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Cities of Culture: what use is the accolade 'European City of Culture'? Not much, when that city continues to neglect its historic buildings, as Glasgow so shamefully has. Will Liverpool do better?
Apollo, Oct, 2004 by Gavin Stamp
As it happened, I arrived in Glasgow to teach at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the beginning of the Year of Culture. There was a splendid exhibition, 'Glasgow's Glasgow', held in the vaults under Central Station (and meant to be accompanied by a fine, learned catalogue--almost all copies of which were pulped by the council because of political wrangles). As for new architecture, all the city could boast was the new concert hall at the top of Buchanan Street designed by Sir Leslie Martin, a mediocre building which had been hurried to completion in time and which, externally at least, looks like something that might have been built in, say, Sofia or Lvov in 1955.
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Nevertheless, 1990 was a catalyst and, despite economic difficulties, both regeneration and new developments followed, as did the unfortunate project to convert the old Royal Exchange into a Gallery of Modern Art. But, as for prestigious projects, all the next few years produced was the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre designed by Norman Foster, the cut-price tinny pretentiousness of which does nothing to redeem the generally low quality of the city's modern architecture.
What struck me afresh in 1990 was the magnificence and high quality of the city's historic architecture that had escaped the comprehensive redevelopments and motorway buildings of the 1960s--and the deplorable condition of so much of it. In particular, the brilliantly eclectic and inventive nee classical buildings of the second of the two Victorian architects of international stature produced by Glasgow, Alexander 'Greek' Thomson, stood neglected and rotting. So, the following year, I was instrumental in founding the Alexander Thomson Society, in emulation of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society (founded in 1974), to do something about this sorry state of affairs. Thirteen years on, it is clear that the society helped change public opinion and we can point to one great success: getting Thomson's finest villa, Holmwood at Cathcart, into the excellent hands of the National Trust for Scotland (with, I may say, the assistance of Glasgow City Council).
Otherwise the picture is bleak. The two long-derelict handsome warehouses by Thomson's firm at Glasgow Cross have been demolished since 1991, followed only this year by the building in West Regent Street cleverly extended by Thomson and in which he had his office. Egyptian Halls in Union Street, his finest commercial structure, is still derelict, as is the wicked, pathetic ruin of the Caledonia Road Church in the Gorbals. And then there is his St Vincent Street Church, the only intact survivor of Thomson's Glasgow churches, described by Henry-Russell Hitchcock as 'three of the finest Romantic Classical churches in the world'. Leased by a Free Church congregation, the building is owned by Glasgow City Council and its condition--given the building's international fame and quality shames the city. In 1998, the New York-based World Monuments Fund put this church on its Watch List of the hundred most threatened monuments. Surprised at finding a local building given the same status as Angkor Wat, Glasgow acted and work began on restoring the extraordinary tower. But nothing has happened since. Exasperated by the supine behaviour of the City Council, the World Monuments Fund has put it back on the Watch List--which is unprecedented.
