1990 and all that

IT was an unlikely choice as European City Of Culture, so how has Glasgow fared in the two decades since, asks Stephen McGinty

CULTURE, according to Lord Raglan, the author, soldier and beekeeper, was "roughly everything we do and monkeys don't". In winter 1989 as Jacques Chirac, mayor of Paris, prepared to hand over the title of "European City Of Culture" from the citadel of the Louvre and Sacre Coeur to, well, Glasgow, his comments suggested simians had also got their hands on paint-pots and chisels.

The handover message would have required far greater hyperbole to be described as "faint praise". Glasgow, according to Chirac, was "very important in a region which is relatively far away from the centres that usually attract people's attention in Europe".

For those Europeans who even recognised the city, Glasgow at the end of the Eighties was still wreathed in an industrial smog, behind whose belching clouds lay the rust-belt industries of shipyards, engineering and a long conga line of the unemployed. The bare-knuckle prose of No Mean City continued to sustain the image of razor-gangs, even though the literati had by then been mesmerised by a new generation of writers such as Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Liz Lochhead.

Yet in a single year, 1990, when Glasgow swaggered under the crown of European City Of Culture, the "Dear Green Place" managed to begin to single-handedly re-brand itself. Like an actor preparing to inhabit a new character, the boiler suit of a decaying manufacturing economy was exchanged for the white shirt and tie of the new service and tourism industry.

So did Glasgow indeed create a lasting cultural regeneration? Will this be threatened by budget cuts as the city council rides out the ripples of recession? And what became of the egalitarian spirit of artistic solidarity that characterised 1990 but which has been splintered as culture has again risen out of reach of the poor?

If it is indeed not over until the fat man sings, the performance by Pavarotti at the SECC in May 1990 drew a line under the past. While there may have been a fond tearful gaze back, as when Bill Bryden staged his epic The Ship at the Harland & Wolff engine shed in Govan, which culminated with the visually stunning launch of a massive mock vessel, the city fathers had their gaze firmly fixed on the future.

Now, 20 years after Frank Sinatra climbed down off the stage at Ibrox and strolled along the running track to better serenade an enchanted Weegie crowd with Fly Me To The Moon, Glasgow's fortunes have rocketed up from the depressed doldrums of the mid-Eighties. It is now the fourth most successful city for tourism in Britain and the most popular in the UK for international business conventions. New five-star hotels are popping up each year and its cultural crown remains buffed and polished. Last year Time described it as "Europe's secret capital of music", while three Turner Prize winners have emerged from its growing community of artists.

Yet the 20th anniversary of the City of Culture has triggered a period of municipal reflection. Glasgow City Council has commissioned a major report on 1990's lasting legacy and its economic impact to be published in March, while a series of seminars and discussions are also planned. Bob Palmer, the former director of 1990 and now Director of Culture at the Council of Europe, will return to Glasgow in the autumn to deliver a major speech.

Though ill-regarded by the vast majority of Glasgow's citizens, Margaret Thatcher helped secure Glasgow's bid for European City Of Culture. By abolishing the Greater London Council, she swept away the body which would have surely pipped Glasgow as Paris's successor. Instead Pat Lally, the colourful and all-powerful leader of Glasgow District Council, was able to argue Scotland's second city was more deserving of the honour than Edinburgh, or Britain's other shortlisted cities: Bath, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Leeds, Liverpool and Swansea.

The bid's success hinged on the gallus nature of Glasgow's plans. While the previous five cities to hold the honour (Athens, Florence, Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris) had each focused events on a specific theme as well as a short time frame, Glasgow embraced Raglan's description of culture and vowed that events would run every day from Ne'er Day until Hogmanay, and from breakfast art shows until late-night jazz jams.

With the city still fragrant from the Garden Festival of 1988, and bubbling with creative energy from bands such as The Blue Nile and Hue & Cry, to the New Glasgow Boys Peter Howson and Steven Campbell, and supported by authors such as Gray and William McIlvanney, the council saw a moment to be seized. The new Royal Concert Hall was finished just in time and the Arches under Central Station were turned into an exhibition on the city's history, Glasgow's Glasgow.

The final statistics were impressive. There were 1,000 main events; 1,000 local events; performers and artists arrived from 23 countries; 30 major new works were commissioned; and the city hosted 40 world premieres in theatre, dance and music, as well as 125 exhibitions. The investment of 32 million was rewarded with 60m in tourist spending, which, over the next two decades, has since risen tenfold to 600m.

"The external evaluation is that 1990 repositioned Glasgow as an international, cultural and tourist city," said Mark O'Neill, head of arts and museums at Glasgow City Council. "It gave arts and culture people in the city a confidence and ambition really to function at a level of international quality and it was definitely something that a lot more people participated in. There were peaks across the whole range of culture, music, theatre, and there was a huge increase in attendance."

Since then the city has ridden through troughs such as 1995 when Strathclyde Region was abolished and funding was cut by a third, and peaks, though smaller ones such as 1999 when Glasgow hosted the City Of Architecture And Design. The demise of The Lighthouse earlier this year, a decade after its opening, could be read as a harbinger of troubles to come. Glasgow City Council will shortly announce a reduction in cultural spending as it tightens the purse strings ahead of central government cuts.

Yet there is a resilience among the city's artistic community. During 1990 Andy Arnold ran the theatrical troupe which used the vast space under the Arches; afterwards he set up The Arches Theatre company and is now creative director of The Tron where he has raised the annual number of productions by 50 per cent. He has not yet heard, but is preparing for a cut in the 200,000 the theatre receives each year from Glasgow City Council. "You figure out a way," he says in The Tron's caf bar. "The mindset that if you get less money you do less work is nonsense."

For all the excitement among the artistic community about the completion of Trongate 103, a cutting-edge new venue, the planned Riverside Museum and the prospect of the Grade A-listed Briggait opening this spring as a new home for 100 visual artists after 20 years of neglect, Glasgow remains a city as much divided by culture as it is united by it.

In the opinion of Hue & Cry singer and social commentator Pat Kane, whose fondest memory of 1990 was looking out at the 250,000-strong crowd who had gathered in Glasgow Green for The Big Day, the city's artistic community has lost the solidarity that once bound them.

"Do I feel the left-wing ire has gone out of the cultural equation in Glasgow? Yes. We have a vampire class, or a ghost class who just come into the city to run about with their mobile phones. The walking wounded of post-industrial Glasgow, the huddled masses, are not just being improperly engaged by the arts community but, in some cases, actively sneered at."

But the economic and social problems of the city have, in a way, been engines of progress, according to Carl MacDougall, the author who was a director of the Glasgow's Glasgow exhibition at the Arches in 1990. "The reason Glasgow was the first city to pipe in clean water was because we had epidemics." He admires the way the city manages to keep reinventing itself.

For Neil Baxter, secretary of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, 1990 was the struck match to a fuse that has propelled the city on and up.

"This is the same city it always was – it's the same pilgrimage city, tobacco trading city, industrial city and the city of change and service industry which it is now. The same tensions do exist. You can spend any amount of money attempting to directly fund the alleviation of poverty and you can improve people's housing, roofs and make temporary improvements in infrastructure, but the long term requires a vibrant economy which is confident and a city that can attract people and convince people that it's a good place to invest – and Glasgow has achieved that 100 times over."