After the Garden Festival, with Lex Lamb, Gordon Barr and Kenny Brophy
Interesting thing that we've discovered, having sort of started this process, is we thought this would be a fairly well defined, finite list of things that we would find, list of sort of artworks and list of specific objects. And it's just grown and grown and grown as we keep learning more and more and more. And what we've learned is that what what it says was there in the various official maps, the official guidebook and stuff, in a lot of cases, doesn't match what was actually on the ground. The things that were designed to be temporary, in some cases, have remained to this day. Mhmm.
Gordon Barr:The things some of the objects which were specifically called out in the handbook as being planned to be permanent fixtures after the festival have gone. So what we've learned is that that we can't believe anything that's written down about what was going to happen and what was there. And we can literally only believe the evidence of what people tell us, the evidence that people give us from photographs, bits of film, footage, and all the rest of it, and trying to piece together what was actually there on the ground.
Kenny Brophy:That's why archaeology is better than history.
Niall Murphy:Okey dokey, everyone. Welcome to If Glasgow's Walls Could Talk. For those of you listening at home, we're inside the splendidly restored South Rotunda in Govan for this live recording. Now Glasgow City Heritage Trust did help out with the restoration of this building so this was a grant back in 2014 for roughly about £173,000 so it's great to see it back in full working order and in sustainable use as well and for a really good purpose as well. So our panel of three are on an ambitious mission to unearth, document and digitally record the event that changed the way the world saw Glasgow and how Glasgow saw itself so we have urban prehistorian Kenny Brophy project leader Lex Lamb, and self styled holder of the official Garden Festival umbrella, Gordon Barr, which is just just just over here behind me.
Niall Murphy:But why here exactly? And it's it's because of the kind of the tremendous history of the rotunda, which I believe you all heard when you did your tour around the building but it's fascinating to think that we're basically sitting on top of what would have been the shaft into the underworld with all of these lifts in it that horses and carts and motor cars and pedestrians would go up and down in and is now used for conveying the water from Loch Katrin into the south side as well, which is which is quite quite something when you think about it. So the rotundas are obviously a a key part of Glasgow's proud engineering history and and the the the promoters of these are actually the same promoters for the Glasgow subway, which is quite interesting. So different tunnels being built around the city at the same time. And what we are doing with today's event is to celebrate an equally important post industrial success.
Niall Murphy:So first question then would be perhaps Gordon, Kenny, and Lex can help us imagine what this building looked like as a pop up Nardini's ice cream parlour in that sunny summer of 1988. Over to you, chaps.
Gordon Barr:Shall I start off? The
Lex Lamb:first week.
Gordon Barr:I'm I I I have a very strong memory of being in this building in 1988. We used to come to the garden festival almost every weekend. My family was lucky enough to have a season ticket, so we came very regularly. And, we recently managed to discover a copy of the menu that was available for Nadine's, which is for the people that are on the screen at the back there, and is also available on our website as well. And my very strong I have two strong memories of being in Nardini's here.
Gordon Barr:You come into the building, it was a big open space with a gallery running around the back. I remember sitting at a table on the ground floor kind of looking up at this amazing ceiling from a much further distance than we're able to admire it just now, and getting to order what was an amazing treat and an amazing excitement for me as a 10 year old boy, which was my first ever ice cream Coke float with Nardini's ice cream put a lump of veggies ice cream put in a glass of Coca Cola, which went amazingly fizzed up, went all over the table. This was the most exciting drink to get as a 10 year old in the world. I I remember it to this very day. And it from the from the menu, we can see that it cost I can't quite read them from this distance with my glasses on, but It was 1 pound 45.
Gordon Barr:I think something like that. Anyway, amazing experience. And my other memory of that visit to Nardini's in here is that my father had told me about the histories of the rotundas before we came and how they had the the tunnels under the Clyde. And I was very disappointed when we came in. There was no obvious sign in the tunnels.
Gordon Barr:I remember going in and going to the toilet deliberately, because the toilets were downstairs from the rest of the cafe and poking at each of the doors in the hope that one of them would open and would get to view into the into the tunnels, which sadly didn't happen. So on the one hand, there's the excitement of the Coke float. On the other hand, there's a disappointment of not being able to see the tunnels. But I think Nardini's was very much one of several hubs of the festival, and I think it's quite appropriate that as a such a landmark building that predated the festival was a really important part of the festival itself, but is and has remained afterwards in several different generations of use. So it's really exciting to be back.
