ENDING THE JOKES

Alan Cochrane stands up for his home town, the City of Discovery, as it prepares for a new attraction

Alan Cochrane believes the V&A will change Dundee’s fortunes

The gloves are off. For far too long we Dundonians have put up with too much in the way of jokes, slurs and downright rudeness about our native city. No longer. Some time ago, along with a fellow scribbler who also hails from that Flower of the Tay, I decided to adopt a zero tolerance attitude to such insults.

To be frank, I’m not sure if our stern expressions did much good in restoring the city’s image but there is, on the horizon, a venture which I am sure will transform Dundee and have every other Scottish city going bright green with envy.

I’m referring to the forthcoming opening in the autumn of the city’s Victorian and Albert Museum of Design. After a lifetime in the inky trade hyperbole is not exactly an unknown to me, but I confidently predict that the V&A will be a sensational success. I admit that I haven’t had a peek at what wonders its interiors might contain, but how could it fail to succeed in such a fantastic building? Designed by Japan’s Kengo Kuma, it really is a staggering structure.

Although I’ve never seen an extra-terrestrial – at least not since I worked in Perth – Dundee’s V&A looks like nothing more or less than one of those incredible spaceships in which creatures from Mars descended to Earth in the old sci-fi pictures. Those aren’t the visitors this building are likely to bring to the city, but it is expected to attract something like 500,000 people a year – a figure which has, incidentally, doubled from the first estimate.

V&A Dundee, as it’s to be called, will be an international centre for design for Scotland. The first ever design museum to be built in the UK outside of London, it will host major exhibitions, celebrate Scotland’s design heritage, inspire and promote contemporary talent, and encourage design innovation for the future.

Now, I’m sure that those of a more carping disposition might say this increase in projected ‘footfall’ is of a piece with the doubling in cost estimate, from the initial £45 million to the current £80 million. My view is that it’s worth every penny and that it compares favourably with the more than £400 million (ten times the first estimate) spent on that concrete monstrosity which houses the Scottish Parliament at the foot of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.

Still, I digress. Dundee, and especially its centre and waterfront, have needed the shot in the arm that the V&A will deliver. It has been sad to drive around the harbour area and see the shabby-looking offices of the old Dundee, Perth & London Shipping Line and the apparently unused Customs House building, structures that told of a more successful commercial past.

The old jute mills aren’t missed, certainly not by those who worked in them, but the abiding folk memory in Dundee is anger at what was done to its heart – the desecration wreaked by ignorant and corrupt former City Fathers on the old and historic centre of what was, until as recently as the 1960s, a wonderfully evocative medieval city.

It may be my imagination but I am delighted to report that the overall mood in the city appears to be improving as the V&A opening date approaches. I was honoured to attend and address the annual dinner of the Bonnetmakers, one of Dundee’s Nine Incorporated Trades and a finer bunch of men (and women) it would be difficult to find.

As well as enjoying their company, it was heartening for yours truly to find that my exhortations about how we Dundonians should no longer put up with the snide and often downright loutish comments from the inhabitants of lesser cities, were well received.

A few of my suggestions about what we might say about, for example, Aberdeen or Perth – from whence a good deal of anti-Dundee insults come – went down especially well.

There will be many who say that mine is a very petty-minded attitude. To that I plead guilty, but would only say in mitigation that it is an attitude brought on by long years of having to grit my teeth when my home town was spoken of in disparaging tones.

However, best of all, I will get to see the forced smiles from all those who’ve enjoyed looking down their noses at Dundee when this marvellous place is finally opened. They’ll hate that the V&A is in Dundee and – not to put too fine a point to it – they’ll be jealous as hell.

“The overall mood in Dundee appears to be improving as the V&A opening date approaches