Episode 9 (Glasgow)

The transcript of this episode is available at Buzzsprout.com/1970784.
For photos of the places discussed, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

                                                 Episode 9 (Glasgow)

I can’t say exactly when it happened, but sometime before I put my liquids, gels, and pastes into that little Ziploc bag we stopped fitting into the world.  My carry-on was in one tray, my shoes and belt were in another, and my RFID-blocking wallet was in a third, along with my passport and the Ziploc bag, stuffed full.  Despite these valiant preparations, one of the trays was kicked out for secondary inspection.  An officer asked if the tray was mine, but he was asking only because I was looking disgusted.  I replied, “unfortunately” in a surly tone.  He asked me to step back. 

A woman in a special uniform came over and asked if she could help.  Her jacket even said something like “Need Help?”  She was brilliant, and in a minute I was ignoring the tray and engaged in pleasant conversation.  As I was leaving, I complimented her and relayed the officer’s explanation: “random screening.”  Writing these words, I almost wrote “random screaming.”

That was Heathrow.  A few days earlier, I had rented a car in Glasgow so I could visit a few places outside the town center.   The car-rental clerk was a young Pole, quietly worried about the upcoming Brexit.  She pushed hard for optional insurance, and I felt slightly guilty declining.  I told myself that she was only doing it because her boss pushed her.  That boss was only doing it because of another boss–and so on up the chain, boxes within boxes. 

Late that same afternoon, I pulled into a nearby parking garage.  I would rather have parked on the street, but I wasn’t sure how heavy the fine would be if I got ticketed, and governments today have no trouble reaching through rental-car companies and credit-card issuers to get scofflaws on the other side of the planet.   I pulled into the garage, waited in my lane to get a ticket, then saw the sign saying “Cash Not Accepted.” 

I couldn’t back up but figured I could use a credit card to get out.  My mistake: a few hours later, the payment station demanded a credit card with a PIN.  My credit cards don’t have them.  There was no attendant, no number to call.  What to do?  Fortunately, the machine turned out to like my ATM card.  

On my last evening in Glasgow I was looking out of my hotel-room window.  It was a new hotel, which meant of course that the windows could not be opened.  The sky was dark at seven, and there was an office building across the street.  The tenant was one of the big American investment banks, and a few men were at their desks studying screens presumably covered with financials.  I believe that is a word.  

Over the previous few days, I had been poking around the city with a very tart Pevsner guide, one of a series of books covering the architecture of Britain’s major cities.  Describing Glasgow’s Westergate office building of 1985, the authors practice criticism as a blood sport and call the building a “huge and crushingly dull office block… with a smooth wall of polished beige granite, monotonously studded with brown window units.  Oblivious to its surroundings, it is perhaps the most deadly building in the City Centre.”   Wow.

British Telecom, the original tenant, was gone, and Yotel, a budget-hotel chain, was now asking for permission to convert the building into 254 so-called “guest cabins.”  Yotel said that it would remove the granite façade and replace it with metal and glass.  Apparently that would make all the difference, or perhaps the city fathers didn’t like Pevsner.  I see now that the hotel has opened, and the granite façade is still in place.  What’s that phrase?  Oh, yes: bet on the money.

Not that I would sing the praises of Glasgow in the 1830s.  Nine men had been appointed to inquire into the condition of hand-loom weavers in the UK.  The commissioners had each been given one part of the country, and South Scotland went to one Jelinger Cookson Symons, later an official inspector of English mines and Welsh schools.  In his report, Symons wrote:

the wynds of Glasgow comprise a fluctuating population of from fifteen to twenty thousand persons.  This quarter consists of a labyrinth of lanes, out of which numberless entrances lead into small courts, each with a dunghill reeking in the centre.  Revolting as was the outside of these places, I was little prepared for the filth and destitution within….  No pains seem to be taken to purge this Augean pandemonium, this nucleus of crime, filth, and pestilence existing in the centre of the second city of the empire…” 

Friedrich Engels read the Symons report and in The Condition of the Working Class in England quotes this Dickensian passage:

I have seen human degradation is some of its worst phases, both in England and abroad, but I can advisedly say that I did not believe until I visited the wynds of Glasgow, that so large an amount of filth, crime, misery, and disease existed on one spot in any civilized country…. These places are, generally as regards dirt, damp and decay, such as no person of common humanity to animals would stable his horse in.

Passages like that are a good reminder of where Marxist wrath comes from.