Lex Lamb:If you were to walk in that big door at the at the ground floor, you would see immaculate waitresses. You would see, depending what time of the day you were there, you would see a fashion show, possibly a string quartet. I would view this in a wider context of what the Garden Festival did of giving a little preview to Glasgow of things that have become commonplace since a kind of continental sophistication that hitherto we would have only experienced on holiday. Certainly, me as a 19 year old remember having a drink outside, a beer outside and a bratwurst outside was an incredibly exotic thing to do in Glasgow. Nardini's is probably the epitome of that, I would say, in the rotunda.
Lex Lamb:If you look at the the incredible events program that was put on during the festival, which is basically 30 to 50 events per day over a 152 days, you'll see that the ones that took place in this space tends to be the fashion shows, the string quartets, possibly some kind of cocktail piano thing going on. But it runs at a very a very a very high quality.
Kenny Brophy:Kenny? I don't remember at all.
Fay Young:So you were obviously here?
Kenny Brophy:Well, I think that my parents were packed lunch people. So then we just brought our own sandwiches and sat outside.
Lex Lamb:We went to the cafe instead.
Fay Young:So why was Nardini's chosen?
Lex Lamb:I'm not sure. I'm not sure particularly, I think, just because of their reputation as as I cater, along through the west of Scotland. One thing I failed to notice there was the centrepiece. It's difficult to visualize because we're in the cupola, right at the top of the building and what we're talking about was happening on a ground floor, plus a couple of kind of relatively temporary balconies. The centrepiece, again the sophistication, the elegance that I'm talking about, was a cast of sir Alfred Gilbert's sculpture Eros, which originates obviously in the version in Piccadilly Circus, which we might have recently tracked down what happened to the garden festival one.
Lex Lamb:But again, it's just a lovely centrepiece to that that picture of sunny Garden.
Gordon Barr:I think that's a good point, though, about the fact that it's the Glasgow Garden Festival, but there's so much more going on at it than just gardens. It wasn't just plants. It wasn't just gardens. It was events. It was shopping.
Gordon Barr:It was restaurants. It was a chance to for Glasgow to show off itself to both to itself and the rest of the world, and that's that's what's really quite exciting about it.
Lex Lamb:And when you're thinking about the elegant sophistication despite the extremely '80s wine list, which is all Piat D'or and Mateus Rose and etcetera, etcetera, Lambrusco, You've got to think about the context of around the same time in Glasgow you had Princess Square opening, the St. Enoch Centre. Yeah. The Tramway was just getting going with the the Mahabharata, stuff like that. I think there was there was a kind of little bit of a renaissance.
Niall Murphy:Very much. I think it really was a Renaissance and a real sense of optimism.
Lex Lamb:Yeah. And to go back to that that line which you quoted early on, Neil, about about an event that changed the way Glasgow is seen by the world and the way Glasgow sees itself. Those things were having an external and an internal effect in the way that Glasgow is, you know, all these cultural, fairly sophisticated, elegant things that were happening were all were all elements in in that effort to redefine Glasgow's reputation and and kind of confidence I think that Glasgow had about itself. Yeah. I I remember because I'm I was living and working
Fay Young:in Edinburgh, and just seeing seeing it from the Edinburgh, and just seeing seeing it from the Edinburgh, perspective, Incredible buzz and and the the Glasgow Mile's better, campaign, which Edinburgh is pretty rubbish at, slogans. And Glasgow has, you know, that miles better really resonated and and it did, it did buzz its way across to Edinburgh as well and and there was a great sense of what was going on.
Lex Lamb:I'd like to make the point that up to this point, the idea of a tourist in Glasgow was the punchline to a joke, you know. Whereas now, anyone who lives in Glasgow is, is, you know, it's a completely different situation. Yeah.
Niall Murphy:I remember, I was at school in Edinburgh at the time and I'd applied to the Glasgow School of Art and actually ended up not going to Glasgow School
Kenny Brophy:of Art.
Niall Murphy:I went to the Macintosh through Architecture instead. And somebody in Edinburgh saying to me at the time, you are so lucky. Do you realise that that city is going through a Renaissance? And, of course, I, you know, I didn't really know because I didn't know Glasgow at all. But now looking back, you know, decades later, it really was going through Renaissance at the time.
