to think through Glasgow’s redevelopment in the 1970s, to use their writing to look at what’s happening in Glasgow now, where in a way there’s not a poet of a urban change in Glasgow. There’s far less discourse around it compared to, for example, the 19th century. Or we’re still talking a lot about slum clearance, comprehensive redevelopment. Whereas the transformational regeneration areas that are taking place across Glasgow just now, are receiving far less and a discussion, and actually the work of Mitch Miller and Chris Leslie are some of the few people that have really documented this latest round of regeneration of Glasgow, of demolition, of the high rises, transformation of places like Sighthill.

Yeah, I guess it’s just interesting that in a way, despite all our technology and the social media and the massive amount of information that’s exchanged constantly, that I think there’s far less being talked about Glasgow now, or far less understanding about the processes of change happening in the city now, compared to previous periods.

So I took a walk through the city centre looking at McFarland’s route. There’s this huge Barclays Bank development on the south side of the Clyde that has just arisen with all this associated luxury build-to-rent under the Kingston Bridge, there’s this new Kingston Quay, another huge development of massive build-to-rent private equity capital investments. The same time I was up in Sighthill the other day, and that’s constantly, this is the biggest project outside Glasgow’s 250 million pound regeneration of Sighthill.

Niall Murphy:

Yes.

Joey Simons:

It’s interesting up there’s been 140 GHA houses built. The tenants that managed to stick out the very end of their tenancies on Sighthill have got out, or have got flats now. The rest of the site, it’s quite incredible. It’s just fencing everywhere. There’s this fancy entrance way off Springburn Road. You walk up, it ends in a fence, you walk back down Pinkston Drive, another fence. You have to kick in a bit of a fence to get into the scheme. You walk around, the whole thing is kind of fenced off or empty all along Sighthill Cemetery, you can’t get out. You can’t cross the road to get into it.

I was speaking to someone, like one of the few people I met there, and she was saying that’s because they’re still remediating the land from all the chemical damage. But some people are living there. Others know that was, in Sighthill, that was two and a half thousand units, so council housing that was built, that’s been replaced by 140 GHA flats. And then 800 private-bought flats, some mid-market rent. So, that’s a huge change.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, absolutely.

Joey Simons:

There’s mass erasure of that community. Very few people are going to be able to come back. But again, there’s no… Where can you discuss this in a way? And I think it’s even interesting looking at these Glasgow Corporation Housing films throughout the, after the war, where you have these propaganda films in a way, explaining and talking about these huge changes that are taking place, like high-rise flats, the motorway, the new schemes. But there is some kind of critical discussion in those films about the problems Glasgow faces, about the problems, the inequalities, the contradictions in the urban plans. Whereas now, well if you go on the Glasgow City Council YouTube, there’s no films being made discussing-

Niall Murphy:

No, not in the same way.

Joey Simons:

… what’s happening in Sighthill or any kind of critical potential that maybe there’s some questionable things happening or things that you can talk about or challenge.

So, I think in a way, because of all the processes, the change that’s happened, that in a way we have much less knowledge at the moment, and we’re facing a much more difficult process to understand and also to combat. And there’s a kind of hegemonic discourse that urban regeneration, this is the only path, the correct path, that there’s no room for discussion, that private investment, private housing, the sale of public land, this is the answer to Glasgow’s problems. But you look at this huge development that’s happening in the city centre, in the financial district, seven new luxury hotels in Glasgow city centre. Yet we’ve just seen the budget release there, cuts to Mitchell Library, cuts to sport, cuts to communities, cuts to cleansing. And you’re thinking, “Well, how come Glasgow could afford these things in the seventies and eighties-

Niall Murphy:

And we can’t now-

Joey Simons:

… when we were much poorer.

Niall Murphy:

… when we’re supposedly a richer society. Yeah, that’s a very good question.

Joey Simons:

So what is all this huge speculative urban development? Where is the money going? Who is benefiting from this? How can this two stories be told that this is the Glasgow miracle, and at the same time, the basic infrastructure of the city is crumbling?
But I think it’s not necessarily a clear answer, but at least if we can critically discuss it, and through Living Rent, we’re seeing the consequences every day in terms of rent increases, housing quality, damp, mould-

Niall Murphy:

Sure.

Joey Simons:

… a basic breakdown.

Niall Murphy:
Okay.

Joey Simons:

And you’re right to housing. Sorry.

Niall Murphy:

That brings me onto the next point, which is the role of women in Glasgow’s housing struggles. And it just comes up again and again and again, the central role that women play in these struggles. And it’s something that I’m wanting to talk about in our podcast with the Glasgow Women’s Library, which is going to come further on in the series. So you have generations of women who have done these incredibly inspiring things in Glasgow and have achieved remarkable results in terms of the housing in the city. And so I just wanted to ask you how that had come about, and is that role now changing?

Joey Simons:

Yeah, in a way that… The first thing to say is that that history, women’s political organising and movements has been consistently marginalised, and not only by official narratives, but within Labour history itself and within the Labour movement. So there’s an amazing film called Red Skirts on Clydeside that was made by the Sheffield Film Co-op in the 1970s, that told really for the first time or in a long time, the story of the 1915 rent strikes. And they met and they interviewed women who, as children, remembered growing up at the time of the rent strikes, were involved in the rent strikes.

The film is interesting because it shows the women who were doing the historical research, and they go to the Marks Memorial Library, I think it is, and they’re looking in different archives, working class archives, and there’s nothing about the rent strikes. There’s no box marked Women or Housing. And they eventually find this box marked Miscellaneous that’s like packed at the back of the way, that has some of the documents about this. So now it seems obvious, but in a way even that story in 1915, which was probably the most successful action or campaign ever fought by the Scottish working class in terms of its immediate results, and that that was really marginalised.

So, like Willy Gallagher, in his famous revolt in the Clyde, barely mentions that. Harry McShane in his autobiography talks about how, that even within the working class movement, most of the women, well McShane or John McLean or Willy Gallagher, that they also were very traditional, that they were wage slaves and their women were slaves of the slaves, even within the most radical ailments of workers’ movement.

So, it’s been a long process. It was a long process to recover that history in 1915 against the prejudices of the Labour movement itself. And that’s just more generally as well, that housing is always this secondary issue to workplace and industrial struggles, but actually it’s been provided the kind of context for some of the most radical and successful struggles have been in housing rather than being in industry in Glasgow.

Niall Murphy:

Very much, yes.

Joey Simons:

So, the Women’s Library, I think has played a crucial role in sharing that history. And we had another, one of the films that we showed last night was about the Take Root Women’s Self-Build Co-op, that was organising in Glasgow in the 1990s, where, as a response to homelessness and precarious housing, a group of women formed a self-build co-op that trained up as construction workers to work with Molendinar Housing Association to build the houses and to build the kind of housing that would meet their needs for the first time. And raised funds, and over years and years and years, led this project, only for the last minute for all the funding to be pulled because it was supposedly sexist, that this would’ve been housing only for women. And you can imagine that kind of tabloid campaigns that were taking place at the time. And the Cathy McCormack’s archive as well, which is now at the Glasgow Women’s Library. Cathy meticulously documented all the years that you saw, resident associations.

Niall Murphy:

I’m particularly interested in what Cathy did as well. It’s my next question for you, is all about what Cathy did and how her fight against the mould was this kind of incredibly powerful collaboration with the Easterhouse residents and architects and scientists, which resulted in this kind of innovative method to cut dampness and high fuel costs. And yet we’re going through that again.

Joey Simons:

Yeah.

Niall Murphy:

And it’s high for your costs, and yet we’re going through that again. It’s dreadfully depressing. Why is it happening again?

Joey Simons:

I think just to go back a wee bit, women have been in the leadership of housing struggles because they have been the ones that have suffered the consequences the most because of everything we know about how society is structured. Women were the ones dealing with the rents, that were dealing with housing conditions, that were trying to maintain the conditions, a dignified life and conditions of extreme overcrowd and poverty, poor housing, and also having to fight the prejudices within their own families and within the working class movement itself.

You read her book, and Kathy’s story, people don’t want to become activists. People just want to have a dignified, decent, fulfilling life without having to constantly fight. But Kathy, the day that she came back from the hospital with healthy babies and she took them home and she had sick children. This kind of shame that attacks you because it’s like you are responsible for this. Why is this happening? You can’t share this with anyone else because it’s so shameful. But eventually her being forced to overcome that and then fight this incredible battle against Glasgow Housing Department officials against elements, scientific establishment. Gary talked yesterday that you quoted this academic at the time saying that he was certain that there was no connection between bad housing and poor health, signing off on stuff.

So Kathy was forced to fight this and through this recognising that her individual problems were the problems of her community and the problems of her community were those of communities across Glasgow and then eventually the world in South Africa and Nicaragua. And the film that we showed last night that she made was called The War Without Bullets, this poverty that was killing more people than bombs and guns. And this kind of innovative approach where she talks about, as well as organising Easthall Residence Association, making links with middle class professionals, with technical service agencies, with professors, architects at GSA to kind of build that coalition that could put the pressure needed on the housing department to get the changes they need. But in her book, she constantly talks about fighting these battles where people on your side are well-meaning professionals that are constantly in a way trying to take her voice away from her or speak for her and speak for her community, and this kind of process of radical education organising and fighting that she did that.

And that’s the thing, as soon as that pressure stops and it takes a massive toll on people trying to raise a family, trying to survive in poverty, trying to survive your housing trying to kill you, as well as organising activism, it’s a difficult process. It takes its toll on people. And as soon as those movements can be sidelined or repressed, then again you just revert to this meaning where the state and private capital is interested in working class housing, if at all, is to invest as little as possible from it and to extract the maximum from it. And that’s why we’re seeing these housing conditions reappearing today. Because without pressure from below, then the interest of the builders and speculators and officials and landlords is that housing is not a home. It’s a commodity to be speculated on.

Niall Murphy:

It seems to be a particularly British disease, unfortunately that, and it’s so frustrating. It really does depress me. I mean, I come from Hong Kong originally, and what really angers me is when you get Tory politicians, and I know I’m not meant to be political, but talking about Singapore and Hong Kong as being these kind of societies to aspire to, and yet they’re both the biggest public housing landlords in the world, and they really look after the people. And it’s so frustrating that we’ve gone in completely, we’re kind of went in that direction in the 1950s and we’ve completely abandoned it from the 1980s onwards.

Joey Simons:

And I think that is the overall lesson from the Glasgow Housing struggle archive is that without tenants organising, without housing movements from below, then you won’t win anything. And I think you’re saying you are not meant to be political. I think that’s the other question is that this form of market led state facilitated urban development that we’re seeing in Glasgow is presented as beyond politics. Tory, Labour, Green, SNP, it doesn’t matter who’s been in the council chambers, it’s almost unquestionable what’s happening. It’s beyond is presented as beyond politics. So we’ve just seen a 16% budget cut to social housing budget, but the sell off of public land in Glasgow, the destruction of social housing, the demolition of communities like Sighthill, this is presented as a natural inevitable process.

Nobody is challenging that planning framework from within any of those parties because it’s seen as kind of inevitable and within a wider system, it is. Glasgow, you have to compete, you have this kind of boosterist approach, you have to attract private investment, you have to stop anything that might put off potential investors. So I think that’s what we’re trying to do as well, is intervene within Living Rent is that there is a different vision for housing for our city that Kathy and others have fought for. And it’s completely necessary because this current one is not working for the vast majority of people.

