Glasgow's reinvention has stalled. Can we rekindle it?

Shortly after it opened in April, I visited Greenock’s George Wyllie museum. The Wyllieum, as it is known, is housed in the gleaming Ocean Terminal. At its back, full-length windows yield glorious views of the Clyde. Wyllie’s best-known artworks are the straw locomotive he suspended from a crane by the river, and the paper boat he floated up it; it is fitting that visitors should gaze on puttering pleasure craft and the cruise ships docked outside.

The locomotive and paper boat were laments for a lost age when the Clyde was the centre of the engineering world. But, created in 1987 and 1989 respectively, they also marked the moment Glasgow shed its post-industrial widow’s weeds and stepped out in brand new glad rags. With their irreverence and verve, Wyllie’s totems encapsulated the spirit of the city’s transformation. Recast now as museum pieces, they sound a fresh threnody: for the energy and vision that drove it. 

As a student in Finnieston, pre-gentrification, I watched that transformation first-hand. When the ceiling of my shared tenement flat fell in, there were no chi-chi cafes to escape to; just a grubby off-licence called Raymondo’s and The Snaffle Bit, where we nursed our pints of snakebite until the rain subsided.

Yet the city, like us, was on the cusp. We may have sneered at lord provost Michael Kelly’s 'Glasgow’s Miles Better' campaign, but as the grime was scrubbed from the city’s face and beacons were lit in one dark corner after another, we could not ignore its power. The Burrell, Mayfest, the SECC, Princes Square, the Garden Festival, the Royal Concert Hall, the regeneration of the Merchant City and the European City of Culture, all within the space of ten years. It was a remarkable rebranding that other cities — Dublin, Birmingham, Manchester — would seek to emulate.

These days it can feel like we are watching the movie on rewind. In a similar timeframe, a comparable number of lights have been snuffed out. The Glasgow School of Art, the O2 ABC, the Lighthouse, Rogano, Victoria’s nightclub, and flagship Sauchiehall Street stores, such as BHS, Watt Brothers and M&S all destroyed or closed; Mayfest long gone; this year’s Aye Write festival cancelled, the Citizens Theatre facing liquidation and, most recently, the Centre for Contemporary Arts (once the Third Eye Centre) announcing its closure from December to March 2025 in the face of its increasingly precarious finances.

Glasgow has not lost its capacity to excite. On frosty nights, heading gig-wards along the Gallowgate, the Barrowlands’ fairground dazzle still quickens the pulse. On late summer evenings, crossing the Kingston Bridge, the sun’s mellow glow on the Hydro still says: “Welcome home.” Look up!, we urge tourists. Those who do are rewarded with corbels and finials, their beauty complicated, but not erased, by the city’s belated reckoning with its links to the slave trade.  

But much of Glasgow’s Victorian and Georgian legacy, a large amount of it in the hands of absentee landlords, has been left to rot or burn. Buddleia, that symbol of bombed-out blight, has a stranglehold on rooftops, railway embankments and the city’s hundreds of derelict sites. Meanwhile, our public transport system takes a perverse pride in its inadequacy. ScotRail advertises its reduced timetable as if it were an achievement worthy of Mussolini. Ditto the Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT), and its failure to run the subway after 6pm on a Sunday. First Bus’ electronic arrival boards are a triumph of disinformation. The much-vaunted Glasgow Airport Rail Link has been abandoned, and the Clyde Metro is grinding its way through the consultancy mill.

Where once the talk was all about Glasgow’s rise from the ashes, today it’s of brokenness and decay. Streets which once bristled with self-worth take no interest in their appearance, while citizens, following suit, trail litter in their wake. There’s a shame, too, in the staggering drunkenness of Friday/Saturday nights, the ripe-for-exploitation vulnerability of the teenagers who hang out at the Four Corners, and the poverty that spills out of empty doorways in the form of gaunt-faced rough sleepers. On Sunday mornings, the streets are rank with the detritus of the night before: discarded chip wrappers, vomit, blood. The cone on top of the Duke of Wellington’s head — so long a symbol of Glaswegian gallusness — is not so funny when the scene he surveys is heavy with dejection.