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?

It passes comprehension why any city should want to undergo the ordeal of hosting the Olympic Games. The event causes much inconvenience to its citizens and leaves the city saddled with massive debts as well as a handful of re usable sports facilities. And the kudos is dubious. There are, however, civic titles that do seem to bring benefits as well as prestige, and the principal one these days is to be European City of Culture. This year it is Genoa, a happy choice given that city's architectural and artistic riches and the strenuous attempts made to clean up and revitalise an ancient but somewhat seedy port.

As each country in the European Union takes its turn to have a City of Culture, Britain has had its candidates: Glasgow in 1990 and Liverpool in 2008. To the average tourist or the blinkered metropolitan, neither city might seem as cultural as, say, Bath or York, but in fact both cities have very well-stocked galleries and museums as well as magnificent architecture (most of it nineteenth century). But it is certainly true that the European City of Culture award has become closely connected with urban regeneration and the chance of inward investment. And Liverpool, once an economic and political basket-case best known for labour unrest as well as the Fab Four, has certainly made great efforts to recover.

It is, however, worth asking whether the City of Culture accolade is always an unmixed blessing, for some in Liverpool were apprehensive when their city defeated Newcastle in the bid for the title. Local councillors tend to have a rather different view of culture from civilised citizens, and the title can seem a sort of fig-leaf behind which undesirable commercial developments can be encouraged. An admirable local pressure-group, Save Our City, points out that remarkable early Georgian buildings in Liverpool's Rope Walks quarter are still giving way to new commercial developments and apartment blocks, with the encouragement of the council. Cheering as it is to see magnificent but long-derelict warehouses by the docks being converted into flats, it is depressing to find that the attrition of Georgian Liverpool continues.

Another problem of being a City of Culture is that it encourages the show off 'landmark' building designed by an architectural superstar. Architecture, like other areas of life, has been undermined by our celebrity culture and each city thinks it needs a building with an internationally-known brand label. So Brighton wants towers by Frank Gehry, Salford has the Imperial War Museum by Daniel Libeskind and Edinburgh can boast the notorious parliament building by the late Enric Miralles. As for Liverpool, there was a now-defunct scheme for a shopping centre designed by Philip Johnson. Then came the proposal to build a tautologically gratuitous 'Fourth Grace' overlooking the Mersey near Pierhead, and of the several designs submitted in competition by big names, one by Will Alsop was chosen. Known as 'The Cloud', this was a sort of big blob on Alsop's trademark stilts. Behind were to be two wobbly towers of apartments, while the flat public space by the Mersey was to be enlivened with giant ripples.

Mercifully, this project has now been abandoned. It was consistently unpopular with the Liverpool public (when asked) and had no easily definable purpose other than symbolic. As Liverpool has, in truth, built little of any merit since Herbert Rowse's Art Deco buildings of the 1930s, perhaps The Cloud should have been applauded as an contemporary attempt to emulate the assertiveness of the existing 'Three Graces' (the Royal Liver, the Cunard and the Port of Liverpool Buildings), but its inchoate pretentiousness was quite alien to the monumental opulence of the Edwardian buildings. Certainly Liverpool has an architectural tradition which verges on the megalomaniac--think of the unbuilt design by Lutyens for a Roman Catholic Cathedral that was going to be bigger than St Peter's in Rome--but that ambition was based on commercial wealth as well as civic pride. That wealth has evaporated. If Liverpool is a city of culture, the inescapable fact is that its culture is largely a legacy of the past, and the city's magnificent buildings seem like the product of an entirely different civilisation to that of today.

The same is true of Glasgow, which was the first city to make positive use of the European City of Culture award and change its image. It already had Kelvingrove and the Burrell as well as a magnificent surviving collection of urban and suburban Victorian and Edwardian buildings (as well as a medieval cathedral), but it was perceived by both locals and outsiders as a dark, depressed former industrial city. 1990 helped change all that, and visitors, having seen some cleaned-up sandstone buildings and noticed smart shops, assumed the place had been transformed. But has it? The City fathers still bend over backwards to accommodate commercial interests; new buildings--commercial and residential--of abysmal quality are allowed, and the old are still allowed to decay and tumble. Glasgow has always had a strong American character, reflected in particular in its early-twentieth-century architecture, but today much of the city looks like parts of Detroit.

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.

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.

Glasgow had a second chance to be officially cultural in 1999 when it became the Arts Council's City of Architecture and Design. A group of 'Homes for the Future' were built and the old Glasgow Herald building, by Mackintosh, was converted into 'The Lighthouse', a centre for architecture and design. But, again, this just seems another public relations exercise when civic attitudes have not really changed. Recently, the Scottish Civic Trust reported that Glasgow has the worst record of any city in Scotland for protecting historic buildings. 120 sites in Glasgow are now on its buildings-at-risk register, and twenty-three listed buildings in the city have been demolished since 1990--in the same period Edinburgh has lost only three. To be 'European City of Culture' might seem a worthless accolade when a city couldn't really care about its buildings. Let us hope Liverpool can do better.

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