Martyn McLaughlin: Images from past chart the changing story of our biggest city

The photograph of John Beanlands indoor air raid shelter is typical of the quirky but important images to be found on the Lost Glasgow Facebook page being celebrated this week.

There is an image of Glasgow, taken on the cusp of the 20th century, which retains the capacity to astonish. It shows James Miller’s grand industrial hall, built for the 1901 International Exhibition. The building’s white and gold facade is obscured by nightfall, the shadows pierced by strands of white light, hinting at the Venetian splendour below.

There are many things remarkable about the glass plate image, not least the way it asks how such a spellbinding creation could ever have been envisaged as temporary. What is most revealing, however, is not the plate itself, but the story behind it. At the time, there were only 3,000 domestic consumers of electric lighting in the entirety of the second city of the empire. The meter, one suspects, must have been well fed.

Snapshots such as these reveal a city familiar yet distinct part of history’s sweeping timeline, while belonging resolutely to another time. For years, such curios could be glimpsed only in books and occasional exhibits. Sometimes, they emerged by surprise – negatives of ice cream parlours, steamers, and howffs, of Orange walks, summer fetes, and Confirmation days – spilling out of of mahogany sideboards earmarked for house clearances.

Thankfully, the digital age, which many once feared would herald the death of photography, is keeping such vital images alive. Later this week, the Glasgow City Heritage Trust will play host to an exhibition of images featured on Lost Glasgow, a Facebook page dedicated to the city’s architecture, history, and above all, its people.

Since launching three years ago, the site has attracted upwards of 137,000 followers, from schoolchildren and architects through to emigres and their descendants.

It grew out of Lost Edinburgh, a similar site set up by journalist David McLean. Originally, he compiled a showreel of old photographs of the capital to stir the imagination of his grandfather, who had Alzheimer’s. A personal labour of love blossomed into something bigger, which resonated far and wide.

The remit of both sites is disarmingly simple: they collate long lost images, sourced from public and private collections, as well as the bountiful archives of newspapers such as this one, before publishing them online. Then, by drawing on the collective knowledge of its fanbase, stories add colour to the monochrome.

Take, for example, a 1941 photograph of a Mr John Beanland, resident in the now demolished Foyers Street in Springburn. It shows him and his wife, Mary, posing stoically in the marital bedroom. What should be an ordinary scene is rendered anything but by the presence of a corrugated steel bomb shelter.

Mr Beanland, it transpired, was fearful of the threat posed by the Luftwaffe, but not to the extent that he deemed it necessary to decamp to the dreich of outside come the siren’s wail.

The image represents Glasgow’s own little victory over Hitler, indicative of a character and humour that has persisted.

Such little moments, captured in the midst of wartime, crisis, or grinding poverty, are indicative of Lost Glasgow’s capacity to satisfy and surprise. The site’s main pull is the way it aggregates nostalgia, presenting vanished industries and the forgotten victims of what was once blithely called progress.

Black and white cityscapes hint at great hulls sneaking above the skylines of Govan and Whiteinch, while street level images, taken a few miles from the gold leaf and Carrera marble of City Chambers, depict backcourts where wrecking balls had moved in, but people had yet to move out – places home to crooked children in crooked buildings, forging playgrounds from, in Edwin Morgan’s words, “that black block condemned to stand, not crash”.

But the photographs, chosen by former journalist Norry Wilson, do not dwell on Glasgow’s hardscrabble past. Neither do they romanticise it. Instead, they form chapters in the city’s changing story, charting its triumphs and follies.

They are a lament for long-razed architectural gems, such as St Enoch Hotel and Springburn Public Halls, but so too they celebrate treasures still with us, such as the purse-proud classical terraces sweeping by Kelvingrove Park, or the triple-arched cast iron framework of the Ca’ d’Oro building on the corner of Union Street and Gordon Street.

The message is implicit: in the rush to castigate the town planners of the past, we should not lose sight of what may be claimed by the future.

Speaking ahead of the launch, Norry revealed the difficulties he faced setting up the exhibition.

“I thought the hard bit would be selecting 50-60 images from the thousands the site has posted – it wasn’t – the hard part was getting permissions and the hi-res images we needed.

“And it’s nice too that the exhibition is in Bell Street – just next door to where my late father, Glasgow architect Norman Wilson ended his working life – in the offices of Strathclyde Regional Council. It was he and my art teacher mother – and the stories they told me - who gave me my love for this great and gallus city. They taught me how to see, how to look beyond the obvious, how to read the city, and its buildings.

“When we look at these pictures, we’re not looking at strangers – we are looking at our forbears, our families, our friends - we are looking at ourselves.”

The modest exhibition, which opens tomorrow, deserves as wide an audience as possible, but it should be a starting point in celebrating Scotland’s rich photographic tradition.

Ever since David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson changed the way photography looked at the world, the nation has given rise to some of the art form’s most important practitioners. It is a legacy which spans figures such as Thomas Annan – currently the focus of an exhibition at the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles – Bert Hardy, Margaret Watkins, Oscar Marzaroli, and David Peat. Through the likes of David Gillanders and Chris Leslie, the thread runs through to today.

Many, if not all, have featured in Lost Glasgow’s posts down the years, but these photographers – and their images – deserve more. There were once murmurs of a potential museum dedicated to Scottish photography. The advent of the internet may have quelled the demand for such an institution, but it should not extinguish it.