A tale of two burghs: Govan and Partick cherish their unique identities

I was born and bred here, and wherever I go in the world I tell people I’m a Govanite, no’ a Glaswegian.”

Tommy is 64, a retired sawmill worker, barrel-chested beneath a bright yellow vest, Che Guevara tattooed on one strong round shoulder. He has a handlebar moustache, which appears to have been forged from gleaming steel, and he seems to embody the burgh motto, engraved in cast-iron on the nearby Victorian drinking fountain at Govan Cross – Nihil Si Labore, nothing without work.

This week it is exactly a century since the law was passed which saw Govan and Partick lose their independence and become part of the city of Glasgow, despite the wishes of many of their people. The former burghs regard each other across the Clyde like gossiping housewives in tenement windows on either side of a street. If we could hear them speak it is likely that Govan would be cursing the day it ever married Glasgow, which it considers to have squandered its shipbuilding wealth and left it poor; Partick – tholing, consoling, wealthier, less thrawn – would be advising its neighbour to make the best of the match.

Govan has been inhabited since the stone age. It is the earliest known Christian site in the region. For 1,500 years, this has been a place of pilgrimage. On a bright Friday morning, shipyard cranes stand stark against blue skies and starlings sing in the kirkyard rowans of Govan Old Parish Church. There are only a dozen or so folk in for morning prayers, but there is no doubting their faith as they worship in a small side chapel beside the 9th century sandstone sarcophagus thought to have held the body of St Constantine. No doubting their belief, either, when – over tea and buttered pancakes – they discuss their home. You’re not a proper Govanite unless you’ve been in Elder Park pond, they say. You can be baptised in the church, but the pond is the true Govan baptism.

“People tend not to be bland about Govan,” says the minister Moyna McGlynn. “They are passionate about this place. When I think of Govan and Partick, I think of the old Glasgow, and in many ways think of them as untouched by the modern aspirations of the city. People here still see themselves as separate. That psychology may have been compounded by the decades of isolation when this was a no-go area – housing being pulled down, shops closed – but I think it was there anyway.”

Govan has energy. There are many parts of the city which are far richer, but which feel poorer in spirit. On the pavement outside a pub on Govan Road, a street party is starting up: kids with balloons; kids with ice poles; young men reeking of wacky-baccy; a merry 72-year-old who introduces herself as Mad Betty Diamond, daughter of the stage comedienne Wee McGregor, and who is reputed to know more dirty jokes than anyone else in Govan.

Next door is a salon which, of late, has found a new line of business providing waxes to pensioners. “Lorraine,” says one hairdresser to the other, “tell him about the wee woman of 90 that was waxed last week. She went skipping out the door, very near, she was that chuffed with herself.”

“Oh, aye,” says Lorraine. “Better than the doctor. The OAPs come in for a blether and stay for a wax. They go to that shop” – she points across the street – “get four scones for a pound and they’ll sit aw day.”

Seated on a bench outside the studios of the Sunny Govan radio is Brian McQuade, known as Sir Brian, a director and presenter with the community station. Sir Brian is a great Govan character. His gaunt, craggy features and long brown hair bring to mind a more desiccated Ronnie Wood; it is, as he says, the kind of face you get when you don’t eat properly and you drink too much. He has, one might add, kindly eyes. Sir Brian is 57, a staunch Govanite, tremendous autodidact and former alcoholic – pretty much in that order.

He was born in Govan and grew up in the Moorpark scheme, better known as the Wine Alley, an infamous slum. He was wild. “Before I was ten, I robbed mair trains than Jesse James.” The Wine Alley backed on to a railway goods yard and he’d lift coal from the halted freight, selling it on cheap at half a crown a bag. He broke into warehouses and shops, in the small hours of the morning, pulling away the crumbling old stone and stealing fags or whatever he could find. “Eventually, I got charged with 147 burglaries.”