Niall Murphy:

That brings me onto my next question, which is basically how you present that in terms of street names tell a story about the history of the city and how those street names came about, but development and redevelopment and demolition of the city bring a sense of loss, which is a theme of our podcast. But can you explain why words matter in the past and present stories of Glasgow’s housing struggle? How are you going to use that to improve things?

Joey Simons:

Yeah. Well, I think the basic thing about looking at this history is that you see people have organised in the past in the streets and in the same community where you are now, it breaks down this sense of a inevitability that you’re just kind of pushed by these forces from above to go along with whatever. And I think words are really important. So for example, this Glasgow Harbour development. So it’s obviously down by Partick, but Partick is being erased from the name of that development. And if you think about Partick, you can make these connections back to 1915, back to the rent strikes, Partick was one of the centres of that, histories of industrial organisation of migration. And it’s interesting that you’re not Partick Harbour, these investors you’re not come to live in a specific area of a specific city with its own history, its own tradition. It’s just this abstract bit of land in a luxury house, it could be anywhere.
I did some work with some young people living in the scheme in Townhead. That’s another place being erased, they’re literally being hemmed in on all sides by student accommodation, by the college, by the expansion of Strathclyde University, surrounded by libraries and swimming pool and bars and rooftop terraces they can’t access. And they’re saying that the name of Townhead is disappearing. There’s nothing there’s no signs to Townhead. You can’t even see into it now from George Square. It says Collegelands. This is the name of this new area. Nobody has a connection to it, it’s meaningless for anyone in the city. But again, kind of flattens the space of this city just makes it this abstract space where people can invest and let then leave.

Niall Murphy:

Absolutely. It reminds me of, I used sit in the Glasgow Urban Design panel. Glasgow Urban Design panel basically any kind of big scheme that’s going to affect the city tends to get run past the Glasgow Urban Design panel. It’s not a statutory body, so the planners don’t necessarily have to listen to it, but they get input from various kind of people in Glasgow who might be expert in the city or amenity groups in the city or architecture groups in the city to get their say on things.

And there was one that came to us about Glasgow Harbour, which was when they were looking to develop a kind of shopping centre around the Riverside Museum. And all the images that were getting projected were people in fancy clothes, drinking wine and Lambrusco and that kind of thing. And it was like somebody finally piped up and said, “The image you’re projecting doesn’t really have an awful lot to do with Partick, which is literally right next door to this. Would you care to comment?” And the guy actually to give him credit, at least he was honest enough to say, “That’s not really the image we’re looking for.” And you’re like, but it’s totally disconnected from the actuality of the city. And you’re not trying to connect into these neighbourhoods at all. You’re just not interested, it’s all about the money.

Joey Simons:

Yeah, definitely. And I think connections between the past and the present are also to think about different futures as well. And we just did this project with the Travelling Gallery: Resistance in Residence, looking at kind of histories of resistance and also different kind of urban theories in Edinburgh and Glasgow. So in Wester Hailes and Pilton and Muirhouse and also the work architects and theorists like Phyllis Birkby and Yona Friedman.

And that sort of thing is just this poverty, a vision that… And it’s like, again, in that post-war era, you had this grand vision, a modernist vision for better or worse, about how people should live and how cities should be designed. And it’s funny now that the same things are happening now in terms of, but without discussion. So again, in Sighthill I was looking on Collective Architecture’s website about their award-winning development. And it’s just interesting, you’ve got these kind of two storey townhouse, garden kind of street, just the lay out of the streets and they are talking about that they want to redesign the relationship between public and private space, some people like others don’t, but it’s just quite interesting that how the city is being redesigned is coming from an ideological point of view about how we should relate to each other in spaces, what’s desirable or not, whether consumption should be prioritised. This kind of Lambrusco drinking class.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah. It’s very 2008 just before the crash.

Joey Simons:

But again, it’s just presented as this is just natural. This is how we want to live rather than, this is another grand redesign through architecture and urban planning of how they think people should relate to each other. And histories of collective struggle are not part of that because they’re not designed for that and they’re present. And that’s what Living Rent we’re trying to do is like…

Niall Murphy:

Is it because they’re uncomfortable, they’re uncomfortable. It’s about resistance and therefore it’s not something that’s an easy sell.

Joey Simons:

And I in that Charles Johnson PhDs chapter on rent strike in Arden in southwest Glasgow in 1957, 1958, that took place in Scottish Special Housing Association housing. And yeah, again, it’d be interesting to work with the housing associations down there in other areas and think… Or even these murals that are appearing around Glasgow on the gable ends.

It’d be interesting to, can you connect that history to what’s happening now? Can people get a sense you’re living in these same houses in the same schemes where people have come together, where they have fought. People had an influence in their own future. When that is wiped out, then the answer to our present problems isn’t people’s own organisation, it’s again, saviour from above by the council through private investments. So I think that connection between the past and the future is crucial. It’s like who controls the past, controls the future or whatever.

Niall Murphy:

And it is about grassroots and something of the whole thing organically rather than being imposed.

Joey Simons:

Yeah.

Niall Murphy:

Okay. Well, basically it brings me onto my next question, which is what is next for you? And people are obviously looking for answers. Can a better understanding of Glasgow’s housing history help us improve the present and provide more hope for the future? And did the pandemic teach us anything about building back better?

Joey Simons:
Yeah, I think, again, well, there’s this quote from Brecht always and it’s there’s not much knowledge that leads to power, but there’s plenty of knowledge to which only power leads. Where in a sense, not just about knowing things, we need the power to implement the lessons we know from the past.

So I think Living Rent, we’re not a campaigning group, we’re a lobbying group, we’re a tenants union. We’re rooted in local communities and the idea is about we’re trying to build the power from below where you can take this knowledge and these lessons from the past and enforce them or learn from them. But without having that power, then it doesn’t matter in a way. This idea of mistakes being repeated, whose mistakes? It’s benefiting some people, it’s only a mistake for some. So I think we’ve seen that with the pandemic and the Workers Stories’ Project that and that led this archive of workers’ experiences during Covid-19.

So people should check it out online. People contributed stories, poetry, films, diaries, documenting workers’ experience. But again, without the kind of political organisations and movements… We’ve seen with Covid, I’m astounded how little has changed. I mean, if you think even about the Covid in the built environment, in your workplaces, if there was another pandemic just in terms of adaptations to windows, ventilations, nothing. I mean, it’s actually incredible how little it has changed in a way because without this kind of political power then the regression to the mean, it’s always towards inequality. But I think with Living Rent, we are starting to have that influence and build some of the power we need. And learning from that history, understanding our cities better, and seeing the potential for organising today from what has happened in the past, but also without romanticising it. That we’ve gone through whole periods of defeat as well as victories.

But we need to just have that history to understand it, to critique it, to learn from it, to use it, and also to add for it and people to contribute to it. Because I think what I’ve learned is, there’s always a feeling that somewhere there’s some academic or some researcher looking at all this stuff, but a lot of times there’s not, and we just need to do it for ourselves. And people have their own stories, their own documents, their own photographs, their own personal histories.

So I think we’re just trying to provide a framework and try to establish a collective, kind of take ownership over the archive and collectively decide what we want to do with it. Do we want it to be online or physical? Do we want to just use it to do talks? So I think it is open question, and again, we’re not professionals or academics we’ve just done this kind of out of our own interests. So the future’s open. We definitely feel hopeful that it’s possible to change things. And we’ve already, through the pandemic, won a ban on evictions, a rent freeze, the battles over these are being lifted now. So the struggle never stops, but you can take great inspiration from it as well.

Niall Murphy:

Good. Final question, and this is always a loaded question and people’s answers to it are always really fascinating. But what is your favourite building in Glasgow? And it could be visible or invisible, and what would it tell you if its walls could talk?

Joey Simons:

Well, it’s probably a boring answer, I’m sure everyone…

Niall Murphy:

No answer is boring. They’re all really fascinating.

Joey Simons:

I think the Mitchell Library is a hundred percent my favourite building in Glasgow. So I think I like it as you’ve got all humanity in the Mitchell as well. I mean, it’s basically the last kind of free public space, indoor space in Glasgow. And there’s just kind of always new and weird things I’m finding in there as well. And I actually did, I wrote this kind of piece of fiction, semi fiction about the Mitchell Library where I was imagining its future where the library was closed and a group of librarians and archivists had gone underground to try to fight for it. But I think its walls would tell an interesting story because…

Niall Murphy:

They certainly would.

Joey Simons:

I mean, it is just those contradictions from the past. You’ve obviously got through Stephen Mitchell a lot of connections back to Glasgow’s colonial and slavery past and where that collection emerged from. You’ve got Carnegie that laid the final stone that paid for the new building. Also a very complex history of repression on one hand or another.

Niall Murphy:

Absolutely.

Joey Simons:

But I think it’s just, again, to that period where at least the rich in the city left something in terms of civic infrastructure whereas now there’s nothing, it feels like things have just been…

Niall Murphy:

I know it’s like the days of municipal socialism and completely moved on from that.

Joey Simons:

Yeah. So I think the Mitchell and I always go back to kind of Tom Leonard and his collection Radical Renfrew. He talked about always being on the other side and this librarian fairy would go away into stacks to find this mysterious text that he wanted. And by going on the other side of it, he discovered so much. So I think it’s it as a huge untapped resource still. And we did some workshops where we worked with our librarian archivists, public workshops where people could come in and just see how do you use the filing system? How do you get a card? How can you… Just breaking down those barriers that exist where it’s quite intimidating. So I think I spend a lot of time in the Mitchell, I’m still into the carpets and I do…

Niall Murphy:

Who isn’t, they’re wonderful.

Joey Simons:

I’ve got a couple of books I need to bring back as well that are overdue I think they’ve cancelled the overdue fees now. So I’ll shall sneak back in.

Niall Murphy:

Classy carpets. Love them. Well, thank you very much, Joey. That was a complete pleasure talking to you. Really enjoyable.

Joey Simons:

Cheers.

Niall Murphy:

Thank you for your time. Much appreciated.

Joey Simons:

Thanks for having me.

Niall Murphy:

It’s a pleasure.

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. The podcast is kindly sponsored by the National Trust for Scotland and supported by Tunnocks.

Niall Murphy:

Hello, everyone. I’m Niall Murphy. Welcome to If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk, a podcast by Glasgow City Heritage Trust about the stories and relationships between historic buildings and people in Glasgow.
Today, we’re venturing into an intriguing new area. Buildings don’t just tell stories. Over the years, many of them often seem to develop their own characters and personalities, a mood or atmosphere, maybe. Something you can sense as soon as you walk over the doorstep. But is there more to it than that? Have you ever entered a room or a building and felt that someone or something unseen is following you? Those footsteps on the stairs, shadows in an empty room, whispering voices. That’s all part of a good night’s work for our next guest who can tell us fascinating stories about investigating paranormal experiences in Glasgow buildings.