Lex Lamb:I should see it. I I I don't think it's without controversy at the time. If you look at what, you know, there were alternative viewpoints on offer. I'd solicit Elizabeth King to get her angle on on the garden festival and I got an excellent very full 2 or 3 pages with footnotes response. Some of the points of which I would find quite difficult to challenge even in retrospect.
Lex Lamb:But something was going to have to change and Glasgow was at that point really looking for a way ahead, heading for a post industrial situation. And the garden festival wasn't unique in that respect, but we, you know, presumably we could talk about the city of culture etcetera etcetera and all the other things I've just mentioned. But it was the pivotal event, I believe, of that renaissance.
Fay Young:So can I maybe ask you guys to introduce yourselves and explain, because you were all just youngsters in in 1988? I mean, I I was I was a lot older. So you had a very different perspective of this grand event that was was happening. So so why are you revisiting it now? What's the lure?
Lex Lamb:From my perspective, I I really have no background in this kind of thing. I've always been interested in design spaces.
Fay Young:So this is this is Lex Lamb speaking for our listeners at home.
Lex Lamb:I went to the Garden Festival twice, and I wasn't actually that bothered about it, which is odd. But you know, I always as a bolshi teenager, you know, I don't have anything in my mind. Gordon, I think, I think,
Gordon Barr:was fixed. Well, yes. So I'm Gordon, but as I say, I was 10 years old when the festival was on, which I think is probably the exact right age to experience it in almost every possible way with one key exception, which is one of the one of the most obvious and famous attractions at the Garden Festival was the Coca Cola roller coaster, which I was just too small in height to be allowed to ride. And I I was very nervous. I was a small a small chap from my age and some of my classmates from the same age, where will I get enough to ride?
Gordon Barr:And I'm still slightly bitter about that. So with that one exception, I was just the right age to to really appreciate the festival, possibly not the sitting outside drinking beer, Almond. But it it was the first time I had my own camera. So, I've got my photo album from the festival here, which I've kept all the years. And it's one of these things that looking at these photographs is one of the things that sparked conversations that led to this whole project sort of getting started.
Gordon Barr:And it's really interesting looking at the things that caught my eye to take a picture of when I only had 24 or 36 exposures to to focus on. And some of it's really interesting art and sculpture. There's a random goat. There's there's me meeting David Bellamy. There's attending there's attending, there's attending one of the BBC recordings of something being live in in in the central pavilion.
Gordon Barr:And so it's about all the different events, some of the different gardens and things as well, and some pictures of the roller coaster from afar. Ken?
Kenny Brophy:Yeah. Yeah. I'm Kenny Brophy. I'm an archaeologist. And I was 14 in the summer of the festival, and my parents had season tickets.
Kenny Brophy:But I really can't remember much about it. Plus my dad's lost all his photographs. So I don't even have those things to prompt memories.
Lex Lamb:So I
Kenny Brophy:didn't go on the roller coaster because I would have been too scared rather than too short.
Fay Young:Or too bold.
Kenny Brophy:Yes. Well, yeah. And all I remember is I've got these 2, fake daily record front pages. One of them is about me signing for Hamilton Hackies for £1,000,000 and one of them one of them is about me scoring a goal for Scotland or something like that. So and so I've got those, but my parents kept the copy of the the the official program.
Kenny Brophy:But other than that, I can't remember anything about it. But for me actually, that's the I mean, archaeology is full of things that no one remembers or that memories are false and fake and difficult. And so as an archaeologist, I'm really drawn to an event that happened relatively recently but already memories are fading and not necessarily that accurate. So actually for me, it's a perfect archaeological project because we don't know everything despite the fact it's so recent and so well documented. So actually that, sort of forgetting that I've gone through in the process has really been useful in me rediscovering this as an as an archaeologist.
Lex Lamb:I just I should just point out that, I did go on the Cola Roll. Are you?
Gordon Barr:11023 I've
Lex Lamb:since met a person who claims to have, named the Coca Cola Roll, my new wife persuaded me to go on the Coca Cola, knowing that I was somebody who hated these kind of things. She said, this one's all nice and shiny. It doesn't look all rusty, and it's not run by somebody you wouldn't trust. And and I said, yeah, okay. Since then, I have spoken to people involved in the garden festival who've explained to me why they've never went on the Coca Cola Roll.
