Glasgow between the races: a duke crowned in traffic orange, an Oasis pilgrimage, and a city with seventy-four nations on the pavement.
We had one day off in Glasgow, between the races, and we thought we were spending it visiting famous places. We were wrong in the best way available. We spent the day visiting beginnings.
And somewhere in it, we finally worked out how to describe this city we’d been living in for a week. Edinburgh is the city that knows its history. Glasgow is the city that survived it. One wears its beauty like a tailored coat; the other rolls up its sleeves and offers you a seat at the bar. Edinburgh impresses you with castles, closes and postcards. Glasgow wins you over with murals, music, wit and people who’ll call you pal before they know your name. It’s a city that doesn’t ask to be admired. It asks to be experienced. Its story is painted onto brick, played through pub speakers, poured into pint glasses and carried in conversations with strangers, more than it will ever be carved into stone. If Edinburgh is Scotland’s grand novel, Glasgow is its best song: raw, funny, generous, and unforgettable long after you’ve left.
The day off ran the whole city, and the city obliged. George Square first, all Victorian ambition and civic swagger, then Glasgow Cathedral, one of the only medieval cathedrals in mainland Scotland to come through the Reformation nearly intact, standing there since the 1100s like it has seniority over the country around it. Behind it climbs the Necropolis, three and a half thousand Victorian monuments on a hill, a city of the dead overlooking the city of the living, and it is eerie and beautiful and cinematic and, somehow, peaceful, which is to say it’s precisely our kind of place. Cinematic is the literal truth, too: this hillside plays Gotham, The Batman filmed its cemetery scenes among these monuments, and Glasgow’s streets have doubled for that darker fictional city more than once, which a town of makers seems to take as simply one more manufacturing contract. We walked it slowly and photographed it on our phones like the reformed camera-carriers we currently are.
Down the High Street to the Clyde, because everything here begins at the river. The old saying goes that the Clyde built the ships that built the Empire, and whatever you make of the second half of that sentence, the first half explains the whole city: Glasgow was built by people who made things, and it has never really stopped, it just changed products. Ships, then music, then art, then stories. West to Kelvingrove and the university, founded in 1451 and educating scholars a century before Shakespeare, its gothic towers drawing Hogwarts comparisons from every passing tour group despite predating the boy wizard by half a millennium. And Charles Rennie Mackintosh everywhere, once you notice him: the tea rooms, the typography, the stained glass, the door handles. Glasgow’s greatest designer didn’t just design buildings. He designed the experience of being in them, and the city still runs on his handwriting.
By mid-Games, the streets themselves had become the exhibition. Tracksuits in every national colour, accents from seventy-four places, and the strange, lovely speed at which all of it becomes normal. We loved every pavement of it.
The crown
Sometime in the early 1980s, somebody in Glasgow climbed the equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington outside the Gallery of Modern Art and balanced a traffic cone on the Iron Duke’s head. The council took it down. Somebody put it back. The council took it down again. This has now continued for more than forty years, which means the removal programme is old enough to be having a midlife crisis, and somewhere along the way the entire city quietly changed sides. In 2013 the council proposed raising the plinth high enough to end the game for good. More than ten thousand Glaswegians signed petitions in roughly the time it takes to say don’t you dare, and the council surrendered. The cone stays.
Today it might be the most honest civic symbol in Britain. It’s on the postcards, the T-shirts, the fridge magnets. Banksy has called it one of his favourite works of public art in the country. It dresses for occasions: painted gold when Scotland wins Olympic medals, wrapped in Ukrainian colours, given a Santa hat in December. At the opening ceremony this week they were selling traffic-cone hats, and people wore them, indoors, with civic pride.
We paid our respects in person, of course. The Duke, when we reached him, was wearing not one cone but several, Games week having apparently called for full ceremonial dress, and a steady rotation of visitors from every nation on Earth was queuing to be photographed beneath a man crowned in road furniture. Wellington won at Waterloo. Glasgow decided that wasn’t his finest achievement, standing still for forty years of cones was, and looking up at him in his stacked orange regalia, surrounded by the laughing world, we found it hard to argue.
The joke has also stopped being local. Edinburgh statues get coned now, to the audible sighing of Edinburgh authorities. And during the World Cup last month, the Tartan Army coned monuments across Boston as a calling card, which went so well that a specially decorated Boston Cone was flown back across the Atlantic in its own first-class seat, welcomed by officials, and sent touring for mental-health charities before returning home to Scotland. Other nations might have sent a ceremonial sword. Scotland sent road furniture. The cone belongs to Glasgow by history, to Scotland by adoption, and now to the world by export, and everywhere it lands it says the same small orange sentence: the Scots were here, and nobody took themselves too seriously.
