This photographer captured Glasgow for 30 years. What’s changed?

If Thomas Annan was Glasgow’s most prominent chronicler of ordinary life in the late 19th century, then Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert is surely his contemporary counterpart. Now in his mid-50s, Sutton-Hibbert has been capturing Glaswegians for more than 35 years now, his photographs mapping the changing character of the city. Their essence, he says in a pleasingly thick, glottal brogue, remains the same: “gritty, stoic, hardworking”. 

But, he adds frankly, people do seem more “worn down”. Not just people, but also “the city and fabric of the city itself”. Over the last year, Sutton-Hibbert has been out at dusk and dawn, photographing Glasgow’s very foundations: buildings, roads and so on, for a new project he’s set himself. “It looks really rough. I know certain councillors say it’s all fine, but I think to the average Glaswegian walking around in recent months, it does look bad”. 

We’re chatting because the Drumchapel native has released three new zines, featuring never-before-seen snaps of Glasgow and its residents, pulled from his extensive archive. These zines are the latest chapter in a re-examination of Sutton-Hibbert’s long career, kick-started when his archive — comprising roughly 27,000 images (edited down from almost 1m) — was acquired by the University of St Andrews in 2022. 

While Sutton-Hibbert was preparing his files and negatives for the institution, he realised there were “really nice sets of pictures which have never seen the light of day. Doing these zines [is] a way for me to give the images new life”. 

Six zines (reasonably priced at £8 a pop) have already been produced as a result. The latest three, featuring black-and-white images, date from the 1990s and the early 2000s, a past just slipping from recency. 

One records attendees of Glasgow Fair celebrations in 1991 (it’s efficiently titled ‘Glasgow Fair 1991’), while ‘On the Clyde’ documents the — somewhat lost — legions of Clyde day trippers who used to hitch rides on the likes of sewage boats. A third zine, ‘Not in Our Name 2003’, is filled with pictures from a single day: 15 February 2003, when tens of thousands of people took to Glasgow’s streets to protest the imminent Iraq War.  

The latter, Sutton-Hibbert tells me, contains one of his favourite shots, its subject a grizzled man in a black beret, which he’s paired with dark, circular sunglasses, three-blind-mice-style.