Glasgow Requiem - The Walk review: 'a unique perspective on the city'

Glasgow Requiem - The Walk ★★★★

Some city, Glasgow. Hailed as a loving mother to her people, Glasgow has also - at times in its history - been a scene of immense human suffering, growing in a single hectic century from a small riverside town to the heavy-industrial second city of Empire, and sucking in generations of migrants - from Ireland, the Highlands and beyond - who, in the early 19th century, often died of hunger, disease or exhaustion within months of their arrival.

So now, as Glasgow celebrates 850 years since it gained Burgh status, landscape artist Angus Farquhar and his company Approximate Arts have created an audio walking tour of the very oldest part of the city, which seeks to open our eyes and ears - and also our hearts - to Glasgow’s history as a city of the dead, as well as of the living.

Glasgow Requiem - The Walk | Alaisdair Smith

Scripted and directed by Purni Morell, with beautiful soundscapes by Andrew Knight-Hill, the walk begins at St Mungo’s Catholic Church near the Royal Infirmary. It carries us across the motorway, down past the hospital - now the oldest working hospital building in Scotland - which is built on an old original burial place, to the grave-filled grassy grounds of the Cathedral on whose walls workmen five centuries ago, and more, scratched hard-hitting messages about the inevitability of death, and their visions of resurrection.

Then the audio guide, narrated by the actor Gary Lewis whose parents grew up here in Townhead, leads us in through the gates of the City of the Dead itself, the Glasgow Necropolis; the mighty city cemetery that climbs the hill on the other side of what was once the Molendinar Burn, and is now a modern traffic road, with the burn culverted beneath. We remember the women who used to wash their household clothes on the banks of the burn beneath the Cathedral; we walk an avenue of headstones, hearing the names of the Glaswegians buried there, their famllies and occupations.

Then in its final phase, the walk soars to the top of the hill, to contemplate the vista across Glasgow; and the uncomfortable truth that the tallest and most prominent monument in the Necropolis, paid for in the 19th century by subscriptions from hundreds of wealthy citizens, is a statue of John Knox, the 16th century Presbyterian leader famed mainly for his virulent hatred of Catholics and Catholicism.

Glasgow Requiem - The Walk | Alaisdair Smith

And at the end, we walk downhill, passing between two glorious blossoming cherry trees, to a Flower Memorial garden planted as part of the Glasgow Requiem project, in remembrance of the 27,000 people buried here without a named grave; we hear some of their stories, and spend a moment mourning those whose stories will never be told.

What Glasgow Requiem - The Walk offers, in other words, is a unique perspective on a city whose more upbeat, celebratory or combative faces are well known, but which sometimes hesitates to confront its own history of pain and loss. Beyond Gary Lewis’s central narrative, the soundtrack features a dozen other voices, including those of actors Douglas Henshall, David McKay and Gabriel Quigley; it also offers glorious music by composers ranging from Karine Polwart to JS Bach, and is beautifully paced and delivered, in five sections, to accommodate all speeds of walkers.

It’s also profoundly in the spirit of The Walk that it is available to download to everyone, free of charge, until October, so that people can visit the Cathedral area and make the journey with their mobile phones and earbuds, whenever they choose. And the man who conceived the project, Angus Farquhar, insists that it is not over yet; as he follows the buried Molendinar Burn down to the Clyde, and reflects on the lives of all the people - the wealthy and the poor, the blessed and the wretched, the known and the unknown - who have lived and died along its banks.

The audio soundtrack to Glasgow Requiem - The Walk can be downloaded at https://aproximaarts.squarespace.com/gr-walk, and will be available until October.