It took Glasgow thirty years after the Symons report to begin demolishing the wynds.  They’re gone now, but much of the housing that replaced them survives.  A good example, built about 1900, is on High Street a few blocks south of Glasgow’s twelfth-century cathedral.  What looks at first like a building with five hundred feet of street frontage proves to be seven almost identical buildings pressed together.  At first glance, the ground floor appears to be a string of shops: Glasgow Appliances, High St. Sandwich Company, J.J.’s Off Sales, Tesoro Mio Italian Dining, Friends Chinese Café, and so on.  On closer inspection, the ground floor of each of the seven buildings resolves into two shops separated by a door leading up to three floors of flats, which in Glasgow are called tenements and lack the American connotation of slum.  The façades above the shop signs are of a handsome red sandstone with frequent bay windows under decorative gables.  The Pevsner guide turns all sweetness and light, praising the buildings for their “happy Arts and Crafts design.”  

Glasgow has a great many such tenements, many of them almost identical, and building them took a staggering amount of labor.  Of labor, however, the Scots have never been shy.  I was reminded of this while wandering around the fifty thousand graves in the Glasgow Necropolis, next to the city’s cathedral.  In some parts of the world, tombstones are limited to names and dates; in others, they herald the virtues—real or imagined—of the deceased.  In the Necropolis, the men who lived through the Industrial Revolution are remembered first and last for their work–and not much else.  I met John Walker, a biscuit manufacturer who died in 1862.  I met Thomas Tattersall, a cotton spinner who died in 1878.  I met John Wardrop, a master slater who died in 1890.  Walter MacFarlane of the Saracen Foundry had an impressive monument.  If you’ve been to Durban, you may have seen his Vasco da Gama clock.  In Brazil, the cast-iron railings of the grand staircase in the Manaus public library came from the MacFarlane foundry.  Wandered around the Raffles Hotel in Singapore?  MacFarlane did the verandas.  He also did the ironwork on the facades of the commercial blocks in old Salisbury, now Harare.

I came upon the grave of David Elder, “Engineer.” That’s a splendidly understated epitaph for the man who designed the steam engine for the East India Company’s first paddle steamer.  Close by lay son John, “Engineer and Shipbuilder.” John invented the compound or double-expansion steam engine, which among other things made long voyages under steam possible without refueling.  John also established the John Elder shipyard, in his day among the biggest in the world.  Today, as part of BAE Systems Maritime, it is one of the two shipyards still operating in Glasgow.  It survives on contracts from the Royal Navy. 

John Elder’s compound engines were adapted in the 1870s to railway locomotives.  One of the men building them was James Reid, who began as a blacksmith’s assistant and rose to be managing director of Europe’s largest locomotive factory, the Springburn Shops, located less than two miles north of the Necropolis.  An obituary from 1894, when Reid collapsed on the St. Andrews links, describes Reid as a man of “iron will, indomitable perseverance, sterling integrity and most methodical business habits…. He seldom made a mistake, though in all cases he imperatively insisted on implicit obedience to his orders.”  I chuckle at the thought of the poor public-relations advisor pleading with Reid to smile for the camera.  

Reid certainly doesn’t smile in the statue that stands in Springburn Park, just north of the former locomotive shops.  Full-bearded, he gazes forward with an I’ll-brook-no-nonsense expression.  One side of the plinth carries a bronze plaque indicating that he found time to serve as Glasgow’s Dean of Guild, a position responsible for approving all new buildings in the city.  The other side has a bronze plaque with a graceful young woman in flowing robes.  She holds a sign that reads, “President Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, 1891-1894.”  Apparently there was more to James Reid than calculations of cylinder pressure and drawbar pull. 

The Springburn shops disappeared in the 1950s and were eventually replaced by a Tesco, a Costco, and a Lidl.  Less than a mile south of the Necropolis, the Clyde River has changed, too.   As late as the 1960s, the view downstream from what is now a bridge on the motorway to Edinburgh included what looked like the teeth of a rake, with a set of six straight and parallel rivers.  One, approximately in the middle, was the river.  The others were artificial channels separated by docks lined with warehouses.  The channels and warehouses are gone now, and the river, channeled between stone walls, is fringed by an exhibition center, an arena, a couple of museums, theaters, hotels, and studios for BBC Scotland.   It’s Sydney’s Darling Harbor all over again.  Glasgow still has a port, but it’s a minor one, and it’s miles downstream. 