In this episode, we meet Jan Murdoch-Richards, who founded Lanarkshire Paranormal with her husband Steff almost 14 years ago. In fact, Jan has been interested in the paranormal since childhood, when she used to watch her mother reading tea leaves for families, friends, and neighbours. I’m told she could predict the future with uncanny accuracy. However, Jan spent the first part of her working life in the down-to-earth setting of a Glasgow bar and restaurant where she managed events. Then 15 years ago, she met the man who would become her husband and business partner. It sounds as if the turning point was their first date, an outing to a haunted house.

Now their not-for-profit company runs paranormal investigations across the UK. In Scotland, their clients include the National Trust for Scotland, among other owners of haunted stately homes and castles. But there are also spooky happenings in much-loved places, deeply rooted in Glasgow life. Before the pandemic, the company was booked up for a year or two ahead. Now, as they ease back into a paranormal life, Jan and Steff are once again opening up a programme of real-life paranormal investigations. So what does this all mean? Let’s investigate with Jan.

Jan, first question. Perhaps we should start by checking out the meaning of paranormal. What is a paranormal investigation, and what are you looking for?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

A paranormal investigation is basically we go into a building, it usually starts 9:00 PM until 3:00 in the morning, and it’s pitch black, no lights on at all, and we are looking for evidence. If people say, “Oh, this is haunted,” we are looking for the evidence of that, and it’s very interesting.

Niall Murphy:

Right. Okay. How did you first become interested in paranormal experiences? What switched you onto this?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

As I said, my mother, I was fascinated watching these lovely ladies coming to my mother’s house and her reading these tea leaves, and I would meet them maybe a few weeks later, and they’d be like, “Oh, Jean. You know what you said?” And I was like, “Wow, how does that happen?” And then I used to watch TV programmes. Then, I met my husband, and he used to run a team in Manchester. And then when he moved up with me, we talked about it, and thought, “Yeah, we’ll start one up here.”

Niall Murphy:

Great. Good. Where was the inspiration for Lanarkshire Paranormal? Can you tell us a little more about the first date, which I understand, was an outing to a beautiful haunted house, Bowling House?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Bowling. Bowling Hall.

Niall Murphy:

Bowling Hall?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Bowling Hall. Bowling Hall.

Niall Murphy:

Bowling Hall in Yorkshire. And how did you react to it?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Well, when he first said to me about it, I just looked at him and I thought, “Are you mad?” Because I had never done anything like that before. And I was like, “Are you crazy? No way.” He was like, “No, no, no. Come on. It’ll be fun.” And I’m like, “Fun? Are you mad?” I went anyway, and I think it was all part of his plan because I clung to him the whole night, didn’t let him go at all. But after an hour or so, I calmed down and I loved it. It was just so interesting. I got a lot of names in my head, a lot of dates. And then we spoke to the historian. It was true, the names of the people, the lords and the ladies who stayed there, and the dates. And I was like, “Wow.” It was just fascinating.

Niall Murphy:

So you’re sensitive to all this stuff, and you can pick up that information-

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

I think so. Yeah. My mother was-

Niall Murphy:

… just from the environment?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

My mother and my grandmother, they were both like that. Yeah.

Niall Murphy:

Right. Fascinating. So there’s some kind of a… Right, okay. That’s really interesting. The next question is quite personal to me as well, but we’ll get onto that. Your first investigation as Lanarkshire Paranormal was in Govanhill Baths. Now, with one of my other hats, I’m the chair of Govanhill Baths Building Preservation Trust. What we’re doing at the Building Preservation Trust is we’re trying to restore the building at the moment, but that would’ve been Govanhill Baths Community Trust, which I was chair of for about five minutes before I moved over to the Building Preservation Trust. But obviously, I absolutely love Govanhill Baths, so I’m intrigued to know how you got involved in all of this.

Now, I’ve got a good story to tell you about this as well. But there’s been a very long community campaign to restore the baths, this great Edwardian baths complex. And I just wanted to know, how many times have you been in and out of the building, and what was it that you discovered? Because I’m fascinated by this because it’s really intriguing for me. Go on, tell us all about it.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Well, what I did was I stay in Pollokshields. I don’t stay too far away. And I used to take my kids to Govanhill Bath when they were small, so I knew that they were trying to raise funds. I contacted them and they said, “Yeah, absolutely.” So we did it. We did a paranormal investigation twice a year and we raised over 1,000 pounds a year for them.

Niall Murphy:

Brilliant.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

And that was going on there for about 11 years now. Oh, what a place. It’s amazing. Oh, yeah.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, really? Oh, go on. Do tell us.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Me and Laura, who’s also on our team, we were standing in where the steamie used to be.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

And it was like 2:00 in the morning, pitch black, we’re standing there ourselves, and we literally felt these ice-cold fingers on the back of our neck, and we were frog-marched out of there, out of that room. And we were like, “Oh my God, what’s going on?” Just frog-marched right out of there and into the main reception area. And then I left.

Niall Murphy:

Right.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

And we just looked at each other and we’re like, “Okay, let’s go back in,” and we went back in again. And it happened again.

Niall Murphy:

I couldn’t do that.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Obviously, it was very tragic as well that the main pool was drained and used as a morgue during-

Niall Murphy:

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah, during the Clydebank Blitz.

Niall Murphy:

Okay. I had no idea.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

The main pool was drained.

Niall Murphy:

Right.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

And that area I decided to play 1940s music. We’ll Meet Again, things like that. And just the noises, the bangs, the bumps. And then I put the music off and I could hear a man singing. And there was no men, it was just me and my friend and some public. And I said, “Right. Okay, I’m going to stop the music now, but if you want me to do it again, can you say you want me to do it again?” They’re like, “Yes, please.” We all heard that, “Yes, please,” this man’s voice. So I put the music back on, and again, he was singing. Okay. There’s loads of spooky things have happened in there.

Niall Murphy:

It’s intriguing. It is. It’s intriguing. My funny story about the baths was we were taking… This was just before lockdown, and this was just as we were about to start on all the works, the construction works. We were interviewing for the contractors for it. And we had this day in which we took the contractors around the building. And I don’t know whether Stevie West, who now manages the Deep End around the-

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Mm-hmm.

Niall Murphy:

Stevie, he’s great fun and he plays practical jokes. So we’re taking these contractors around the building, taking them down into the basement, and the basement freaks me out because it’s straight out of a horror film, the basement.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah.

Niall Murphy:

First thing he did, I’m leading this party down the stairs and I opened the door, which normally is an electrical cupboard, just to show them this is the electrical cupboard here. And out pops this mannequin with a noose around its neck with a rectus Stevie set up for us. And it was like, “Ah.”

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Oh, no.

Niall Murphy:

And you’re trying to be professional and taking a bunch of contractors around and you’re completely freaked out. And it’s like, “Stevie, I’ll get you for that.”

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

The basement is one of the creepiest. The stories I can tell you about what happened down there was, wow. We were doing some glasswork, finger on the glass and it was just the public, they were doing it. And the glass was going, it was going everywhere. It was doing the shape of a pentagram. It was going all over and then it just flew off the table and smashed against the wall.

Niall Murphy:

Right. Scary.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

I was like, “Oh, let’s do this again.” Oh, yeah.

Niall Murphy:

Okay. Before we delve deeper into this, a few technical and practical questions. First off, what is involved in managing a paranormal investigation? I understand that a typical event is held between 9:00 PM, 3:00 AM. Do you need any special equipment to pick stuff up? Any training, risk assessment, first aid, all that practical stuff?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah. You need that first-aider. We also do a risk assessment. We do that because it’s pitch black. And sometimes we’re in big castles and there’s stone stairs. And so we need to do all sorts of things like that. We have a load of equipment that we use.

Niall Murphy:

Right. Okay. And does any of that equipment, can pick up stuff, stuff that is going on in the environment, cold spots, stuff like that? Because I know people talk about that.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah. We’ve got laser thermometers, and we’ve also got an SLS camera, which that is one of my favourite things because if there’s a spirit there, it will capture it like a stick figure. So if you’re in an empty room and you’re panning the camera around, if there’s a stick figure in that room, that’s how we spell it. Can you say hello?

Niall Murphy:

Right. Okay.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

And we have trigger objects as well, which is good.

Niall Murphy:

Right.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

That we throw around.

Niall Murphy:

Intriguing. Okay. Tell us more about Glasgow’s Haunted Buildings then. You’ve investigated some wonderful places in Glasgow that are really high profile, full of everyday visible life. So places like Tron Theatre, Barrowland Ballrooms. What have you found there and can you tell us a bit more about all of that?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

The Barrowland Ballroom, I was so happy to get that. I couldn’t believe I got that. Yeah, I was so excited about that. That was amazing. Just the history of that place. And me and my team and a lot of the public were in the guest dressing room and we heard this big band music. This was like 1:00 in the morning. It was only us that were in the building. We heard this big band music and I thought, oh. And then we heard this lady singing. It only lasted a few seconds but we clearly heard this lady singing. And then it stopped and we thought, what? Hair was standing on end. And I said to her, “Do you know that was beautiful?” I said, “Could you do that again?” And it happened again.

Niall Murphy:

Right.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

She sung again. Oh, it was just… And the infamous, I’m Afraid Bible John came through.

Niall Murphy:

Right. Fascinating.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Picked up that as well. Yeah.

Niall Murphy:

Why is it that people’s spirits and things can get trapped in these places? What is that about? Is it memories? How does that rub off on a place?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

It’s said that obviously, things can happen in your house, bad things, good things. It’s like they get ingrained into the walls, the feelings that happened on that particular day. And spirits can come back to visit or they can stay there because it was a really happy event or a really sad event. And people think, when you say to people, “Oh, there’s a spirit in your house,” they get terrified. But not every spirit is bad. Some spirits, we’ve met some… Well not met, but we’ve spoken to, interacted with a lot of lovely, lovely spirits.

Niall Murphy:

I’m assuming here that obviously if you’re in an older building, it’s much more likely those qualities are going to be more imbued in an older building. But have you come across new places that attract paranormal?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

It depends, it may be a new building, but what is it built on?

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

What was on that ground before it was built?

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, yeah.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah. Which could be-

Niall Murphy:

That can abuse something too. I’m interested in this because I did see a ghost once. I was brought up in Hong Kong.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Oh, wow.

Niall Murphy:

And we were living in this building called Greenlake Hall. And when I look back… And I was born in the seventies, Greenlake Hall must have actually been built in the sixties because it was a modern block of flats. And I saw a ghost of a woman’s head come through a wall in my bedroom.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Wow.

Niall Murphy:

And I’ve never forgotten. And I must have been about three, four at the time.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Wow.

Niall Murphy:

Never forgotten. Screaming and running to my mom because I saw this happen.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

That would be scary.

Niall Murphy:

And I’m thinking, “Where did that come from? Did I imagine that?” And I’m like, no. It’s one of my earliest memories.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

See, if you do see something, you do think, “What was that? Was that my imagination?” And you start questioning yourself. Mainly, sometimes it’s out of the corner of your eye you’ll see something walking past. Or I’m like, wow. It happened in our house. Our house is crazy. It’s an old Victorian tenement. And we had one of our friends who was a really good medium, he came into my house and he just walked in. He is like, Oh, my God.” He said, “This house is crazy.” And it’s the old couple who used to stay here. And there’s also a little boy who wanders around, but that’s fine.