Lex Lamb:And because it's still running, I can't say any more about that.
Niall Murphy:I have to confess, I I went on the Coca Cola roller coaster. I did. Yes. Yeah. I was 16 at the time.
Niall Murphy:We had a school trip over from Edinburgh to Glasgow for it. So which my 3rd time I was ever in Glasgow. So, yeah, it was it was a really interesting experience. And it's funny because my memories of that, I remember recycling the Main Street and how they were like the silhouettes of all the buildings a later architectural project in 2010 and being criticized by my boss for it. And it was like, that's very nostalgic.
Niall Murphy:And it was like, but that was the point. And so I remembered all of that. It kind of that lodged
Lex Lamb:street thing with the outlines of the great built the great towers of Glasgow done in.
Niall Murphy:Yes. Yeah. It wasn't it wasn't that Glasgow thing. It was sort of a different place entirely, but I was playing on that kind of idea.
Lex Lamb:They ended up rotting in a warehouse in Hellington as far as I can imagine.
Niall Murphy:No. Really? That's such
Fay Young:a shame.
Niall Murphy:They were really good fun. Yes.
Gordon Barr:I think that that's a nice kind of segue into why we started this this project now called After the Garden Festival, because it sort of grew out of a few conversations on Twitter about what actually happened to all the stuff. Because there was a huge amount of things created for the festival, both objects and and sculptures and things like the the roller coaster itself or the the the buildings and things. And there was a lot of art and other materials borrowed and brought in temporarily. And then that was all for a temporary deliberately temporary, always designed to be a fixed period of time and then it all dissipated again. And that sort of sense of trying to figure out where did it all go, what happened to it was the sort of key kind of impetus that started us having conversations about, well, somebody must have a list of where it all went.
Lex Lamb:Okay. Richard Groom's floating head was a trigger.
Niall Murphy:Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Kenny Brophy:So I did I did a couple of blog posts. So I blog about prehistoric sites and things in urban places. And so obviously the Garden Fest was not prehistoric, but there was elements of it that really interested me. And the first thing that really brought that home was when I stumbled across a picture in an old Clyde Bank webpage of this monstrous huge head perched up on the side of the Clyde and asked them, the person who posted the picture, what's that? And he said, oh, I think it's something to do with the garden festival.
Kenny Brophy:So So it struck me it had a kind of a more type quality, a kind of Easter Island quality that I really found. It was it was megalithic. It was monumental. So I went down and photographed it from the other side of the Clyde from Yoker. And then I went after that to the scrapyard just behind in Erskine.
Kenny Brophy:And after kind of negotiating my way into the scrapyard with these guys, I had no idea what I was talking about. I could already see this giant, the top of the head sticking above the back of an old orange bus that was kind of falling apart in the scrap yard. And I went round and it's just this massive face facing out to the Clyde, covered in graffiti, lichen growing on it. And every so everyone who went past in the the Waverly on a boat in the Clyde would have saw this enormous monumental head looking at them. And so I did a bit of digging about and I found out it was a bit of art by Richard Groom called Floating Head, which had been a boat, and I found some pictures, did a blog post.
Kenny Brophy:And then for some reason, the Scotsman picked up on it and did a wee story about it. And a while after that, and I don't really think it was to do with my blog, his family got in touch with me because he died. And they wanted my photographs, and they wanted to try and revive it. And then it was moved from the scrap yard, and then the sculpture placement group had a project where it was refloated during the pandemic. So that was one prompt.
Kenny Brophy:And then I did a blog post about the Antonine Gardens, which is a replica of the Roman bathhouse from Bear's Den. Now that counts as urban free history because Romans were in Scotland, most people were Iron Age. So therefore that gets in under that label. So again, I was really fascinated with this replica of a bathhouse that was then removed brick by brick and replicated next to roundabout in Milngavie where it now stands and it's now a lovely garden. It's run by a local garden organization just across from Waitrose and Aldi's.
Kenny Brophy:So I blogged about these things and I tweeted about it and likes, got in touch, and then this kind of Twitter relationship emerged between us. And then before I even met Lex, because we started to talk about putting in a funding application, and then I started to wonder, is this some kind of scam?
Lex Lamb:You'd have told me that.