I drove two miles downstream from the motorway bridge to the former headquarters of the John Elder shipyard.  The building, now the Fairfield Govan Heritage Centre, is faced with the same red sandstone used in the High Street tenements, but in this case two sandstone longboats protrude a few feet from the façade on the sides of the entrance.  Guided by dolphins, the boat on the left holds a shipwright, identified by the ship’s wheel behind him.   On the right, an engineer stands in a longboat in front of a spur gear as big as a manhole cover.  

I infer that what Glasgow’s industrialists lacked when smiling for photographers they made up for with self-respect.  I imagine them telling me, “Your world wouldn’t exist without us.”   I would assure them that I agree, but they would not be mollified, because they’d know that I also found fault with their work in the same way I find fault with the legacy of Guillaume Delprat back at Broken Hill, or with the more modest work of Weary Wallace at Great Zimbabwe.

Collectively, these men—and overwhelmingly they were men—made it possible for me to speed down Australia’s Lasseter Highway or Zimbabwe’s Route 4 while listening to Bruckner’s Fourth.   Of course I do stop if I have a flat tire or if I run out of gas or if the timing chain breaks or if a bridge is out or if there’s no electricity at the gas station or if I can’t pay for gas.  Whizzing down the highway, I feel free, but it’s a funny kind of freedom, dependent on my compliance with a hundred systems under somebody else’s control.  I’m tempted to call it contingent freedom, or conditional freedom.  Maybe it’s just fake freedom.    

True, there’s a counter-argument, which is that a thousand years ago people bitten by poisonous snakes couldn’t call an ambulance.  Those people weren’t suspended in our ingenious cocoon that leaves us forever detached or separated from the world in which we became ourselves, but I admit that, given the choice, I’ll take the ambulance.  I can’t tell if that makes me a sissy or sensible.

Close to the shipyard, I stopped at several blocks of tenements built for Elder’s workers.  They were made of the same red sandstone used for the High Street tenements.  It’s a rock created three hundred million years ago, when Scotland was as barren as central Australia today.  The sheer age of the rock gives the buildings a gravitas, a sense of permanence, but it doesn’t make them attractive.  There’s no Gothic freedom in them.  

These tenements have no ground-floor shops.  Instead, four floors of flats are stacked up along the full length of the block.  Once again, the lineup is actually a set of separate and contiguous buildings, but seen from above, the lineup proves to be one side of a quadrilateral rimming an entire block.  Bay windows and evenly spaced doorways break the monotony a bit, but the street still looks like a prison courtyard.  

There was a similar story near Walter MacFarlane’s Saracen Foundry in  Possilpark, a company town about a mile north of the Glasgow city center.  The foundry closed in 1967 and was replaced by an industrial park with a dozen companies, but Walter MacFarlane and his nephew Walter MacFarlane, Jr.,  who took over the business after his uncle died, once employed ten thousand men.  The tenements built for their workers have mostly been cleared away, but the survivors are more four-story red sandstone blocks, in this case with ground-floor shops including a mix as exotic as the destinations to which the MacFarlanes shipped their ironwork.  Along one block I saw the Saracen Bar, the Sultan Super Market, 3Dee African Taste, the Layalina Middle Eastern bakery, and at least two Turkish barbers.

And housing for the rich?  To my surprise, it turned out that their housing might as well have been the model of the Glasgow tenement.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised.  After all, there isn’t much difference in the shape of a car that costs thirty thousand dollars and one that costs five times as much.  We all wear jeans. 

Examples of Glasgow’s housing for the rich line up along Glasgow’s Great Western Road, a road surveyed in 1830 straight as a die from Glasgow most of the way to Loch Lomond, about fifteen miles to the west.  The road is an extension of Sauchiehall Street, once a premier shopping street. Times have changed, and in the space of one depressing kilometer on Sauchiehall I walked past a Boots pharmacy, a Starbucks, a Pret A Manger, a Burger King, a McDonald’s, a Marks and Spencer, a T. K. Maxx (that’s a UK subsidiary of T.J. Maxx), another Boots, a Primark, a Tesco, a Sainsbury’s, a Taco Bell, a third Boots, a Subway, and a second Starbucks.  That must be some kind of record.  As I say, we all wear jeans.

Close to where Sauchiehall crosses over the motorway to Edinburgh, the Great Western Road starts and continues west through what once was the property of the Kelvinside Estate Company.  The estate owners in 1846 decided to make some money.  To that end, they hired Decimus Burton, fresh from designing London’s prestigious Regent’s Park.  Burton drew up a plan, but the company rejected it because Burton didn’t pack enough houses onto the site. 