But there was one day my husband was in the kitchen and I was in the bedroom and I walked through the hallway and I saw my husband coming into the living room and sitting down. So I followed him in. Nobody there. And the hairs on the back of my neck really that… I said, “I’ve got chills. And they ain’t multiplying my spirit at all.” I was like, “Wow.” And in the kitchen and my husband was sitting in his man office thinking away. And I was like, you’ve got a doppelganger. He’s just walked into the living room.” There’s only one time in the… no, twice, sorry, in the 14 years I’ve been doing this I’ve had really bad nightmares. And that’s only twice since that’s happened. Oh, I didn’t like that.

Niall Murphy:

Right. So most of the encounters are good.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah. Yeah. They’re a lot. Over the years, we’ve met… Well, not met, I keep saying met, but we’ve interacted with spirits from the Bannockburn right through World Wars. And we’ve even got relations back together with their ancestors. That was really interesting. That’s happened a few times. Yeah. That was really-

Niall Murphy:

Fascinating.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah. Plane Castle, it was a lovely girl was here with her husband. And we kept getting this French man’s name. And I’m like, “French, my baby is here to help fight with the Bannockburn.” And then I said his name out loud and she went, “Oh.” She said, “That was my great, great, great, great-grandfather’s name.” And I was like, “Wow.” And then we did some glasswork and he kept coming through and it turned out it was her great, great, great, great-grandfather. And there was also other names that he said. And I said to her, and it connected all up. And I was like, wow, that’s happened a few times.

Niall Murphy:

Fascinating. How do you handle sceptics? And it’s not just awkward customers who might be alive. What about ghosts, are they always well-behaved? Your encounters mostly seem to be with nicer ghost, but you did mention you got some difficult ones. Can you tell us anything about that?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Sceptics are good because we need a good balance. I’m not one of these that think everything’s bad or everything’s good. No. But my husband is a sceptic, even though he is been doing it. It drives me mad. A spirit could come up and slap him in the face and he’ll say, “That was wind.” It drives me crazy. But you need that. You need the balance. So that’s good. But yeah, we’ve had a few. Inveraray Jail, I got grabbed by the lapels and shoved against the wall in one of the jail cells. And I was like, “Please don’t do that.” I said, “We are not here to hurt you, so don’t hurt any of us.” Everything that we do has got to be with the greatest respect. I will not go…

I see these paranormal shows. Some of them, not all of them, some of them, the people go in there very aggressive, shouting. No, we don’t know. No, absolutely not. Spirits were alive once as well. We are not there to judge anyway. We’re not there… We don’t do that. So if they’re attacking us, pushing us, and poking us, we’ll be like, “No, please don’t do that.”

Niall Murphy:

Right, right.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah.

Niall Murphy:

So you are a true believer of this, but you seem to take this quite lightly and not too seriously with the whole thing. And looking at your Facebook page and your website, you seem to be having a lot of fun, but there’s obviously a serious side and a serious interest in the buildings you’re exploring and you’re raising money for charity as well. Tell us about the causes you’ve supported as part of this.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Over the years, we’ve supported the West of Scotland Autistic Society.

Niall Murphy:

Oh, interesting.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

We did that twice for them. Once in Govanhill Baths. And then we did another one in Provan Hall in Glasgow. And we raised money for them to take the kids on a sleepover at Christmas to the aquarium and-

Niall Murphy:

Right. Sea Life. You mean Sea Life, something like that. Right? Yes.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah, Sea Life, they did a sleepover for the kids. And recently we did the Barrowland and we raised 1,050 pounds for the Glasgow Children’s Hospital.

Niall Murphy:

Brilliant.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah, we’ve done lots of things over there. I mean, 14 years, I can’t remember all of them. But yeah, we’ve done quite a lot. And we raised a lot of money for the National Trust as well, to keep them going. They’re a charity, they’re a preservation thing, so we do that as well.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Big fan of their work. Okay. What happens next? Your first live event since lockdown sold out very quickly, and you’ve been asked back by a special request to Holmwood House by the National Trust of Scotland. Can you tell us what you’ve uncovered there on previous visits?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Do you know that the mirrors in there, we do a lot of scrying, which is-

Niall Murphy:

What’s scrying?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Scrying, the team doesn’t do it, but we will say to a member of the public, “Does anybody want to do scrying? Only if you feel comfortable.” What they’ll do is they’ll stand in front of the mirror and we’ll shine a candle or a torch into the mirror, and I’ll ask the spirits to change that person’s face in the mirror to come through to us. Now, we’ve seen men turning into nuns.

Niall Murphy:

Really?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

We’ve seen women start to develop beards, moustaches.

Niall Murphy:

Right.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

It’s really… Yeah.

Niall Murphy:

That’s fascinating. Because it sounds like that links back to the history of the house with it having been a convent at one point. And, of course, prior to that, it was that one of the local mill owners, I think it’s John Cooper, who had built the house or got Alexander Greek Thompson to build this fantastic house for him in the late 1850s. That’s intriguing that both your references are from key moments in the building’s history.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah. On our Facebook page, we’ve got photographs of everywhere, every investigation we’ve done over the years, all our pictures are on there. We’ve got videos on there, you can have a look at. And I love having fun. I do. I will chat to anyone. That’s why I love working with the National Trust. And I try to keep our page light as well because people can come along an investigation and it’s scary. They can be really scary. And I find that humour helps to put them at ease a little bit.

Niall Murphy:

Absolutely. Yes. Yeah, very much. The first time I got asked to do a walking tour in Glasgow, this is way back, it’s like 2001, and I got asked to do it as a dare for Doors Open Day. And I thought, “Oh God, I’m going to make a complete fool of myself because people will realise straight away that I don’t come from Glasgow and I would be so rumbled.” And I was standing in front of what’s now… It used to be the We Travel Centre in St. Enoch Square, but I think it’s now… I can’t remember. It’s a coffee shop of some… I can’t remember the name of it. Anyway, the actual door to that, which used to be, that was the headquarters building for the Glasgow subway. And it was the main entrance into the subway itself that James Miller, who is the architect of that, around that door, he has Devil mask faces.

So it’s actually a gate to hell, Glasgow’s hell mouth. And you’re like, how did he get away with that, with the subway making that joke like that? And yet presumably the building owners were actually okay with that. So standing there, I suddenly spotted this, and I turned it into a joke and people started laughing. And I thought, oh, that’s really good because then you start connecting with people through humour. And that worked really well. It’s a really good way to connect with people. It’s interesting that you do that too. Okay. What else lies on the horizon for Lanarkshire Paranormal? I can see you’ve got a lot of things. Hill House. I’m intrigued to know what Hill House is going to be like.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Oh, yeah, we’ve done that. We did that a couple of years ago. Oh, so good.

Niall Murphy:

Right. Go on. Tell us a bit about that then.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Nothing bad, but there’s a spirit there. He is quite famous. Everybody has seen him, apparently, of a man, a tall man with a cape and he is walking around. We saw him, footsteps. If we were sitting down, above his, in the room above his, you could hear, it was a sound like dragging. Something was getting dragged across the floor.

Niall Murphy:

Oh, that’s a bit creepy.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Oh, it was good. It’s like, “Yay. Do it again.” What we do find, which everybody says that men scream louder than the women.

Niall Murphy:

Oh, really?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yes.

Niall Murphy:

That’s too good.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yes. The men can be, “Oh, you’re okay ladies. You’re safe with me. Don’t worry.” And then a door will slam and the men are like, “Ah!”

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, you’re like, right. Quick, run.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

And their wives are like, “I could have been killed and you run away and left me.”

Niall Murphy:

Yeah. You abandoned me. You ran off.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

That’s fun.

Niall Murphy:

I remember once I was living in Berlin, and this was my first job out of architecture school, and I had to survey this huge factory complex in Kreuzberg in Berlin. And it was five interlocking courtyards in this one factory that was across six floors with a huge basement. And it was going around the basement all by yourself in the dark with a torch. Completely creepy. And all I could think of was, “Oh God, what if something did happen to you? Nobody would ever find you again.” It was just me and the security guard at the front door. And it used to completely freak me out. And by the end of it, I was sprinting out of that place as fast as I could go.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

See, we’d be like, “Yay. Take us out.”

Niall Murphy:

You’d have been right in there.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Yeah.

Niall Murphy:

And I was like, “Get me out of here. I don’t like this. I can’t take it anymore.” Okay. Right. Coming to our last question, which is a completely loaded question, and we ask everybody who comes onto the show about this. What is your favourite building in Glasgow, haunted or not? And what would it tell you if its walls could talk?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Oh, there’s so many to choose from.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, you’re like me.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:
Oh, I love it. I love all these old buildings. And I think it’s tragic the way they’re getting knocked down.

Niall Murphy:

Yeah, I know.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

That drives me insane.

Niall Murphy:

Tears my hair out and I don’t even have any hair.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

I love Glasgow Cathedral. That is just stunning. And the history that could tell us. Yeah. But I understand it’s still used as a cathedral. I don’t really disrespect anybody. Or the Theatre Royal, wow. I love theatres.

Niall Murphy:

Theatre Royal is a great space.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

I love theatres. See, the spirits that come through in the theatre, obviously the actresses, the actors, they come through and oh, it’s great. You’re standing on the stage looking out, and you can see the chairs going down as if people are sitting down and there’s nobody there, but you can see the shadows of people sitting.

Niall Murphy:

Right.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

And you’re like, “Hello.” And they’re waving back at you. It was great.

Niall Murphy:

But Glasgow Cathedral, that’s so ancient.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Oh, it’s beautiful.

Niall Murphy:

Glasgow Cathedral intrigues me because it’s like when you go into it now, your experience of it is completely different to what it used to be. Because for a start, obviously, it lost all its stained glass and everything in the Reformation. And then the Victorians gave it full-on high Victorian stained glass. And all that’s gone because of all the pollution in Glasgow is so bad that the leg columns apparently they couldn’t cope anymore. That was all stripped out in the Second World War, and now it’s all completely modern inside. And probably most people who go there don’t realise that all that stained glass is actually not that old. It’s not even a century old, but it’s all… And it makes it so light, and it must have been quite gloomy in the past, but it’s such a great space. Fantastic.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

It’s beautiful. And can we just tell Glasgow, say, “Can you just stop knocking down all these old buildings?” Oh my god.

Niall Murphy:

I know. It’s what makes Glasgow. Glasgow has all those old buildings that have so much character. That’s what makes Glasgow such a great city.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

This is the thing. Edinburgh has embraced their old characters, whereas Glasgow City Council, “Oh, knock it down. Knock it down.”

Niall Murphy:

Yes.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Drives me crazy.

Niall Murphy:

Yes. Yeah.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Just thought I’d get that in there.

Niall Murphy:

Quite right to. Yeah, I know. It is very frustrating. I was meeting somebody in St. Enoch Square this morning and I was trying to explain about the church that was there in the square and that got knocked down because it was in the way of the buses.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

And that beautiful old hotel that was there, that all got knocked down.

Niall Murphy:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Isi Metzstein used to teach at the art school, teach architecture at the art school. Really great Glasgow architect. Used to say that the joke was that the St. Enoch railway station, it was a grand hotel, huge hotel at the front of two big sheds, and they bulldozed it and then used it to infill Queen’s Dock. And then on top of Queen’s Dock, they built a big hotel with two sheds, which is the SECC. And it’s like, why didn’t they just keep St. Enoch Station and turn it into the SECC?

