Words: Ethan McGrory (he/him)
I could see all the way to that desolate upland from which I was spawned, so distant and unremarkable compared to the glamour and rush of the city and the life I had adopted.
The Glasgow tenement was first hewn from the local Carboniferous blonde, and later, the imported Mauchline red. The reddish tenements we see date from this later period (late-Victorian or Edwardian) and indeed the stone itself is the newer of the two (though still some 270 million years old itself). Glasgow didn’t dig me up until 2021. When I skulked my way up to the Dear Green Place from my native country in rural mid-Lanarkshire, unfettered from the pandemic and from childhood (a mere 18 years old), I moved to a sandstone tenement at the foot of Blythswood Hill, the sole remaining such building on a street now plagued by a titanic student residence complex.
And what a place for a young man! The restraints of a childhood daubed in a stiff-lipped Toryish propriety were cast off, and I was free to aspire to the Bohemianism I had read so much about. This young man who, in years before, would never have been seen wearing shorts, was sitting on the stoop in his dressing gown (knickerless), chainsmoking Marlboro Reds with his Lost Boy flatmates. We all had sinks in our bedrooms; the toilet and the shower were in two separate, closet-sized rooms at either side of the entryway. There was no lounge, merely a denim couch shoved up in the corner of the kitchen like a frightened, abused animal that we dubbed the “Jouch”. Then, habituated to insomnia, my late-night reading was once interrupted by a stranger sidling into my bedroom at four in the morning believing it to be the bathroom, having been invited over by my flatmate after a rave to continue snorting cocaine on the “Jouch”.
Jobless, directionless, bleary-eyed, and underweight, I had to return to life with my mother in the provinces. Revitalised (and employed), I triumphantly returned months later and took an apartment in a redstone one-bed in Thornwood next to the termination of the Expressway at the maw of the Clyde Tunnel. This was all a bit more grown-up. I had a kitchen table, a bathtub, and a Chesterfield: uncomfortable as it was, it proved to be a fantastic statement piece. I had an office (a cupboard with a desk) where I wrote my second novel. The period here was marred by a variety of unsuccesses with women but the place itself was magnificent. I loved inviting round friends to stay over in my queen-size bed or to drink beers in the kitchen. Many original features appealed to the crustier depths of my aesthetic tastes: fireplaces tiled with art nouveau stylings; illustrations of ethereal, spindly, pale women with hair bound up into fixtures; the porcelain approximation of an elephant’s head, upon whose trunk I balanced my hand towel beside the bathroom sink. I loved creeping out onto the scaffolding that surrounded the flat and smoking a fag poutingly while playing my favourite Billie Holiday tracks, overlooking the local pub for which I was too hard-up to patronise myself.
Seeking a cheaper alternative, I decided to ship out of the one-bed and find a flatmate.Then, in full-time work (and in full-time restraint from lamping my employer – the kind of man who wouldn’t have ever thought to fall in love if he had never heard of it), I was able to tuck away much of what I was earning. This new place was a lovely, well-proportioned blonde perched atop Dowanhill. From my third-floor bedroom window, I could see all the way to that desolate upland from which I was spawned, so distant and unremarkable compared to the glamour and rush of the city and the life I had adopted. Sparsely furnished, much of this flat was treading bare boards, memories of my flatmate’s little pants, permanently exhibited on the clothes-horse at the back of the living room, turning the boiler off-and-on every other morning for a hot shower, and heaving bags of swag from the Partick Lidl to the door which loomed vertiginously over the staircase.
I now share a street with the university’s library, and I love it as I have loved my experience of city living these past five years. I feel as though I belong to Glasgow as much as the tenement, as much as I have belonged to the various tenements which I have inhabited. I champion the lifestyle it provides, its retention and our stewardship and inheritance of their great legacy in defining this fine city’s image. From the quarries at Cowcaddens to the walls of the room from which I address you now, these stones have been Glasgow, and will remain as such through wind and rain, fire and smoke, time and time again.