Kenny Brophy:Because I know. Well, so it's like, who is this? I met this guy on Twitter.
Lex Lamb:It was, Kenny. It's just very long.
Kenny Brophy:Yeah. He's now asking me to provide information for a funding application. I am am I just enabling him to embezzle money from the Glasgow City Heritage Trust? And then I'm gonna be left holding the baby when he runs off, so
Gordon Barr:So remains remains to
Lex Lamb:be seen.
Kenny Brophy:But then Yeah. Well, it's it could just a bit it could be playing a very long game, but
Gordon Barr:we saw We we have kept all the receipts. We have all the evidence. It's all fine.
Kenny Brophy:Yeah. But you visited an excavation of mine and realized you were a real person. And it yeah. So so that was it was actually I mean, a lot of people, you know, criticize Twitter now and what it's become. But actually, for me, it's been an exciting place where I've made connections and networked and projects of Amers.
Kenny Brophy:And this is probably this is the most exciting thing that's happened through my time in Twitter. So, you know, I don't think if I'd been tweeting about what I've been doing, you Lex may have never saw my blog post and then we may never have connected in that way. And I I sort of suspect you would have done this anyway because I got a feeling you already had a spreadsheet that was ready to go. No. But you know, I think I think that that was a really important connection of like minded individuals who kind of sought each other out on social media.
Fay Young:I hadn't met before.
Lex Lamb:You No. No. No. No. No.
Kenny Brophy:No. It was just a But that
Lex Lamb:I think I didn't know about your urban prehistory gig at the time. But that moment when you saw the floating head Yeah. You know, that's that's just fantastic. And I'm That's just magic. That that that my greatest moment that way was rediscovering the Children of Glasgow Fountain, which, I'm trying to get my bearings, was
Niall Murphy:about That's slow.
Lex Lamb:Yeah. Down towards towards the Science Center from here. Mhmm. Yeah. Thank you.
Lex Lamb:Some of you might remember it from its home after the garden festival when it was located behind Kelvingrove Museum.
Gordon Barr:Yeah. It
Lex Lamb:was a
Niall Murphy:really good phantom.
Lex Lamb:Yeah. Behind the museum and the Yeah. Do all kind of a 19 fifties sort of festival of Britain look about certain Very
Niall Murphy:beautiful figures on Very beautiful kind of classical figures on.
Lex Lamb:But I remember getting a tip-off from an organization which I can't
Kenny Brophy:That was me. See. It was me.
Lex Lamb:Was it you?
Kenny Brophy:It was me. Yeah. I got I got a tip-off from someone who works for Western Barrenshaw Council that I've been working with on a completely different project looking at rock art. And he said to me, I was I was visiting a Glasgow park, depot the other day, and there was some Glasgow garden festival stuff there. So he told me where it was, and then I passed on a lake, said I'll go to a look.
Kenny Brophy:And so that was Yeah.
Lex Lamb:I took a couple of visits before I could find out. Yeah.
Kenny Brophy:It was kind of suit
Lex Lamb:And then somebody said, oh,
Gordon Barr:I'll show
Lex Lamb:you it's around here. And oh, I felt like Howard Carter entering the tomb of Tutankhamun at that point. It was just it was astounding to see that. And sadly, it's still there, you know.
Niall Murphy:Which is really sad. Who who told
Kenny Brophy:me that
Niall Murphy:it was it was taken down because somebody objected to the naked figures on it?
Lex Lamb:Supposedly, there was yes. But I think that might have been convenient. It was removed during the period of the refurbishment of Kelvingrove, and I think that that might have been a convenience. Right. Experience.
Lex Lamb:I wouldn't like to say. I don't wanna be held to my Yeah.
Kenny Brophy:And what's worse are the are the flowers that when you look closely are actually World Bank of Scotland logos. Really? Right. We arranged around it. So nice
Lex Lamb:to see where we did produce a beautifully prepared document with all sorts of suggestions for RBS who have got our biggest state, obviously, in in through in Edinburgh, that they might want to get involved. But no, They suggested we look for funding and do something with it ourselves. So that that's that one's languishing, but if you were to ask me, and I know you haven't, sorry, but, if you were to ask me what was my top favorite found garden festival object, it would it would undoubtedly be that.