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Oh.

Niall Murphy:

No-brainer. And it would’ve been in the centre of town. Even better.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

I know. You’re, “Ah!”

Niall Murphy:

So frustrating. I know, just a bit of foresight. Anyway, that’s what we’re trying to do something about and hopefully inspire people to keep what heritage they’ve got and value it and learn to value it a lot more.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Exactly.

Niall Murphy:

Jan, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Oh, you too.

Niall Murphy:

I might actually really want to go on one of your tours, even though I’d be completely frightened about the whole thing.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Come along, don’t be feared.

Niall Murphy:

If you’re doing Govanhill Baths, give me a shout because obviously, we’re in the middle of a whole construction programme, but it would be great fun, particularly in the basement. And yeah, you’ll be intrigued by the basement now because we’ve had to lower the floor in there.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Ooh.

Niall Murphy:

Because the front half of it is going to be office space, lettable office space to community groups. But we’ve also had to renew all of the equipment for the pools. All that’s got to go around the pools. So all the floors have been lowered down, so it’s much more headroom. So it’s not as creepy as it was.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Well, that will annoy the spirits.

Niall Murphy:

Yes. I know. I wonder what they think about it.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Right? Come on, let’s-

Niall Murphy:

We should check in with them.

Jan Murdoch-Richards:

Let’s go. Let’s go.

Niall Murphy:

We should, when it’s finished, get you in there. It would be fun.

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. The podcast is kindly sponsored by the National Trust for Scotland and supported by Tunnock’s.

Niall Murphy (00:12):

Hello everyone, I’m Niall Murphy. Welcome to If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk. A podcast by Glasgow City Heritage Trust about the stories and relationships between historic buildings and people in Glasgow.

Now each human story is different, but some relationships with the city are more complicated than others. In this episode, we’re going to go off the beaten track into a parallel world. It’s a distinctive part of Glasgow, but rarely visited or recognised by the more mainstream world until planning problems arise. So the story is full of colourful characters, complexities and contradictions. Perhaps that’s not surprising when a travelling community becomes more settled and their traditional wintering grounds lie in the way of new development possibilities. According to established views, Glasgow’s home to the largest concentration of show people in Europe. Historically, they have made their mark. Show people opened the city’s first cinemas, they created the tradition of winter fairs at the Kelvin Hall and summer shows on Glasgow Green.

(01:13):
Even so, this tight-knit community has remained largely unnoticed. And according to today’s guest, that’s the way proudly independent show people have tended to like it and he should know. So today’s guest is Dr. Mitch Miller, social researcher, artist, cultural activist and creative community collaborator. And Mitch was born on four wheels and spent a happy childhood with a show people parents on the road travelling from fairground to fairground. Yet unlike his siblings or many of his peers, Mitch completed and furthered his education leading to a PhD in communications design from Glasgow School of Art. He is an acknowledged expert on the history of travelling show people, but always a cartoonist as at heart and a cartoonist as he has said, with delusions of grandeur. So when the Commonwealth Games threatened to sweep away show people’s homes, many of them inconveniently located in the path of the games, Mitch picked up his pen and the dialectrogram was born. And we’ll get on to more about what a dialectogram involves in a minute.

(02:23):
So Dr. Mitch Miller is an eloquent writer and speaker. Over the last couple of decades, he has become a pioneering presence in Glasgow. That includes co-founding the Drouth Magazine, hoping to establish exhibitions at Riverside Museum and Kelvin Hall about the history and heritage to show people, as well as documenting the lives of other vulnerable communities in and around the city. So a very warm welcome to the podcast, Mitch. It’s a great privilege to be taken inside this kind of fascinating but endangered parallel world and there’s so much to talk about. So it’s hard to know where to begin, but perhaps we might start with your own beginning. So first question, it’s probably fair to say that your beginning was unusual. Not many of us are born on four wheels. So can you tell us a bit more about your early years and why along with many other show people, you’ve chosen Glasgow as your kind of natural home?

Mitch Miller (03:18):

Thanks, Niall and hello. Thanks for having me on. I hope I can live up to that wonderful introduction. I feel very inadequate.

Niall Murphy (03:25):

Of course, you can.

Mitch Miller (03:29):

So yeah, I was born to two show families, both my mother and father’s families go way back in this tradition. Both from kind of mixed circus and fairground families as well. And yeah, I mean, to me it was normal. I had a big extended family. They travelled in the summer when I went to see relatives. We were often off to find them at different fairs around Scotland. I never paid to get on the waltzers or indeed any fairground ride. That was normal to me. And aye it was just life really, I suppose in those early years. But I think when you do kind of live with a foot on either peer, you’re kind of more aware again of what does make it distinctive. And I suppose I started to notice that whereas my friends had weekends, for example, as I got older, weekends were for work. You had a role within the family, you had a job to do as part of what your family did.

(04:32):
So I didn’t have Saturdays or Sundays for most of my life until I went and got my own job and then I could take them off. And yeah, I just sort of lived part of that life and lived in the flow of it really. And yeah, it was a good life. You were surrounded by relatives, cousins. I still discover new cousins to this day. My mother’s great phrase was, “That’s your cousin.” Because there were just so many of us.

(05:00):
And yeah, it felt like a very safe life, a very protected life, quite a hard one at times. So it’s a hard way of making a living, travelling from place to place and breathing the Scottish weather in the summer. But yeah, I always felt it gave me a very good grounding, a very good sort of base from which the work. I always had a very clear idea of who I was, I suppose, in relation to that. And then as I grew older, I suppose I started to explore the outside world a bit more and learn more about that and in some ways appreciate that background even more as a result, although it wasn’t always a smooth journey, I would say, in any respect.

Niall Murphy (05:40):

Okay. So can you tell us more about the long-standing relationship between show people and what is their favourite winter ground in this case Glasgow, and any of the issues that can potentially have emerged from that over time?

Mitch Miller (05:56):

Yeah, so sorry. Yeah, the relationship with Glasgow is a very old one. So just to start from my family, I suppose it’s a good way of explaining it. So my dad’s family were border travellers, so they travelled to border towns and the north of England mostly and ranged out from there. They often wintered in Carlisle actually, but sometimes in Glasgow. But my Mam’s family, they were what was called Tramline Travellers. And the term came from the fact that, you could travel around the greater Glasgow area without leaving it and entire season. There was all these different fairs that…

Niall Murphy (06:37):

Right. Okay. And it’s the tram.

Mitch Miller (06:40):

Exactly. Yeah. And Glasgow has a long history of travelling showgrounds, in part because theatre used to be banned here, you weren’t allowed to have theatre until quite recently, like late 19th century. So the fairs performed a very important function in terms of bringing entertainment. So Mam’s family, they ranged out a couple of places in the season but generally stayed within the Glasgow kind of environment. And that sort of reflects a longstanding relationship with Glasgow, as I said, because you didn’t have theatre here, they weren’t allowed to have theatres here. A guy called David Prince Miller, who was a travelling show person, I don’t know if he’s a relative actually, he had his Adelphi Theatre famously burnt down. Glasgow was very against that in the old days. So that created a sort of ecosystem of small fairs and often a lot of winter fairs as well that go way back 200 years or so.

(07:36):
But Glasgow’s also geographically perfectly placed to go south or north, you can access the north and the south from here. It’s a good sort of locus for that. But also it’s an industrial city. It has lots of brown belt, it has lots of yards and lots and bits of ground that just sit there. And unlike Edinburgh see, if I dare mention the name of that city in this podcast, it’s available. You can be out the way and tuck yourself into different parts of the city. So I think a combination of factors made this the capital for show people in a sense, of Scotland, it’s where most about 80% of us live we think, and where we tend to range out from.

Niall Murphy (08:21):

Right, okay. Oh, that kind of brings me onto my next question, which is it is quite extraordinary that there is this really significant community within the city that has been relatively unnoticed for so long. So how many show people actually live in Glasgow? For Scotland’s latest census, that was the first time that show people were included within it. And so does that kind of make a difference?

Mitch Miller (08:45):

Yes, well we hope it will. So we haven’t actually got our census figures back yet from this census, and we’re very keen to see it. Now, there’s figures that go between four to 6,000 living in Glasgow is what it’s thought. Now, I can tell you now, honestly, that’s a back of a beer mat calculation. It was the best efforts of those who had been doing a bit of research in it, but we didn’t have inclusion in the census, for example, which would mean that we’d have more robust figures. So myself and a bunch of other researchers actually campaigned to get us added to the census for the last time. And hopefully when those figures come back we will know. And I can tell you honestly how many of us there are.

Niall Murphy (09:27):

Yeah. Very much. Because things like that are absolutely critical for being able to direct services towards a community. So you need to be able to gather that information somehow, because it’s going to influence other things like planning as well. And not just in the sense of building stuff, but planning for communities.

Mitch Miller (09:47):

Absolutely. And when we’re having these discussions, I work with Fair Scotland an organisation that advocate for this and the Showman’s Guild, and when we’re having these discussions, we’re saying, “Well, there is a community here that we need to address certain things.” And then we get asked, “Well, how many?” We get asked for the hard data behind that and it’s very hard to provide it. So I think just in terms of that discussion, it will help that a great deal.

Niall Murphy (10:12):

Okay. So show people tend to occupy land where no one else has chosen to live until the grassroots of regeneration appear. So the Commonwealth Games threatened to sweep away many traditional wintering grounds and yards, and that led to the creative activism of your dialectogram. So can you tell us something about what a dialectogram is? And can you tell us more about how collaborative dialectography, if that is actually a word, supports community campaigns around the city?

Mitch Miller (10:49):

Yeah, I think the thing to emphasise is that all these words are made up obviously. So I made up dialectogram, it’s a bad pun, I think we can all agree with that. It’s what happens after several cans of beer and a bit of panic comes in. Because when I was going to work at Red Roads, I was asked to define what I did and I actually didn’t quite know at that stage the kind of work I was bringing out. So I don’t know, I just plucked out somewhere and dialectogram came out of that. But yeah, it’s a bad pun basically of dialect and diagram. They’re very complex illustrations of places and they’re sort of made from conversation, observation and a lot of ink, I suppose is the easy way of putting it. I’ll spend a lot of time in the community getting to know its places, working out how a building or a site or a location of some kind works, what it means to those people, trying to bring people into an ongoing and kind of rolling conversation about it.

(11:58):
And then in the middle of that, I’m starting to draw and map out a kind of representation of it. And everyone’s different, everyone is made differently. There’s the kind of shape of the community, the way the community works will really determine who wants to have their say, who doesn’t. I’ve done some that had only about three or four people involved and others about two hundred. It’s a real range in terms of that engagement. But at the heart of it is this idea that I’m trying not to make something about the community, I’m trying to make it with and through it as much as possible, trying to include them in that discussion, trying to be directed by them to some extent as well. And then to let this kind of visual trace or visual record of what their place is come from that.

Niall Murphy (12:49):

Right. How do you actually work on them? Is it a spontaneous thing or do you sit down with a sheet and know how you’re going to populate it? Or is it something you plan in advance or? How’d you go by doing it?

