Words: Ethan McGrory (he/him)
What once was perhaps the most cohesive Victorian city in the United Kingdom has been tastelessly disrupted. Whilst intended as progress, Glasgow’s Inner City Ring Road served only to forestall the admission of this being a post-industrial city, inevitably, and somewhat obviously, past its productive prime.
Within the looped intestines of the Half-Ring Road lies a confused, inhuman mess of high-speed and high-volume roadways. Here once stood a neighborhood built to a human scale – lost for the wrong reasons, and lost for good. The urban space as a worthwhile cultural consumable, in opposition to the functionalist modernism that has unfortunately persisted in civic thought in this city for some 60 years, is, to the discerning Glasgow pedestrian, plain.
What justification could the Glaswegian offer for the lamentation of the inner city that existed before the Bruce Report – the document that proposed its mutilation – was ever put to the page? Far beyond the nostalgic wails of the puling aesthete, we might consider the cultural context that surrounded the development of the Ring Road.
By no means could one have expected the UK to retain anything of its relevance by the mid-20th century. The US was to become the predominant economic, cultural, and imperial force in the Anglosphere: the Rome to our Greece. Rather than mulishly insisting upon our status as ‘global power’, Britain ought to have accepted its position, committed wholesale to anticolonialism, and redoubled our efforts for the preservation of our nation’s liveability with consistent and exponential growth absent from expectation.
It was inevitable to the point of divine will that the city would face economic downturn in the aftermath of WW2; if the city’s industry could not support the population, then the population could not support the city. A wageless out-of-worker in Glasgow looks to his neighbourhood and sees a host of people similarly out of work. One can imagine that, without work, without wages, working-class neighbourhoods soon turn to dilapidation.
Once the condition of the neighbourhoods had declined, locals felt the need to flee the inner-city to escape the poor standards to be found in the crumbling tenement flats, in favour of recent constructs in nearby commuter new-towns such as the likes of East Kilbride. An unfortunate environment allows for unpleasantness to become commonplace, and the carefulness with which we ought to treat our environments is not justified when it is already crumbling – why not discard rubbish in the streets where a crumbling, empty building stands? Whom will you offend? By the very nature of the flight from the inner-city to commuter towns came the justification for an enhanced road network in and around the city. This was, by no means, unnecessary.
Glasgow was subject, however, to somewhat of a boaby-swinging competition regarding its new infrastructure. The proposed 75-mile-long Inner Ring Road dwarfed the 39 miles of motorway in “contemporary London”. Glaswegian civic engineers took cue from the crass example of American cities (will you allow my superiority?) that had, at least, the luxury of experiencing an economic boom as their nation hoovered up the demand for industry that was unfulfillable by Europe in the aftermath of WW2.
Modernist architecture, whilst ostensibly efficient, unadorned and artful in its supposed lack of pretence, betrays something of the windier tendencies of the capitalist who seeks to appease the person whose pocket they are picking. What exact benefit does the Glaswegian receive when their environment is turned from the artful to the artless? Each person has something of a sense of place, that they were, in childhood, shaped by their environment–their tastes, dispositions etc. What does the Glaswegian of the future feel of their home? An unremarkable, unspecific wasteland built not for the pedestrian but for the motorist, bereft of vernacular and locality does not inspire. The odds against one feeling connection with an environment built under some muscular, rigid ideal of starkness, efficiency and mutability are, indeed, ‘ninety-nine tae wan’. People make Glasgow – though they make every other bloody old place as well.
Where once the flâneur was able to be made a guest by the gardens of the Old Grand Hotel, one now feels decidedly as though they are intruding. Some incomers to the city have described a hesitation concerning how one might navigate from Garnethill to Park Circus–in reality a 5-or-10-minute jaunt–daunted by the unsightly gash cut through the earth between our City Centre and West End. I wish to disabuse you, dear reader, of the presence here of any wet, imperialist nostalgia, certainly, we ought not to be ‘thinking with the blood’. It is the case that much of Glasgow’s near-uniform Victorian character can be attributed to our historic attachment to the industry of the Empire. The subjugation of the Raj and the treatment of the West Indian as chattel were certainly beneficial to the city’s coffers. However, this does not, I believe, diminish the worthwhileness of the preservation of an appealing, historic purlieu.
Now, this is not a matter of distaste toward progress but rather toward monoculturalism, where any given one is indistinguishable from the other. Accepting Glasgow as a bleak slab of concrete, permanently post-industrial, does a great disservice to the Glaswegian and is a chinless mischaracterisation of Scottish cultural and aesthetic heritage. The city of Mackintosh ought not to bow to external pressure, to that of the saprophytic investor, the capitalist who does not need to concern themself with the quality of pedestrian experience in this city.
Glasgow’s long-suffering perambulator, unimpressed with the dysuric trickle of progress made in the post-industrialisation of the city environment, turns to historicism. To preservation, indeed, but also to the established fundamental benefits of historical societal set-up in city-living. The neighbourliness of the tenement, the hale and hearty communities, brocaded by pedestrian-conscious architecture, the preservation of the esprit and the cultural imagination – each and all within our means to preserve. Consider this a supplication to cast off the fetters of the seigneurial – whenever anything of Glasgow is to be brought down, look down to the sand and silt and bury your feet.