The city put a cone on a duke and made it a crown. If you want to understand who is hosting these Games, that is the entire briefing.
The city put a cone on a duke and made it a crown.
Four songs in a small room
You can hear the whole personality in one small room two minutes from where we’re staying. On the last night of May in 1993, five young men from Manchester who were not on the bill talked, or by some accounts bullied, their way onto the stage of a three-hundred-capacity venue called King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, played four songs, and walked out signed to a record deal. The label boss happened to be in the room early, by accident, and by the second song he had decided. Fifteen months later Oasis had one of the fastest-selling debut albums Britain had ever seen. The only footage of that night was shot by a tourist from Tokyo on a handheld camera, which from where we now live feels like the universe winking. A band became itself in a room that small because enough people in it leaned in at once. That is the entire principle, in four songs. We LOVED that our hotel was almost right next door.
We didn’t get inside, and the timing of our visit was better than tickets. It was one in the morning, at the end of the biggest night this family has had in a while, medal seen (story coming soon), food eaten, hearts still at altitude, and the walk back to the hotel happened to run straight past that unassuming doorway on St Vincent Street. Greg and Hayley walked on ahead. Dee stopped, and had her Oasis moment alone on an empty street: the lifelong fan, standing where the band became the band, hours after watching years of unrelenting work become visible in a pool across town. Beginnings and arrivals in the same night, one block apart in the same city.
And the thing that got us, standing there, wasn’t that Oasis played this room. It’s that when they played this room, they weren’t Oasis yet. If you’d been in that crowd in 1993 you wouldn’t have thought you were watching one of the biggest bands Britain would ever produce. You’d have thought: they’re pretty good. History is only obvious looking backwards. What actually happened that night is that someone still unknown walked onto a tiny stage believing, against all available evidence, that their future might be bigger than the room. That isn’t an Oasis story. It’s the story of every person who has ever dared to begin, and we’ve built two entire careers out of photographing people at exactly that moment, at the start of stories whose endings nobody knows yet.
At twenty, we’d have stood here and thought: cool, Oasis played this room. At our age now, having built something of our own out of a room nobody visited at first, the place reads differently. What’s sacred here isn’t the famous name. It’s that they didn’t quit before anyone knew it.
The hardest audience in Britain
The city has been doing this for a long time. A short walk away, above a shop on the Trongate, sits the Britannia Panopticon, the oldest surviving music hall in the world, a steep penny room where shipyard crowds once roared at the acts they loved and threw things at the ones they didn’t. A sixteen-year-old called Stan Jefferson took his first ever stage there, survived the hardest audience in Britain, moved to America, became Stan Laurel, and went on to one half of the most loved comedy act in film history. Glasgow is the UK’s first UNESCO City of Music, and you believe it within an hour of arriving. This is a city that has always understood that the point of a room is the people in it.
We went in. It is living history, worn exactly the right amount, and you can feel the stories in that room: through the walls, whether you believe in that sort of thing or not. The oldest surviving music hall in the world, and it smells faintly, gloriously, of every act that ever chanced it.
Neither of these rooms is grand. Neither of them advertises. That’s the point of them. Greatness has terrible branding at the beginning: it looks like a worn stage, a five a.m. pool, a spreadsheet, a tiny venue with a strange name. People fall in love with outcomes. Almost nobody falls in love with the work that builds them. The world changes in small rooms, and Glasgow, more than anywhere we’ve ever been, seems to know it: a city that celebrates its people before they’re famous, that values craft, music, sport and comedy not because they might succeed but because they’re worth doing. It crowned its duke with a cone, and it keeps its cathedrals three hundred people big.
Monuments to possibility
Somewhere in the afternoon we noticed the pattern, and not just of the day. Of the whole trip. We have stood where a prince raised his standard and where he took his last look at Scotland. Where the whisky crosses out of the Highlands. Where the shortbread comes out of the oven, still warm. Where a band got signed in four songs, and where music hall drew its first hard crowd. A month of pilgrimages, and every single one of them was to a beginning. We are, it turns out, suckers for first chapters. The world builds monuments to success. We keep visiting monuments to possibility.
And all week, across town, in a pool, sits the other end of that road, where years of unrelenting hard work are becoming visible one final at a time. The distance between a tiny stage and a finals wall isn’t measured in kilometres. It’s measured in perseverance, in not quitting through all the years when nobody knew your name. We won’t say more than that here. We save that story for last.
The Barras, and the real city
And on our last Glasgow morning, with no family business at the pool until the evening session, we gave the hours to the Barras, the city’s old weekend market. Local wares, local food, live entertainment working the lanes between the stalls, and more Glaswegian in the air than we’d heard in the entire trip. It was the least fancy place we visited in all of Scotland, and one of the places we loved most, for precisely that reason. Nothing about it was performing for visitors. It was the city itself, at volume, and everyone was there. Lunch was traditional Scottish steak and chips in a whisky and peppercorn gravy, eaten among the stalls, and it was everything a market lunch should be, which is to say generous, unfussy and gone quickly.