Mitch Miller (13:07):

Well, if there’s a dialectography, it’s not a science, I think there’s the first thing I would say. Basically, as I said before, I’m a cartoonist with delusions of grandeur, and that is sadly very true. I kind of treat it like a comic initially. So I work on this A0 mount board, and that’s like the basic unit of these. Some are double size from that, but the smallest that goes is A0. And I’ll start with the ground plan and I’ll start with just working out how the ground is laying out. And I use it almost as a comic panel to then think about how the narrative can be shaped within that and placed within that. And then from that it just sort of grows. And what happens is, I’ll sort of have a wee burst of work and I’ll start to flesh it out. Then I’ll do an artist do an prevaricate horribly and think about it and maybe go and do some more field work because that’s way more fun.

Niall Murphy (14:04):

Yes.

Mitch Miller (14:05):

Yeah, way more fun. And then I’ll come back to it and I’ll maybe do a bit more. I also will often involve people at that stage. So I’ll bring people in to let them see the drawing and process. So for example, at a place called The Claypits up in North Glasgow, for example, I spent many kind of days introducing it to the community again and showing them, “Look, it’s half done, it doesn’t look terrible. How can we fill this up? What can we add to this?” And we sort of have an ongoing conversation about what could be there, what should be there, how people feel about that. Somehow through all of this, and after many weeks, and I know you’ve talked to Chris Leslie on this podcast and he has to work with me, so pity this man because I spend ages, it takes me ages to finish a piece.

(14:56):
It’s a very messy process. Whereas, he of course is a proper photographer, nice and clean, press the button, get the image. He’s done in five minutes, I’m done in about eight months. And yeah, somehow it comes about. And then we have this piece of work that exists. After that, what I do is I’ll photograph it so there’s a digital version. We can make that into signs, we can make that into various outputs, never a tablecloth, which is my ambition. And then we also can do things we… I mean imagine the tablecloth you can add to it as well, a bit of mayonnaise here, a tomato sauce there. You’re adding to the dialectogram, but the original always stays with the community as well.

(15:40):
I always make sure it stays somewhere, it can be accessed. And so it kind of belongs to them too. So I try not to go in, make the artwork and then leave. I tried to leave a bit behind so that it’s there for them as well. And yeah, I’ve done that in all sorts of weird places. Tower blocks, showman’s yards, nature reserves, African art centres, Steeples. It’s been a very strange catalogue so far.

Niall Murphy (16:07):

You’ve, as part of your process, it kind of talk about a sense of social responsibility for us. And it does sound as well, like it can be quite energetic at times. Do you want to talk about that at all?

Mitch Miller (16:19):

Yeah, I mean, I have all sorts of clients. So I’ve had clients from libraries who want to rework what their library is and how it can serve the community, to grassroots organisations, to more community groups. I’ve even done work with some anarchists at the University of Glasgow. It’s been a very strange trip. And I think what that does is that every time I’m going into working with a group, I’m having to adjust myself to that and learn from that as well and learn how this is best done. But yeah, there’s a lot of energy. It’s quite an exhausting process. If you want to do this, it’s not an in and out, it’s not a quick job that you can turn out. For some reason-

Niall Murphy (17:06):

Yeah, it’s an emotional connection to a subject as well. And that can obviously be quite draining as well.

Mitch Miller (17:11):

Absolutely. And I have had projects where there’s been quite strong stuff in terms of the theme and the material we’re dealing with and it can get to you a bit. So you need to take a break from it and so forth. But yeah, I think the whole methodology is about that though, it’s about really getting to understand the place and really being willing to just let the place lead you a bit into making the work as good as it can be.

Niall Murphy (17:36):

Okay. Now, just for our listeners at this point also want to save that. We are going to at the end of the podcast, give you links so that you can appreciate just how amazing Mitch’s dialectrograms really are, and how much kind of information he manages to get down on the page for each of these and just what fascinating narratives come out of them. So, absolutely well worth looking at. Okay. So we haven’t talked about architecture so far, but elsewhere, you’ve beautifully described things like the plug-ugly, prefabs and lives without plumbing and things like inward facing circles of wagons. Can you take us inside some of these settlements and dwellings that you’re observing and tell us who lives there? And then what was it that eventually drew you back to living in a tenement flat?

Mitch Miller (18:27):

Yeah. So we call our sites yards or grounds, it’s just the term that we use. And I suppose I’ve just lived in and arounds all my life and they’re just very familiar. So it’s interesting to have to actually describe it. So as you walk in the gate, so most of them have some kind of wall or fence around them. And if you walk in the gate, what you’ll find is nowadays, certainly is a mixture of what you might call chalet homes, quite posh. They are on wheels, but you can’t really see the wheels. They’re tiny wee things and they’re designed to go in flatbeds and be moved. I think park home is another term for them. But I think we like chalets, I think we all like to imagine we’re in the Swiss Alps or something. So you’ll see a mixtur of those. You’ll also see road going wagons, which are coach built designed to be in the road all year round.

(19:16):
And our homes, they are family homes all year round. And that’s what my parents grew up in, I was born into and my grandparents would live from soup to nuts as it were. And then you’ll also see what we call wee trailers, which is caravans as other people would call them, the tourer caravans. And then a bunch, you see lorries. At one end of the ground you’d see a lot of lorries and kind of work areas and the lorries do everything. They pull the thing, they have all their stuff in them, they have a generator in them and they double as work sheds. And so you’ll see lorries opened up with the steps and usually guys in the winter painting around them or fixing something. And that was always the fun part as a kid, to go down there and see what your dad and your uncles were doing and annoy them quite a bit.

(20:02):
So you’d have that end of the ground there. The kind of more domestic end is where the chalets and wagons are. And there’s a lot of life there too. The steps were always very important. I remember travelling in the summer and you’d sit on the steps and when it was a nice day you’d play with your toys on the steps, there’d be lots of domestics, some people would wash around them. And that was just normal. So a kind of modern yard, a contemporary yard. Has plumbing now, we have from about late 90s we started to have these kind of hose systems where you could plumb them in and that was amazing. But a lot of them, even very modern chalets will still have a water can on the step as a weak kind of reminder of how it used to be, which is that was your water supply.

(20:45):
And I remember as a boy being sent down to the tap and you filled the water up. If your Mam was washing, you’d be going doing that three or four times a day, if not five or six. And that was just kind of normal then. So there are ways in which the lifestyle’s more modern. You go inside one of these things. And whether it’s an old wagon or a chalet, I mean firstly clean, I mean, this doesn’t look clean here, but this is my studio, this is my work shed I’m in right now. But you go into a chalet, I mean F spotless. Usually someone wiping up crumbs right behind you as you go in. A lot of the old wagons used to have winter and summer carpets actually to sort of deal with the kind of outside stuff. A lot of ornaments, very, very well appointed.

(21:29):
It’s like a palace inside, but tiny often. And it was tremendously, could you call it house proud, wagon proud, I don’t know. Was a big thing. So outside you had this very organic life of quite dirty life. A lot of fixing and smell of diesel is just such an evocative one for me. But inside pristine, shoes, off, newspaper down if you’re coming in from working on the lorries and stuff like that.

Niall Murphy (21:57):

Being respectful, yes.

Mitch Miller (21:59):

Yeah. And that was very much the life I kind of remember and still is. And you go into some of these big grounds. There’s some down in kind Rutherglen and Cambuslang that are just… Everyone’s sort of copying each other as well in terms of the style and stuff. And they’ve got the best ornaments and stuff. It’s really, really posh. So it’s quite surprising to a lot of people. They expect I think quite rough and ready and it does look that way outside to an outsider.

(22:26):
But then you go inside and it’s like, “Oh God, dare I sit down on this couch with these pristine lovely plump cushions and so forth.” And that was always the life I remember. In terms of why we moved back, so I lived in a tenement for quite a few years actually and liked it. Tenements are a great way of living in many ways. Very interesting way living. But I think a lot of reasons, one, we wanted to start a family. And for a child it’s a great environment because you have… Well, okay, childcare, you talk to my friends and talk to me about childcare. I am doing so well right? On that front. There’s like an auntie next door, there’s my cousin there, my nephew there, all these people I can just help for childcare in a second. And I just remember as a kid just playing outside with this circle of wagons around you because most showman’s yards are a rough circle or rectangle.

(23:21):
We all sort of face into each other and it’s just very safe and very kind of comforting. There’s an adult who knows you nearby at all times, but you can also just do your own thing and get into trouble and do all the stuff that you want to do, skin your knees and so forth. So when we were thinking about having our daughter who’s three now and really enjoying the travelling life too, it was a kind of no brainer, it was like, it makes sense. And then it’s also quite a cost effective way of living in many ways, we could live more cheaply.

(23:51):
Also, my parents were getting older and I just wanted to be around for them and able to help a bit more in that. But yeah, wife’s not a show person, she’s a normal, but she very bravely said, “Let’s give it a try.” I would never say to her, but she said, “Let’s give it a try, let’s see what it’s like.” And we had a five-year plan. If she was fed up after five years we would go and get a house again. And it’s been seven now. So I think she’s liking it. She has not requested to move at any stage and is actually talking about getting a bigger chalet home maybe in the future. So yeah, it’s a way of life that I think really suits us and has a lot to recommend it.

Niall Murphy (24:37):

It sounds incredibly close knit and real sense of community about the place, which yeah, tenements can be like that, but not to the degree that you are talking about.

Mitch Miller (24:51):

Yeah, I mean, obviously that’s got us up upside and downsides. I did have to, I explained to my wife about how you get some privacy and the methods of that and people don’t knock on doors, for example. My sister has never knocked on my door ever. She just walks in and you just hear her coming in. And everyone can see what you’re doing as well. And so there are obviously, I suppose a price to be paid in that sense if you’re more used to doing your own thing. And it’s just a sort of balance you have to have. During the lockdown. My mother-in-law came to live with us from Fife and she loved it actually. She really liked living there. But I think one thing she never got used to was the fact that people just came in the door. When she saw someone coming to see us, she would go to the door and they were like, “What are you doing? Why are you…?”

(25:32):
Because we just walk into each other’s doors all the time and just… No one ever comes to the door to greet you if you’re another showman, you’re just “Yeah come in to the tea is over there.” It’s very kind of informal that way. So yeah there are, as I say, that can be great, other times it’s like, “Okay, they’re going to see what we’re doing here. How do we stop that? How do we get some privacy?” So it’s not for everybody. And I would say, I think what was interesting was my wife dealt very well with it, but is a culture shock as well, when you go from being an individual unit within a city to you’re kind of living in a village really

Niall Murphy (26:11):

To be something that sounds more like an enlarged family.

Mitch Miller (26:14):

Yeah. I mean, we do live in big extended families, so our wee ground, most of us are there. My brother, my sister, cousins, my brother’s kids, my mother and father, in-laws as well. It’s all a big sprawling extended family. And that’s-

Niall Murphy (26:32):

Sure. It sounds much more like how a village would’ve been.

Mitch Miller (26:37):

Yeah. Everyone knows who you are, they know by your face, they probably knew your grandfather as well. They probably knew you as a child, shall we say, in short trousers. And that’s just how it is. And that again, there’s a lot I missed about that and a lot I kind of love about it, but it’s also-

Niall Murphy (26:55):

I can imagine why, yes.

Mitch Miller (26:58):

…it’s a tight embrace, put it that way.