Several architects replaced Burton.  One was Alexander “Greek” Thomson, most famous today for two Glasgow churches.  One is the Caledonia Road Church, which was destroyed by fire in 1965 and demolished except for its façade.  The other is the St. Vincent Road Church, close to Sauchiehall Street and still used as a church.  Both have facades reminiscent of the Parthenon, which helps explain Thomson’s nickname, and both were perched on high sandstone platforms in the assumed style of Solomon’s temple. The entrances to both churches were through doors set into these massive platforms.  

Seen from inside, the roof of the surviving church, the one on St. Vincent Road, rests on cast-iron columns painted red.  The capitals are a riot of cast-iron stars, shells, pointed leaves, and curls that together form what might as well be called chickens poised to peck.  The pews are carved with golden oak shaped by craftsmen who gave the pews backs as sensuous as a shoulder.                                       

This is a little odd, because Thomson came from a fiercely religious family.  (A brother at age 50 went as a missionary to Cameroon and survived for seven years until malaria finally nailed him.)  Thomson himself was religious and once gave a lecture in which he said that “long before the foundation of the world, at the very beginning, in the councils of eternity, the laws which regulate this art [of architecture] were framed.”  Thompson asked his audience “to abandon with all convenient expedition the whole mass of accumulated human traditions under which we have been, as it were, smothered, and take earnestly to the study of the Divine laws….”    

Thomson’s Buck’s Head Building in downtown Glasgow is a fine example of doing just that.  Historic Environment Scotland describes it as “a watershed in structural logic…” because the building comes as close to a curtain wall as the technology of the day allowed.  

The question facing Thomson on the Great Western Road project was whether he would be allowed to break free from the “mass of accumulated human traditions” that “smothered” his contemporaries.  Thomson himself anticipated the wretched answer: “The great difficulty… is not the inability of architects… but the obstructions which are placed in their way by their employers; for, instead of giving encouragement to progress as a thing essential, or even desirable, the custom is to forbid it as a thing intolerable.”  

Thomson gave the Kelvinside Estate Company ten townhouses stretching cheek by jowl for five hundred feet along the Great Western Road.  Completed in 1869, the buildings were and are set back from the road about eighty feet.  That marginal strip is occupied now by a narrow band of road-sufferng shrubbery, then a paved lane wide enough to allow residents to enter and park with their vehicles nosing toward the façade.  House entrances are spaced every forty feet, a distance marked by four evenly spaced double-hung windows.  Every entrance is up a flight of about ten stairs leading to a porch supported by four Ionic columns.  That makes a total of ten porches and forty double-hung windows on the ground floor.  The upper floor is a line five hundred feet long of identical windows at ten-foot intervals.

In an effort to break the monotony, Thomson included two three-story sections at the second and ninth townhouses.  Each of these larger townhouses has a double-wide staircase leading to two doors behind Ionic columns.   Critics write that this spacing is superior to the more typical placement of pavilions at the ends or at the middle of other terraces along the Great Western Road.  Andor Gomme and David Walker, for example, authors of one major study of Glasgow architecture, write that the Great Western Terrace’s “superb sense of scale and proportion raises it above all the other terraces in the road.”  

I defer to experts most of the time, but Americans mock cookie-cutter tract housing because every house on the street is nearly identical.   They do it even though within a generation many of the homes are heavily modified.   The façade of the Great Western Terrace is equally monotonous but hasn’t been touched in well over a century.  The only reason it’s not mocked is that, seeing with our ears, we wish to live as the rich live.  We remain respectful even when, as here, their stately homes have been broken up into apartments.   We react to classical columns and architraves and entablatures as predictably as Ivan Pavlov’s dogs reacted to bells. 

I do not know if Thomson lamented his Great Western Terrace, but a bust sculpted by John Mossman shows Thomson as a powerful man with a full and commanding beard and a slightly wounded expression.   I think it captures defeat.   I wonder if Thomson ever read Ruskin on the degradation of the sculptors of antiquity, forced to produce endless copies of set forms.  Thomson might have consoled himself with the thought that rich Glaswegians liked the Great Western Terrace well enough to buy a piece of it, but then he might have thought that they too were seeing with their ears.  It’s like the early television comedian Milton Berle, who asked for a laugh track at a point where a live audience hadn’t laughed.  The track was added.  “See?” Berle cracked, “I told you it was funny.”

