Chancing to be in Glasgow on Friday morning, having parked in Buchanan Galleries I took a turn down Buchanan Street, hung a right on to Argyll Street, and passed under the “Highlander’s Umbrella” which is the enormous bridge carrying the main lines emerging south from Glasgow Central Station. From here I was able to walk round Central Station, clockwise, via Hope Street, and Gordon Street, thus to get a view of the destruction, by fire the previous Sunday evening, of a beautiful Victorian building at the corner of Gordon Street and Union Street. The fire apparently erupted in a vape shop, and there are various theories about the hazards of lithium batteries in vapes, but the cause of the fire to date is purely speculative.
It was a sorry sight. Most of the building has been destroyed, and I believe what remains is now due for demolition. Glasgow Central was closed, though by Thursday the lower level was running trains. It crossed my mind that the political opposition in Holyrood would find a way to make capital out of a disaster – “We knew they couldn’t run the ferries. Now they can’t even run the trains” – sort of thing. In fact they concocted a narrative about the fire brigade being unable to control the blaze because of underfunding. Actually the fire brigade did very well to protect Central Station. I always find it disheartening when our parliamentary representatives try to make political capital out of a mishap. It’s a reflex to point the finger of blame, especially if your raison d’être, sine qua non, is to hound the government out of office.
But I’m hardly exempt from such a reflex response. As soon as I heard of the fire I put it into the context of St Andrew’s Halls and the Glasgow School of Art, and started to concoct a kind of inarticulate, rambling conspiracy theory. They have a saying in Chicago, said Goldfinger to Mr Bond. “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.” My own immediate thought on hearing of the disaster was to link it in some non-specific way to the disgraceful scenes that took place at Ibrox Park after an Old Firm match on the Sunday afternoon. Maybe some disgruntled supporter got careless with a cigarette butt, just as happened following a boxing match in St Andrew’s Halls sixty four years ago. There have been so many “disgraceful scenes” over the years at Ibrox Park, or at Celtic Park, that I confess I didn’t take the trouble to find out exactly what had happened. I believe the match went to a penalty shoot-out, which Celtic won. It may be that for the fans, losing by a whisker is harder to bear than getting a sound drubbing, though in the rugby on Saturday France beat England in the Stade de France by a single point, and with the last kick of the ball; and I don’t believe there was a riot. Everybody seemed to agree it had been a magnificent game. One thing I’ve noticed about a contest, in any sport, closely fought at a high level, sportingly played, and culminating in a tight result which could have gone either way, is that it actually ceases to matter who the winner is. It turns out that the tired old cliché, wrongly attributed, I seem to recall, to E. C. Bentley by Alan Bennett in Beyond the Fringe, and mockingly lampooned, shows itself to be true. It matters not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. This attitude however did not seem to pertain at Ibrox, where there was a pitch invasion. Who invaded first seems to be a moot point. One of the journalists on The Herald wrote a piece about it. He had to declare a special interest, not necessarily because he was of the Roman Catholic faith, but because he was a Roman Catholic. It matters less what you believe, but rather what school you went to. I don’t believe people who put great store in these cultural divisions in Glasgow take a particular stance over, say, the doctrine of transubstantiation. I think, if I understood the journalist correctly, he was implying that the Celtic support constituted a persecuted minority, by stating precisely the opposite. This isn’t just irony; it’s sarcasm. You really have to be Glaswegian to appreciate such nuance.
But whatever the cause of the fire at Central Station, it has to be asked, are we getting careless of our magnificent architectural heritage? A loss on a parallel with the St Andrew’s Halls was that of Charles Rennie Macintosh’s magnificent School of Art, which went on fire not just once in 2014, but for a second time in 2018, with devastating consequences. In 1962 there was a proposal that St Andrew’s Halls be rebuilt. But they never were, and it took nearly thirty years to construct an adequate replacement, the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in its present day site at the top of Buchanan Street. Whether or not the Art School will be rebuilt remains an unanswered question, but if it is, it seems likely it will take another thirty years.
Glaswegians tend to take Glasgow city centre for granted. That is because we have poor posture, and tend to look down rather than to look up. We don’t appreciate the magnificent buildings that form the grid system wedged between the M8 to the north and west, the river to the south, and High Street to the east. And yet Hollywood chooses to film here, not just because it’s cheaper than Philadelphia. And they get the RSNO to provide the film soundtrack, not just because they are cheaper than the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
But it seems that the roads that form the Glasgow grid are permanently “up”. The M8 has been “up” for a decade. It just can’t take the volume of traffic. Our city fathers in the 1960s didn’t see it coming. They chose not to rebuild St Andrew’s Halls, but rather to build the M8. Fatal error. And now we are paying for it. The whole of Glasgow city centre is in danger of looking like the corner of Gordon Street and Union Street.
Yet all is not lost, and Glasgow flourishes, in a kind of way, despite itself. While the fires raged, I, blissfully unaware, was attending a concert in St John’s Renfield Church, three miles to the west, given by Glasgow Chamber Orchestra. Larsson, Haydn, and Brahms. Terribly good. And I will be back within the grid on Thursday with my German conversation class colleagues, to lunch at Ardnamurchan, opposite the Theatre Royal. Where there’s life, there’s Hope Street.
jamescalumcampbell 