Niall Murphy (26:59):

Yes. Okay. Bearing that in mind, that kind of brings me onto my next question, which is, you’ve talked about this really kind of close-knit community. So then when you’re looking at things like the regeneration of the city, particularly in places like Water Row, Govan, that must be a huge threat to what is a small, really close-knit community. So can you tell us more about the feelings about that?

Mitch Miller (27:25):

Yeah, so Water Row and Govan is one of the older sites that we have. It’s at least over a hundred years old. As I say that we can trace our sites in the city back at least 200 and odd years. But certainly there’s a handful of sites that are over a hundred and we have a very long history in the city and certainly Water Row is one of them. That’s if you include Govan as part of Glasgow, and I know that for Govan that’s a big issue.

Niall Murphy (27:53):

Yes.

Mitch Miller (27:54):

It’s the issue isn’t it. Yeah, Water Row, there’s two yards there, owned by two different families, but again, big extended families. And there’s about 12 families involved there. 12 plus, actually I think, not quite sure exactly how many now. So around roughly two tenement buildings worth of people live there and have lived there for a long time. And there’s a very old association with Govan as well. And Govan, Old Kirk and things like that. So they’re in the way of the new development at Water Row. Now I think a couple of things to emphasise whenever these discussions come up. One is we pay council tax and we pay lease on the ground that we do. No one’s squatting here. These are the Johnsons, for example, who have one of the yards. They’ve been playing their way on that yard for a long, long time. And it’s always something that comes up. “Now, do you pay council tax? Do you pay your way?” And “Yes, we do.” We’re like everybody else, unfortunately we have to pay the tax man.

Niall Murphy (28:48):

Yeah. You have just as much a right to the city as everybody else.

Mitch Miller (28:53):

And I think that’s the issue, Niall. It’s not like we want special treatment, actually, it’s just we pay our way. And we live an odd way. We know that it’s odd that not everyone’s cup of tea, but all we want to do is live that way and not bother other people. And what you’ll find is in most the parts of the city we’re in, people don’t even notice us half the time. So the Water Row has to move, and that has been known for a while. And actually a lot of the families there were fine with that. It was like, “Okay, we’re not going to get in, we don’t in the way of this, we can see what benefit that brings to Govan.” And they are Govanites, their kids go to school there, their doctors are there, their lives are there when they’re not travelling.

Niall Murphy (29:32):

Yes.

Mitch Miller (29:33):

So it wasn’t as if they didn’t want things to get better there or go ahead. But what happened was… Unpicking this is quite complex. So I’ll tell you my involvement and my perspective in it.

Niall Murphy (29:45):

Okay.

Mitch Miller (29:45):

In 2018, when that first was announced and it was announced that the family had to move, I think the attitude was they wanted to work with the council as much as possible and cooperate. But certainly, the consultation was very thin and engagement was very intermittent. They were not never actually to their knowledge deemed to this day, told in writing what was happening. They were just told verbally that this was going to happen. Myself and a group of other researchers who are from a showground background and Fair Scotland, we wrote a series of letters, open letters to different councillors just asking to deal with this issue and to firstly improve the level of conversation and then to address the provisions in Glasgow’s own housing strategy.

(30:35):
Page 94 to 97, if I remember rightly, which says they have to provide an alternative model site, like for like as best they can. And as I say, picking apart what some people think on different sides can be difficult. But from our perspective there has not been a positive engagement with that. There has not been a conversation or a paper trail round out of any quality. And we sent a letter in 2018, it has yet to be answered by anybody and this is 2023. So you can see the predicament the families are in and why they’ve went from cooperative to now really quite angry and scared as well.

Niall Murphy (31:18):

I can imagine. I mean, I recall going along to the consultation and it was just kind of a drop in thing in Govan at the time, just because I was interested in seeing what was happening. And I remember there being a woman from the Water Row site there, and that did seem to be a real disconnect, which did make me feel really uncomfortable, because there’s kind of a core thing of consultation is you got to be able to connect into communities and explain things to them. And yeah, it’s very difficult because it is a very private community and then this kind of massive thing is being done to them. And yet Glasgow with its kind of history of comprehensive development areas and regeneration from the kind of 1960s onwards, you would’ve thought would learn the lessons that you can’t do things to people, you’ve got to take people with you. It’s very frustrating.

Mitch Miller (32:09):

Yeah. And we’re not the only community who has this kind of issue. We know this, of course not. There’s lots of stories around Glasgow like that. I suppose what kind of worries me is that when we were included in the 2017 to 2022 housing strategy, which was great, that was a step forward. It was the first time they recognised they should be trying to push the envelope in how they work with our community. That was hopeful, that was progress. But then we’ve seen the first test case of that and-

Niall Murphy (32:39):

It’s not worked out.

Mitch Miller (32:40):

…it’s not been very encouraging. And as someone who lives in a yard myself, just to be selfish, I’m like, “What happens when mine’s in the way of something?”

Niall Murphy (32:47):

Yes. Yeah.

Mitch Miller (32:50):

Does the fact I live in four wheels just make me a different type of citizen? Should I build foundations legal or not, to make me a better citizen? I don’t know. You know what I mean? It’s clearly quite concerning. And I think Glasgow’s missing a trick actually here to lead by example. We have a big community here.

Niall Murphy (33:08):

Yes.

Mitch Miller (33:08):

It’s a big community. It’s a community that lives for the most part, very peacefully and unnoticed as part of this city. And they could really be showing how it can be done. And so far I’m not seeing it.

Niall Murphy (33:22):

Completely agree. I mean, it’s funny because it’s not as if it’s a new issue when the whole regeneration of the East end kicked off even in advance of the Commonwealth Games. I was involved in that kind of from 2006 onwards. And I remember going and having a look at that area relatively early on, because we got involved with looking at Bridgeton Cross and the area around Dalmarnock Station and a potential regeneration of Dalmarnock Station. And so this was my previous life as an architect. And we’re wondering around the area taking photographs and just trying to get a feel for it because you didn’t really know that part of the city terribly well. Of course, there’s a big community bang in the middle of that. And it was made really clear to us, “Would you please not take photographs of our spaces?” And we respected that as you should be respecting and any community that you come across. But it seems so, it strange to me from that basis there when you’re thinking, “Hold on a minute, there’s an issue here. We have to think about this.” Nobody’s really done it.

Mitch Miller (34:31):

And I could talk about Dalmarnock for quite some time as well, but I wouldn’t bore you to death. But Dalmarnock was why I picked up the pen with dialectogram back all those years ago. That was the clearance of Dalmarnock or the potential of the clearance of Dalmarnock.

Niall Murphy (34:46):

Yes.

Mitch Miller (34:47):

And we didn’t lose as many as we thought. It’s still the biggest concentration of us actually in Glasgow.

Niall Murphy (34:51):

Yes.

Mitch Miller (34:52):

But that was looking like, wow, all these relatives, I’ve got all these people I know, that life I remember visiting these yards going down there, that’s just going to be cleared away. And where did it go?

Niall Murphy (35:05):

Yeah.

Mitch Miller (35:05):

What’s the plan? And wasn’t one really of any kind. And that’s kind of why I did the first dialectogram actually, which was kind of made in anger slightly. And I just wanted to show that, you know what? You might not like this way of life or you may have issues whether you may be even prejudices about it, but what you can’t say is, it’s not a way of life.

Niall Murphy (35:23):

Yeah, definitely.

Mitch Miller (35:24):

There’s a system to how we live. There’s a culture here.

Niall Murphy (35:26):

There’s a whole culture there you should be respecting. And a key part of what kind of emerged from all that process was that there had to be, and this is very much due with the regeneration of these East Enders part of it, there should have been a health impact assessment. And so the impact on that community should have been properly assessed. Because we know from what happened in Glasgow back then that this is the consequence of suddenly scattering communities to the four winds, how tight-knit these communities were. And suddenly all those kind of soft social bonds are shattered that the impact that has on people’s health and psyche and it’s really damaging.

Mitch Miller (36:05):

Absolutely. Yeah. And again, what concerns me about Water Row is that I know there’s a lot of elderly, lot of very young families there and young people. I’ll call them vulnerable in the sense that they could be made vulnerable by this. They’re quite proud and I wouldn’t want to just play that on them. But the effects of this movement, if it’s not done right, if it’s just a scattering of them, if it’s have them towed some site that’s just really deeply unsuitable would just be terrible. And the effects, as I say, are almost hard to quantify.

Niall Murphy

Yes.

Mitch Miller (36:39):

But we do have an example of this before. There used to be sites in Whiteinch and Hull Street in the West End, other side of the of the river. They got moved to Dalmarnock of course, and they were right next to the sewage works again. So there’s all sorts of ways in which you do find this obviously in the least pleasurable parts of the city or the parts that people really don’t want to go until, of course someone realises something can be made of that, of course. And then again suddenly we’re a problem.

Niall Murphy (37:08):

Yes.

Mitch Miller (37:08):

So I do think people might listen to us thinking, “Well, why can’t they just be more reasonable or be more normal or live in houses?” And I think it’s not that we want special treatment.

Niall Murphy (37:19):

But it’s your land.

Mitch Miller (37:20):

Yeah, exactly. This land is bought, it’s leased, it’s legally bought. And they apply for planning. I have a cousin who has a site and it’s just beautiful. It’s like I wouldn’t even eat my dinner off it because that’d be besmirching it and he keeps us all there.

Niall Murphy (37:33):

Yeah, absolutely.

Mitch Miller (37:35):

And it’s just, all we really want to do is actually get on with our lives and not be a bother, in a sense.

Niall Murphy (37:44):

Yeah. I mean, this kind of brings me on to my next question because it’s about the stress that communities are placed under. And at the same time there’s this massive change going on in the Glasgow and you are living through this time of enormous disruption and your work, what you’re doing celebrates that really unique culture. But then how much is that culture already changing and evolving and are you seeing those changes in the way the younger generation think and speak and about how they want to live? So are you seeing that too?

Mitch Miller (38:19):

Yeah. I think that one thing to stress is that we’re not immune history, however that history comes to us, whether it’s through regeneration or just through the processes that are there. Our young people have phones, there’s interesting pictures of Valley speaking our own dialect and Glaswegian going on there. We’re like anybody else, we’re sort of changing with times. We have PlayStation 5s and broadband. So yeah, no, there is change, and I think it’s a change I’ve kind of been charting and noticing quite a lot of, so. For example, in my grandparents’ time, you were 80% nomadic, very rarely, and your season in the winter was very short, as in the off season. You were out again by February knocking ice off the wheels and you would just wear a perpetual nomad really. And that was life and that was fine. And you lived very cheaply and you did your thing and you did that one thing, which was fairs and circuses. That was what you did.

(39:21):
But that’s changed now. It’s very diverse now, I think. Even on our tiny wee yard, which is not a big one, we’ve got some people who work in offices, we’ve got a joker who teaches the art school and draws for a living, which is just a ridiculous thing. There are many different jobs that people do, but actually interestingly, people still want to live on the yards with their family. They still want to retain that. Even those who do travel, they often do it part time where they’re almost like portfolio work now, where they might have a job driving or doing something with a snack bar. If you meet a snack bar in Glasgow, by the way, you’ve probably met a relative of mine, just to be clear. But they have a kind of mixture of ways of incomes that they bring in as well.