The story has a second act.  The Kelvin River passes under the Great Western Road, then flows southwesterly through the Kelvingrove or West End Park.  The Glasgow city government in 1853 bought the park for almost exactly one hundred thousand pounds.  It was a lot to spend on an amenity, but the city—and Charles Wilson, the local architect behind the scheme—intended to develop a public park along the low-lying land flanking the river, then recoup the investment by subdividing and selling off residential lots on the higher ground, safe from floods.

The scheme was important enough that Joseph Paxton, the designer of London’s Crystal Palace, was commissioned to prepare a plan.  There’s some confusion about what Paxton did, but Charles Wilson stayed with the project from its inception until 1861, when he died at fifty-three.  By that time, Wilson had designed many of the houses in the development.  He, or perhaps someone else, gave the development the romantic name of The Woodlands.  Since the birth of the industrial city, most homeowners have wanted to escape, even if escape meant no more than a patch of grass in a subdivision with an evocative name.    

Instantly recognizable from satellite imagery, where it is buffered on the west by Kelvingrove Park, The Woodlands consists of a central green oval—Park Circus—wrapped by two concentric residential ovals, one facing inward toward the Circus, the other facing west and down over Kelvingrove Park.  The development extends to the south in stepped levels connected by grand staircases.  Most of the buildings on Park Circus are now offices, and those on Park Terrace have been subdivided into apartments and hostels, but when they were new these homes had three floors, plus attic and basement.  Eight stairs led up to a doorway.  Next to each door there was a bay window, copied on the second floor but not the third.  One after another, the townhouses line up like soldiers on parade. 

The inward-facing Park Circus units skip the bay windows, perhaps because there’s no view except of the oval.  Measuring about a hundred feet on its greater axis, the oval park is locked, restricting access to property owners, most of whom seem to make little use of it.  Each townhouse overlooking the oval has nine double-hung windows—three atop three atop three, with one at the bottom replaced by a door.  The facades are all of a gray sandstone, so anyone looking for color must settle for the cars parked in front.  

The Pevsner guide calls the Woodlands “the finest piece of town design in Glasgow.”  The authors pay special attention to one house.  It’s at 22 Park Circus and is a 12,000 square-foot corner unit distinguished by an upstairs bay window that looks away from the oval park toward a regal staircase, a swath of parkland, and, on a good day, the Clyde, less than a mile away. 

Small world: 22 Park Circus was designed by Charles Wilson for none other than Walter MacFarlane of the Saracen Foundry.  Walter, Jr., inherited the house from his uncle and occupied it until his death in 1932.  By then, the house had been transformed, as the Pevsner guide says, into “the richest interior in the Circus, indeed as rich as any in Glasgow.”  A club in the 1930s, then a consulate, the house eventually became the property of the Glasgow city council, which put the building up for sale.  Two years later, after a twenty-five percent price cut, the house apparently did sell.  The estate-agent’s signs were gone when I came by, so I missed the opportunity to see what the Pevsner guide calls “an astonishing upper hall with Corinthian columns and galleries and a scalloped and glazed dome made in cast-iron by MacFarlane’s Saracen Ironworks.”

Perhaps the inside would have stopped me in my tracks, but looking at the outside of all these houses I see homes for people whose goals are security, comfort, and status.  Come to think of it, that’s the full monty, the complete justification of the Industrial Revolution.   Sitting as I am in a nicely heated room whose temperature I control from a thermostat on the wall, I shouldn’t belittle those goals.  I belittle them anyway, because security, comfort, and status aren’t enough. 

I recall Bankimchandra Chatterjee, a Bengali appalled by what he called the “tutelary deities” of English civilization.   He meant “Comfort and his brother, Respectability.”  That was 1872, when The Woodlands were at their apogee.  I don’t know if Chatterjee ever left Bengal, but I imagine him coming with me on a walk around The Woodlands.  We would joke about the colonial officers who retired to places like this on very generous pensions as a reward for decades of malaria, cholera, and risking getting shot, stabbed, or poisoned by people who hated them.  Returning from West Africa or India or Malaya, these men moved into their boxes.  A big day was one with a visit from somebody they had known in Nigeria or the Punjab.  For a while at least, they kept busy writing memoirs hardly read today.  Even when first published, they were read mostly by people recalling their own colonial adventures.  As the Joni Mitchell song goes, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.