Fay Young:Well, I think that calls for others to say what their favorites are. Well, I
Gordon Barr:think the interesting thing that we've discovered having sort of started this process is we thought this would be a fairly well defined, finite list of things that we would find. List of sort of artworks and list of specific objects. And it's just grown and grown and grown as we keep learning more and more and more. And what we've learned is that what what it says was there in the various official maps, the official guidebook and stuff,
Lex Lamb:in a
Gordon Barr:lot of cases, doesn't match what was actually on the ground. The things that were designed to be temporary, in some cases, have remained to this day. The things some of the objects which were specifically called out in the handbook as being planned to be permanent fixtures after the festival have gone. So what we've learned is that that we can't believe anything that's written down about what was going to happen or what was there. And we can richly only believe the evidence of what people tell us, the evidence that people give us from photographs, bits of film, footage, and all the rest of it, and trying to piece together what was actually there on the ground.
Kenny Brophy:That's why archaeology is better than history. Indeed.
Lex Lamb:It wasn't the Bells Bridge was not the one that was going to be kept, for example. The Canton Basin Bridge or the British Steel Harbour Bridge, which went from where the Science Centre is now basically over to the Gov Engraving Docks, was the one that was going to be preserved or hung on to.
Niall Murphy:And So there wasn't going to be a link across the Clyde? It was just No. And
Lex Lamb:I guess they probably made the right decision.
Niall Murphy:Well, it's funny that they're talking about putting a bridge there now to connect and to govern.
Lex Lamb:Yes. I know. But at the time, you know, those those intervening decades wouldn't have been
Kenny Brophy:I suppose,
Niall Murphy:yeah. Because the grave index would still have been in use at that point.
Lex Lamb:Yeah. And I was reading the other day somebody writing in about 19 mid 90s, I think, saying why did they keep the Bell's bridge? Nobody's using it. You know, or do you want it's required to make it take a temporary structure and make it permanent.
Niall Murphy:Yes. Because it took so long for the site to, you know, be regenerated afterwards. So going back a bit, obviously, you know, the Glasgow Garden Festival, it was the most successful of the 5 garden festivals. So you got this festival, 4, what, 3,000,000 people?
Lex Lamb:3.4. Sorry. 4.3. Yes.
Niall Murphy:Yes. Passing through it. So the biggest and most successful of them. What was the genesis of it? Why did it happen?
Niall Murphy:How did it come about? You tell us more about that?
Lex Lamb:Well, the final bid went in and was approved in 'eighty four. I think some forward looking people partly I'm not sure at this point whether that was in SDA, the Scottish Development Agency or whether it was in the City Council or possibly a bit of both. I think claim to think it was the SDA and thought let's go for this. Produce an excellent bid, got the right site. Originally, there was speculation about putting it in Kelvingrove or Glass Green or Belle Housten.
Lex Lamb:But as one of the lead designers once told me, if we'd done that, we wouldn't have got it because what it was all about was regeneration. It wasn't It wasn't and although inspired by the German Bundestkatten, so movement of garden festivals, Unlike that German movement, it wasn't about creating public parks, it was purely about regeneration of inner city areas. So you needed the right site, We had the right site. What makes Glasgow unique amongst the garden festivals, we had a history of great exhibitions obviously, and we seized upon that and tied it in, which is not the case with any of the other sites.
Niall Murphy:This would be the kind of exhibition number 5
Lex Lamb:in Glasgow. Exactly.
Niall Murphy:So 18/88, 1901, 19 11, 1938, and then 1988.
Lex Lamb:Yes. So, originally, the central committee or whoever was looking for a 1989 garden festival.
Niall Murphy:Right.
Lex Lamb:We put in the bids some bright spark thought, well, we had an exhibition in Kelvingrove 18/88, we had an exhibition in Bella Houston in 38. It would be great to do it in 88.
Kenny Brophy:Let's bring
Lex Lamb:it forward
Kenny Brophy:by a whole
Lex Lamb:year. So, let's bring it forward by a whole year, which I have plenty of people suffered because of that.
Gordon Barr:I imagine.
Lex Lamb:But it was probably worth it to tie it in to that tradition of big exhibitions which Glasgow already has, which as I said, it makes it stand away from the other UK garden festivals.