(40:05):
So yeah, it’s changed. Our young people, for example, we have a very good education system here in Glasgow for them. That came about because, well, basically a bunch of women in our community really fought for it. And so it’s now quite normal for people to go into higher education. But they don’t necessarily leave. In my day, you did, it was a choice you made, were going to assimilate, you were going to go out there. And that was what we did. And you never mentioned where you came from either.

(40:31):
But the younger generation now, I think they’re a actually a bit more ballsy, a bit more like, “No, we’re not going, we’re not going to hide it. And also we’re going to go to uni, but we might just come back and still work on the fairs. We will blend our lives in interesting ways and not necessarily make that break that would’ve traditionally come with that decision.” So I’m it’s trying to embrace us a whole range of complexity. It’s quite hard to put into words actually. It’s changing a lot. I don’t think my grandparents would quite recognise. They’d recognise some parts and feel comforted by that, but also be quite surprised I think at how much we’ve changed as a community.

Niall Murphy (41:09):

The kind of traditions have evolved over time in generations.

Mitch Miller (41:14):

Yeah. Having said that, we have these big chalet homes and they’re palatial and they’re big, but they still own wheels. They still move if they have to. We still want them to be able to move. So there’s all these ways in which things persist as well. And it is kind of amazing we’re still here as well. The fairs are not going through a good time. It’s not even legal in some fairs to have your caravans there with you. And yet we’re still doing it. And it’s not because of the money, because it’s a terrible way of making money. I can’t stress that enough. It always has been actually, if you look at what my great-grandparents were going through.

(41:47):
But it’s a tradition, it’s a lifestyle, it’s our world in its own. And yeah, my nephew, who’s 22, he wants to do this and I’m like, “You’re mad, but it’s great. Well done. But you’re insane. It’s a terrible way of making a living.” So I don’t know, I always get asked, “Is this lifestyle going to survive? And I think, well, as long as there are people bloody minded enough to want to still live it, then yeah ii will.

Niall Murphy (42:13):

Okay. Can you tell me more about who the Glasgow giant is? This kind of big bull fat guy with elephant feet, this cartoon figure that kind of emerges from the rubble of Red Road. Can you tell us any more about that?

Mitch Miller (42:27):

Well, this is the cartoonist part of me, I suppose. And also maybe a part of my brain it’s based, not explored, but I worked at Red Road for many years as you know-

Niall Murphy (42:37):

Fascinating

Mitch Miller (42:37):

I produced five dialectograms.

Niall Murphy (42:37):

Yeah.

Mitch Miller (42:39):

Fascinating place and a place that really kind of made me as an artist, if you like. Oh, a lot. I kind of really came to love the place even though I had all these contradictions. And I think just looking at when that demolition happened, and actually that demolition was ongoing, there was successive demolitions before the big one as it were. I think I was after maybe the first or second of them that happened. I sort of started to really just think about this character and developed this character in my sketchbook one day of, I don’t know, what represents progress or what represents a city, a big organisation it’s very complex. It doesn’t always know what one hand is doing from the other. How to represent that. Apparently it’s a big fat bald guy with elephant feet. I don’t know. It just came.

Niall Murphy (43:28):

Just a large.

Mitch Miller (43:31):

And yeah, it’s not about saying… It’s not like being pejorative even, it’s about… I think Glasgow, listen, I love the place unconditionally much as it annoys me at times. And I think the way in which the city tries to improve itself can sometimes be inspired and sometimes just be really destructive and terrible. And so the giant kind of represents that. He represents a sort of lumbering attempt to move forward and occasionally crushing things flat and occasionally making a mess of things. And I don’t know, it’s a bit…I mean, my wife finds it very creepy because of the way the eyes are and stuff. But to me, I look at it affectionately, it’s like this is a city trying to change and not always getting it right.

Niall Murphy (44:13):

Yes.

Mitch Miller (44:14):

So there’s a series of these drawings I’ve made, did a bunch for The Guardian where it’s just different places like Red Roads or a travels yard or other types of site. And I’m just putting the giant in there as a sort of marker of what’s happening.

Niall Murphy (44:30):

Touching on that, do you feel a sense of responsibility for how you record people in your dialectrograms?

Mitch Miller (44:36):

Oh, huge. Yeah. I mean, it does actually worry me sometimes. “Am I doing this? Am I getting this…? Am I doing this well? Am I doing this responsibly?” Because I do think as an artist, get some licence and I see it myself. I go into a place as an artist, for example. And I can ask really stupid questions. I can get in on conversations I really shouldn’t be involved in. And it’s quite easy in a way. And you could really misuse that.

Niall Murphy (45:02):

Yes, yeah.

Mitch Miller (45:03):

You could really do terrible things with that if you wanted. And some have, let’s look at the history of art, there’s loads of that.

Niall Murphy (45:08):

Yes.

Mitch Miller (45:09):

But I am trying not to do that. I’m trying not to be wishy-washy per se, but to just be very careful and thoughtful about where that power goes, how I’m using that capital I get from my position. And yeah, trying to make it with that community. Again, not trying to pretty them up or make it too feel good or touchy feely even, just trying to be genuinely objective, admitting my own subjectivity and then trying to work through that to make images and representations that mean something. But also trying not to cause chaos in my own wake as well. That’s really important to me.

Niall Murphy (45:50):

So what lies ahead for you? What kind of new work are you’re planning at the moment?

Mitch Miller (45:54):

Right. Well, there’s one thing I can’t announce yet, so I wouldn’t even talk about that. So forget I even said that right now.

Niall Murphy (46:00):

Okay.

Mitch Miller (46:00):

But at the moment I’m working with the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisation in Marseille.

Niall Murphy (46:09):

Oh wow.

Mitch Miller (46:09):

Isn’t that an impressive sentence? Yeah, which is a really, really interesting and nerve-wracking project looking at Romany culture in Europe. So Barvalo will be the first big exhibition in a European museum about Romany culture. Unbelievably, if you consider the thousand Europe history and all the opportunities that they’ve had. And this will be so, I don’t know if you know the museum, but it’s a big Borg cube on the kind of harbour at Marseille. It’s kind of amazing. And I’m working on two works for them at the moment. Looking at migration and language. And I’m working with an amazing team with the museum, University of Vermont and an organisation called ERIAC, which is the European Romany cultural organisation who very nicely asked me to be part of the whole thing, which was really quite something. So working on that right now, looking at it just now. And still kind of working on that, and that will be exhibited in April as well. So that’s the main thing I’m working on.

Niall Murphy (47:11):

Any sort of positive changes you’d like to see?

Mitch Miller (47:14):

In terms of Glasgow?

Niall Murphy (47:19):

Oh, just kind of general, your work and kind of your impact on Glasgow?

Mitch Miller (47:22):

I think I’d be very careful about overstating any changes I make. I think what I get to do is, I get to ride along with people who are often doing very good things and are good people in that sense. So for example, a dialectogram I did a Baltic Street Adventure Playground. Those guys are doing amazing work with the young people down there, bringing play to that area that really needed it. I’d just been working up at Possil with The Claypits, local nature reserve people who took a bit of wasteland, which was in effect to nature reserve already, but very hard to get into and made it into something beautiful that anyone can go and see and access. And I was there this other day with my daughter and it was amazing just how diverse the communities of people who use that now are.

(48:06):
So you have to go. And if you go, you might bump into a big dialectogram installed there, which was quite a job actually, it was quite a trick one to draw. But I think I also often feel I’m along for the ride in a lot of these things. And there, I get to see these people doing the thing and I get to maybe contribute something to it, even if it’s just a record of that in some way. And that’s always been… That’s what keeps me doing it, to be honest with you. Because honestly, sometimes you’re there at 12 o’clock at night still drawing this damn thing and you really just wish you’d done landscapes or cartoons down in Hyde Park or something. Just think, “There’s got to be easier ways of doing this.” And you do get a bit scunnered with it, but every time one of these projects comes about, I realise why this is a great way to work and a great kind of job to be able to do.

Niall Murphy (49:00):

Sure.

Mitch Miller (49:00):

So I carry on doing it.

Niall Murphy (49:02):

Sure.

Mitch Miller (49:03):

Until till the end probably.

Niall Murphy (49:06):

Okay. Final question, and it’s a total loaded question we ask everybody who comes on a podcast this question. What is your favourite building in Glasgow? And it can be a building that has disappeared or is still around. It can be static, it could be mobile. What would it tell you if its walls could talk?

Mitch Miller (49:27):

Oh, I thought about this quite a lot. This was the hardest one. When I got the question I was like, “Oh my God.” And I really wish I’d called Chris Leslie and copied his notes, but okay, I’ll talk very briefly about the ones that didn’t make it right. So I did the Barrowland always makes me happy just to see it. Always will. And it’s one of my favourite dialectograms of course, as well that I did. But I’m not going to choose that. I’m not going to choose the Kelvin Hall, which would be the natural one given the theme of today.

Niall Murphy (49:55):

Sure.

Mitch Miller (49:55):

…because I grew up with stories of the Kelvin Hall Carnival. My Mam was in there from a very wee girl to her final days there. And it was just the stories and the lore of that. I’m very tempted to pick that. But what I thought I’d do is I’d go hipster. So there’s a very strange building on Balmore Road that when I was working up at the stables, Lambhill stables, I was doing a dialectogram up there and I would pass this every day. And it’s a bookies, so it’s a bookmakers. And go and see it, it’s kind of boarded up now and it’s looking like, I mean, it looks like if you would touch it would fall down now.

Niall Murphy (50:30):

Okay.

Mitch Miller (50:30):

But it’s a very strange building. It’s got two gable wings, it’s really quite well built. It’s got a bookmaker sign on it and it seems to represent just a different era. There must have been buildings around here that were just… It just very different landscape to what we know and it’s still there. And I don’t know anything about it and I want to. And just every time I walk past it, I see it and I’m like, “I want to know more about what that is.” So I’d love to know more about the building. I’d love to hear it talk.

Niall Murphy (51:00):

I don’t know it. So that’s intriguing. I must go and have a look, see if I can figure it out.

Mitch Miller (51:06):

Go and check it out. It’s on Google Street View as well. You can see it on Balmore Road.

Niall Murphy (51:10):

Right.

Mitch Miller (51:11):

It’s not a distinguished building, but it is a very interesting one. And that’s my choice.

Niall Murphy (51:15):

Interesting choice. Okay. Right. I have to go and check that one out and see if I can figure out something of its backstory and where it came from.

Mitch Miller (51:24):

Let me know what you find out.

Niall Murphy (51:26):

I will do. That would be, yeah, wonderful. We could have a further conversation about that then.

Mitch Miller (51:31):

Sounds good.

Niall Murphy (51:32):

Mitch, that’s a complete pleasure. Thank you very much for answering all the questions and letting us know what your favourite building is. It’s very much appreciated.

Mitch Miller (51:40):

You’re welcome, And thanks for having me on. It’s been great.

Niall Murphy (51:42):

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch Miller (51:43):

Thank you.

Katharine Neil (51:45):

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 @GlasgowHeritage. This podcast was produced by Inner Ear for Glasgow City Heritage Trust. The podcast is kindly sponsored by the National Trust for Scotland and supported by Tunnocks.