The Herald - The Herald Magazine
‘Physical heritage creates a sense of belonging’ How a vanishing city was captured on camera
A Glasgow historian’s photo archive can finally be seen by everyone. This is the story ...
THERE was a lot of history embedded within the walls of the Snodgrass Grain Mill, an imposing 19th-century edifice in the Anderston district of Glasgow. The building in Washington Street, close to the waterfront, was erected in 1849. Steam power had allowed the city’s grain mills to move further up the Clyde, away from their previous dependence on the water power of the River Kelvin.
Snodgrass greatly expanded the works in 1874 with fine Italianate towers; and the mill was one of the first to install electricity as competition from cheap North American grain increased.
Anderston, however, suffered greatly in the name of comprehensive redevelopment in the 1960s and early 1970s. A former public librarian, launching a book of old Anderston photos and postcards in 1993, complained that the redevelopment removed not just buildings but the lines of the streets. “It took Anderston back to the earth it stood on,” he said.
The grain mill managed to survive the wrecking-ball. Twenty-odd years ago there were plans to turn it into
103 high-quality apartments and penthouses. Nothing transpired, however, and the grand old building was eventually demolished. The site remains vacant.
The disappearance of the Snodgrass mill, and countless other buildings besides, is lamented by the Glasgow historian and author Ian Mitchell, who took the main photograph here in 2001.
The picture, and dozens of others taken by Mitchell, have now been digitised and put online by his namesake, the Mitchell Library.
Shot over the last 40 years or so, the images are an intriguing record of the city and its social and industrial history. The collection – the library’s first-ever array of photographs in digital format – ranges far and wide, from Parkhead to Possil, Govanhill to
Kinning Park, Shieldhall to Dalmarnock.
There’s a picture, for example, of the original Albion Motor Works, in Scotstoun’s South Street (“a centre of the shop stewards’ movement in the First World War”, Mitchell notes), now demolished.
There’s the Sentinel Works, in Jessie Street, Polmadie, an A-listed building designed by Archibald Leitch, acclaimed architect of such football stadia as Ibrox, Hampden and White Hart Lane. Hundreds of small boats were built by an engineering firm here; later, the building was owned by Beardmore and then Weir.
Other subjects include a Possil street scene, from 2007, an eye-catching shot of tenement frontages in Maryhill’s Murano Street, and an old nightclub in Duke Street. “This place fascinated me,” Mitchell notes of the latter, “as it resembled so many similar establishments that one encounters in rural and small-town USA, looking as though it were erected in a day with clapboard – and, like them, having no windows.”
Also featured is Govan graving dock, which found fame a few years ago when it hosted a scene from the Oscar-winning film, 1917. In Mitchell’s own words, the A-listed site is of world importance, a symbol of Glasgow’s maritime dominance a century ago.
Few people are better placed than Ian Mitchell to document Glasgow’s storied past. The Aberdeen-born author taught history at Clydebank College for 20 years and among his many fiction and non-fiction books are three volumes that breathe new life into Glasgow’s history, especially of the working-class kind: This City Now, Clydeside: Red, Orange and
People often don’t value what is on their doorstep until someone else values it
Green, and A Glasgow Mosaic.
“During the first lockdown I decided to organise my Glasgow photographs in some sort of order,” he says. “I realised I had quite a few of buildings that were gone, or buildings that were in great danger of going, or buildings that had been renovated. In some cases, more or less by accident, I had photographs of buildings before and after restoration.”
At length, recognising that his collection might have some historical interest, he approached the Mitchell Library, which responded with interest. Mitchell then began filling in some of the gaps in his array of photographs.
“In the past we’ve amassed lots of physical photographs and we have built up a substantial collection,” says
Clare Thompson, a librarian at the Mitchell. “Ian’s items were largely digital and I asked a few colleagues in Glasgow Museums to help me understand how to make this collection available online.
“Ian’s photographs are part of our tradition at the Mitchell of recording the decline of the historical heritage of the city. There’s the William Graham collection, for example: he went round Springburn, taking photographs of it before it was demolished.”
Certain trends occurred to Mitchell as he surveyed his own images. “Just as there used to be a rush to demolish tenements in the 1960s and 1970s, to me it seems that the same thing is happening with high-rises in Glasgow at the moment. There’s an assumption that they should be knocked down and replaced, for whatever reason. In some cases that has been the wrong decision.
“The other is that many old schools have been turned into, say, flats or offices or events centres. There’s almost a law that the more affluent the area, the more likely that was to happen. The poorer the area, the less likely. If you have a lovely Edwardian school in Hillhead, you could sell it for £200,000 flats.
“If you have the same in Bridgeton, you wouldn’t be able to sell it, because you wouldn’t have the market. And to do it up as a council venture – an old folks’ home – would cost far too much. In areas that already have, in a sense, a diminished cultural heritage, redevelopment in many ways is making that even more so.”
Such is the pace of urban change that he expects that some of the buildings he photographed “will be gone before too long, because not everything is savable.
“You walk around the streets of Glasgow and you hear people saying, ‘The council should do something about that building’. I always say, ‘Right, what should we do?’ When they say it should be done up, I ask – what would we use it for? If a building doesn’t have a function, it’s basically doomed, unless it’s historically unique, like the Necropolis or some place.”
He specifies some “astounding” buildings in Bridge Street, Laurieston, including the India Buildings, and it’s a source of regret to him that the local area “has more or less had the carpet pulled from under it”.
“You are going to lose some old buildings, generally, but the more you can keep, the better,” he adds. “I think people do get a sense of belonging and a sense of pride out of physical heritage.
“I used to do a lot of talks and slideshows. I remember doing one in Bridgeton once and there was an elderly woman there. I showed her a picture of Dalmarnock school and she said, ‘That’s my school – I went there!’
“She was amazed that anything in her experience should be of interest to anyone else. I ended up giving her a copy of a book of mine that had that photograph, and she went away saying, ‘I’ll show this to folk’.
“People often don’t value what’s on their doorstep until someone else values it. If they see somebody else valuing it, they’ll say, ‘Oh, I remember that’. But I’ve never forgotten that lady.”