# Transcript

SEANDAMER

The Second World War brought a hiatus in the negative imaging of Glasgow. There were much more dangerous people to rubbish than Glaswegians. And indeed, for some years after the War, Glasgow sustained a positive image largely as a result of the efforts of the Corporation. It involved itself in a massive council house-building programme in an effort to deal with the problem of the slums and films of this programme went the rounds of British cinemas.

But under the hype the reality was that the old Glasgow was doomed. The whole country was re-structuring economically and the ship-building skills and political militancy of Clydeside workers were as obsolete as the tenements in which they lived. In the 1960s Glasgow went in for 'comprehensive redevelopment', as the planners called it. What that meant was comprehensive destruction of the tenement city -starting with -guess where? -the Gorbals, the location for the violent events of"No Mean City", and Jimmy Boyle's neighbourhood. But now there was television. So again Glasgow's image got a boost as the Corporation could shqw the whole of Britain that it meant business, that it was determined to demolish every single slum and with them the "No Mean City" imagery. But unfortunately, towards the end of the 1960s, the pre-war imagery of violence burst into flame again.

The issue was gang warfare in the Easterhouse housing scheme - or perhaps we should say 'alleged gang warfare'. What happened was that when these vast working-class schemes were built on greenfield sites no services were included in the brave new world and this was not the fault of the tenants, but the planners. There are football teams in Glasgow called Celtic and Rangers. So it is hardly surprising that some teenage kids formed groups and started fighting each other. What was surprising was the speed with which this was translated into a classic moral panic by the media. In no time flat Glasgow was portrayed as coming down with gang violence. Interestingly enough, at this period the stereotypes of Glasgow as violent city were both shared and reproduced by some social scientists who, of course, are supposed to be critical of media inspired moral panics. 1973 saw the publication of a lamentable book called "A Glasgow Gang Observed" which was serialised in one of the Sunday quality newspapers accompanied by a graphic ofa bottle getting wrapped round someone's head. This book purported to give an insider's view ofa Glasgow youth gang and is full of prurient detail about sex and violence.

MICHAEL PERCEY AL-MAXWELL (from "A Glasgow Gang Observed", wrillen by James Patrick, pub. London: Eyre Methuen, 1973. Duration: 25'') "The variety of weapons I saw was manifold, the types I heard of legendary. Hatchets, hammers, knives, meat cleavers, meat hooks, bayonets, machetes, open razors, sharpened tailcombs, all these were the regular chibs. Bottles of all sorts and tumblers and bricks and sticks were employed in emergencies."

SEANDAMER

This book further amplified the deviant reputation of Glasgow as 'Violent City' and did so successfully precisely because the author was a social scientist. Then a series of highly dramatic television films written by Peter McDougall in the 1970s and 1980s portrayed a series ofimages of hard men battling it out with each other. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s there was also a stream of television documentaries made in and about Glasgow. The cumulative effect of them all was to ensure that Glasgow's image was truly awful by the 1980s.

What happened next is fairly well know, although its interpretation is still open to controversy. Under the then Lord Provost, Glasgow started an active public relations campaign aimed specifically at reversing the utterly negative image of the city. Its slogan was 'Glasgow's Miles Better' and it evoked images of Glasgow as a friendly city, as a city of considerable architectural interest, and as a city with a beautiful hinterland. There has been a spectacular reversal of the negative, violent imagery to the extent that Glasgow won the status of European City of Culture in 1990 and in 1999 City of Architecture. While the meaning of that status was a matter of considerable controversy within Glasgow I think it would be fair to say that its effect has been a new mood of optimism in the city, a civic reinvigoration, and a quiet pleasure that the city's many beautiful Victorian buildings and parks are now nationally acknowledged, as are its many cultural facilities, and numerous talented artists. There has been a positive blossoming of Glasgow literature in the last couple of decades, and what is interesting is how the images of Glasgow in fiction have changed. Moira Burgess again.

MOIRA BURGESS

The great breakthrough came in 1981 with the publication of Alasdair Gray's novel "Lanark". This had a marvellous empowering effect on Glasgow writers who seemed to discover that Glasgow fiction didn't have to deal with those old topics of slums, gangs, shipyards, hard men, that it didn't have to stick to a programme of grim realism. After "Lanark", in short, it's a case of anything goes. So, we have James Kellman's work, published in book form from the 1980s onwards with his technique of interior discussion so to call it which gives a voice and a thoughtful, intelligent voice to a whole stratum of society which had never been heard from before. We have Janice Galloway's first novel, "The Trick is the Keep Breathing", published in 1989, centred on a woman struggling out of a nervous breakdown, that's as far as possible from the old hard man character. A magic realism arrives in Glasgow fiction with A.L. KeMedy's 1995 novel "So I Am Glad" as the seventeenth century Cyrano de Bergerac turns up in a Glasgow bedsit. Anything's possible in Glasgow today. That's what the new Glasgow fiction says.

SEANDAMER

I have tried to show that the labelling of Glasgow as a dangerous place in the nineteenth and twentieth century derives from a complex of economic, political and social processes which can only be unpacked by historical analysis. These processes are unique to Glasgow, in my view, but do have parallels in other British cities. What appears to be a constant is that under capitalism there is a need to project an imagery of certain urban neighbourhoods and certain cities as dangerous places, as the locii of fearful forces. What you might care to think about is this. Who, in contemporary British society, is afraid? Of whom, and what is it that they are afraid? How do they project these fears symbolically? On what historical continuities can they draw in such projections? Does everyone share them? As a final treat, sit back, relax, and listen to this imagery of Glasgow written by local poet Donny O'Rourke. Cheerio.

MICHAEL PERCEY AL-MAXWELL (from "Great Westem Road",a poem written by Donny O 'Rourke in "The Waistband, and Other Poems", pub: Edinburgh, Polygon, /997; Duration: 35" (copyright permission for use from Alison Bowden, Polygon, Edinburgh) "Glasgow, you look beatific in blue and I've a Saturday before me for galleries and poems, a house full of Haydn, and beneath my kitchen window, tennis stars in saris lobbing backhands at the bins. French coffee, and who knows maybe Allen Ginsberg in my bath! then round to the dairy where scones are cooling on the rack and Jimmy won't let me leave till I've tried one there and then, here, where the new Glasgow started - an old grey city going blonde .... "