At 13, he was sent to an approved school, a kind of borstal, and for six months worked there as the librarian. Hardly any of the other boys could read so he had the place to himself, devoting his time to the discovery of leather-bound classics – Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens. Out on parole, he got a job in the cleansing department, lifting the bins from back-court middens. “It was a dirty hard job but it was educational because people throw oot thousands of books.” Among the ash and dirt, the broken glass and dead cats, he found a copy of The Odyssey, so beginning a love affair with antiquity. He taught himself Latin – “enough to get by” – and ancient Greek.

The world of Tacitus and Plato seemed solid and certain, “like the Kingston Bridge”; the rest of his life perhaps less so. He went abroad and begged on the streets of Rome and Naples. He struggled with drink. He slept rough. One morning he woke up and decided to make a change. He studied for qualifications and eventually took two degrees at Glasgow University – in classical civilisation and the history of art.

Sir Brian’s is a tale of redemption and so it is perhaps unsurprising that he sees a similar arc in Govan’s own story. “Govan is like a phoenix from the ashes,” he says. “I saw the tenements destroyed and the place a bomb zone. But they’ve built hundreds of new hooses alang the lines of the auld streets. The place is buzzing. It’s just like being back in the auld Govan again, full of people and life.”

To travel on the underground from Govan to Partick takes 90 seconds. To go by ferry takes twice that time and is about a million times more pleasant, a ziggurat of luxury flats on the northern bank casting zig-zagging reflections in the dark rippling river.

The community-minded feel of Partick finds strong expression in some of its traditional bars. Drinkers at The Quarter Gill are planning an outing on the Waverley to Dunoon. Behind the bar is kept a list of phone numbers for the sons and daughters of elderly patrons; if a regular fails to turn up for their daily nip, a call goes out to check they are okay. “We’ve lost a lot of folk,” sighs Babs the landlady, “to the big pub in the sky.”

Partick is multicultural. Crescents and saltires adorn the walls of Turkish barbers. In Vietnamese-run nail bars, young Polish women apply colour and glitter to the manicured talons of west end glamazons. A Lhasa Apso eats a macaroni pie off the pavement on Dumbarton Road. Young women sun themselves as far as hijab will allow on the grass of Mansfield Park.

There is also a sizeable Gaelic-speaking community, drawn largely from Lewis, Harris and Skye; incomers from Barra and Uist traditionally preferring to settle south of the river. Such is the Gaelic presence here that certain shopkeepers have found it prudent and amusing to learn something of the language. Khalid Parvaiz, a speaker of Weegie and Urdu, who runs the Stardust newsagent and grocery, has picked up a fair bit over the years. His favourite phrase? “Thalla a nis is mach a seo!” – get out of my shop.

Less studenty and gentrified than neighbouring Hillhead and Hyndland, this is a district where one might see or hear anything. It seems to gather eccentrics as its granaries once gathered grain. “That’s Partick, intit?” says Mark Cullis from behind the counter of the family diner, Cullis’s. “I go out there some mornings to put the tables out and there’s guys going by on unicycles or folk running in bare feet. There’s a lady sits and talks to herself in the mirror.”

On Dowanhill Street, in the late afternoon, a young man called Kieran Brogan is walking home with a ten foot Burmese python called Noodles wrapped around his shoulders. Noodles belongs to Kieran’s flatmate, Joe, but he helps to look after it. He and the snake have just been moved along from Kelvingrove Park.

Noodles attracts lots of attention. A local undertaker called Danny comes running over to ask if he can take a photo on his phone. “It’s funny,” says Danny, “but I’ve seen a guy walking along here with a cockatoo, I’ve seen a guy with a lizard and I’ve seen a guy with a big spider.”

“A big spider?” says Kieran. “That’ll be Joe.”

Joe and Kieran, it turns out, share their flat with eight snakes, three bearded dragons, a monitor lizard, three tarantulas, one giant snail, a chameleon from Yemen, and a dug. “Only,” says Danny, “in Partick”.

The old burgh motto of Partick is Industria Ditat – which Brian McQuade could tell you means “Industry enriches us”. Maybe it does, but one sure fact is that Partick and Govan both enrich Glasgow. It would have been a far drearier century without them.