The wall of support
The day’s required ridiculous moment arrived at the Australian team HQ, where we stopped for a coffee and discovered the photo booth: four frames, then you pin the strip to the wall of support for your athlete. What nobody told us is that the machine starts shooting the moment you arrive. The resulting strip catches us in four escalating stages of unpreparedness, hair being fixed, eyes half closed, one of us mid-sentence, and it now hangs proudly on the wall. It also, we have since discovered, appears on the official website, where any Australian on Earth can inspect it. We regret nothing. We regret it slightly. Both are true.
The night the city fed us
Drinks at the Ben Nevis, an old Highland pub that seems to have landed intact in the middle of Glasgow, timber and stone and folk music, mostly locals plus the occasional traveller who found it by accident and looked delighted about it. The house move is a Tennent’s, when in Glasgow, but the Happy Chappy IPA found us first and we stand by the decision.
Then dinner at the Ubiquitous Chip with Greg, Hayley and Liam, drinks at the pub opposite first, Ashton Lane pumping around us on a Saturday night. The Chip has been part of Glasgow’s cultural furniture since 1971, when it started championing Scottish produce a generation before anyone said farm-to-table, and the main room remains genuinely magical: hanging gardens, stone walls, fairy lights, a glass roof, murals by Alasdair Gray, a building now listed for its cultural importance. We’ll be honest the way we’re honest about places we still liked: on our night, the room outshone the plates. But the company outshone everything, which is the only review of a family dinner that matters, and being folded into a loud, happy West End Saturday felt like the city including us.
The swimmer on the wall
And then, not on any official itinerary, we found the stop that ended up mattering most. Glasgow keeps more than nine hundred murals, a deliberate campaign to turn blank walls and forgotten laneways into an open-air gallery, and on the City Centre Mural Trail there is a swimmer, painted for the 2014 Commonwealth Games: a diver suspended in the split second between intention and impact.
We stood under it a while. Every city tells its history. Glasgow paints it. And after the week we were having, that mural read as something more than street art: proof that long after the medals are packed away and the arenas empty out, a city chooses what, and who, it remembers. Twelve years after its Games, Glasgow still keeps a swimmer on a wall. We found that unreasonably moving, for so many reasons.
The anthem Scotland borrowed
One more piece of the soundtrack needs its own paragraph, because it had been chasing us since the Highlands. On the drive north, deep in the Scottish Bangers playlist, we fell for a song we assumed was Scottish, since there it was between the folk and the indie, being adored: Yes Sir, I Can Boogie. Greg, who knows his facts and his stats, corrected us over dinner. It isn’t Scottish at all. It’s Baccara, Spanish disco, 1977. It simply got adopted a few years back, after the national football team was filmed belting it in celebration, and the Tartan Army decided, in the way this country decides things, that it was theirs now.
And so, at these Games: it featured at the opening ceremony, gloriously. And a rhythm emerged at the pool that we will carry for the rest of our lives. Every time Scotland won a medal, the crowd sang Flower of Scotland as the flag rose, every word. And then, as the athletes set off on their victory lap around the pool, Yes Sir, I Can Boogie would drop, and an entire aquatics centre would dance. A Spanish disco track from 1977 is now welded permanently into the DNA of a Scottish Games, and into ours. For the rest of our lives, those opening bars will mean Glasgow, a pool, a a fabulous week, full of people we love.
It is, when you think about it, the cone again. Scotland saw something bright and joyful that technically belonged elsewhere, put it on its own head, and dared anyone to say it didn’t fit.
Gie it laldy
We walked home through the Sunday crowds with the family, and picked up our last piece of Scottish vocabulary on the way, printed on the foam hand of a volunteer: gie it laldy. Give it everything. Go all out. Cheer with your whole chest and hold nothing back. Scotland, compressed into three syllables, and the exact instruction we carried to the pool every night.
We came into these days expecting famous places, and every one of them taught the same quiet thing instead: everything enormous starts small, unwitnessed, and unconvinced of itself. Greenland told us that with snowflakes. Glasgow tells it with stages and paint, crowns what it loves with what it has, and never stopped making things: first ships, then music, then art, then stories. Somewhere along the way it worked out the thing the strongest cities know: believe, against all evidence, that your future is bigger than the room you’re standing in.
Gie it laldy.
Read more Greenland/Scotland travel stories here:
The Night the Fjord Disappeared
Midnight Gold on the Ilulissat Icefjord