Niall Murphy:I suppose also timely as well because it gives you enough of a breather to 1990 and the European of the city
Lex Lamb:of culture. True. Yes. And we knew that we were going to be city of culture or we changed the name of it. We knew before the Garden Festival was, I think, 86 or something.
Niall Murphy:I thought it was 84, but I could be wrong. I just I remember, you know, having read back over it. It was kind of decision net with astonishment.
Kenny Brophy:Yes. So that Glass
Niall Murphy:would get it.
Lex Lamb:And I think that at some at the time, some people kind of viewed it as being a provocative sort of gesture on behalf of who was making that decision. But when when we were building up for the garden festival, we knew that the city of culture was coming up as well. So, there was a lot going on beyond the bounds of the Garden Festival site, huge though it was.
Niall Murphy:So, what comes first then? The filling in of Prince's Dock and the Basin or the Garden Festival? How's the timing of that? When does the filling in of Prince's Base in a
Lex Lamb:car? Almost immediately. The other thing that happened almost as soon as the basin was filled in and the site was cleared was planting. Because from the cultural viewpoint, you wanted to have a lot of mature trees, mature shrubs in there. They needed to be established, as many years in advance as you could possibly do.
Lex Lamb:So if you look at aerial photographs of the site, as soon as you've got the docks filled in and the site leveled, then there's actually very basic landscaping and young trees going in there, even when other bits were just like, you know, a sea of mud.
Fay Young:And and what was the ground like? Did they have to bring in
Lex Lamb:Well, yeah. When you think about it, when they filled in the docks, they ended up with a a flat surface, which was largely cobbled, obviously. So if you go to a festival park, for example, the the surviving part of the the land the landscape of the garden festival, it's all quite hilly. The idea overall of landscape was to create a kind of highlands at the governed side, gradually tailing off towards the lowlands and then a seaside area. Okay.
Lex Lamb:Yeah. So you had your maritime area down, say, where the science center is now. And right up to Festival Park, you had you had your highland scenery landscape and scenery area. Not all of it, but a great proportion of it was was produced by a rather novel technique of dredging it up from Medev side for the granaries, where Glasgow Harbor is now. You had a team of dredgers dredging up the riverbed, taking it through the Clyde Tunnel, up governed roads, and dumping it all on this.
Lex Lamb:So a lot of the landscaping was was built up from that. And I've always wondered with Kenny's future investigations, whether he's going to find stuff that was actually on the riverbed of the Clyde.
Kenny Brophy:Given we know what's been found here, it's very likely there's probably prehistoric stone tools that are in the kind of the heli areas that are around the waterfall location. So I think that's kind of inverted stratigraphy that's been created by that process. So it's definitely worth a little slot trench through that one of those slopes at some point.
Niall Murphy:So it wasn't spoiled from tenant demolitions and kind of the comprehensive development area.
Lex Lamb:You know, it's funny. I was I was looking at the big picture downstairs earlier and I was thinking to myself, you know, I don't I'm sure somebody's told me, and I do not know what they actually filled the docks in. Uh-huh. I mean, there's all that stuff about where the SEC is, that that dock was filled in with
Niall Murphy:Well, allegedly, with sitting in a station and
Kenny Brophy:her cell Sitting
Lex Lamb:in a station. That was what it was. Yeah. And, I know that the the land from Battery Park in Greenock, where I'm from, was was created, reclaimed from the sea by digging the railway tunnel that was digging. It was always you tie in one infill thing with a Yeah.
Lex Lamb:But no, I I don't, off the top of my head, know Okay. What the docks were actually filled in. But it's an odd thought if you would walk through Festival Park, if you find it on a nice day, to think that, you know, 6, 10 foot or maybe even less under the ground is just cobbles. It's an entirely artificial construction on top of an old dock.
Gordon Barr:That's amazing. When you look at the old maps of the area from before the festival, when it was still lots of working docks, like the amazing aerial photograph in the entrance foyer downstairs here at the Rotunda, A huge proportion of the Garden Festival site was water. It was those 3 huge docks, almost all of which have now been filled were filled in to create the land for the festival or refilled it, if you like, because those docks obviously weren't there originally. It was land that was reclaimed from water that was originally land. It's different generations of use, but it's it's those different layers of of history and things that make it really fascinating.
Niall Murphy:So how then did the Scottish Development Agency how did they begin to kind of get talent in? How did they sit and plan out this huge festival? How did they go about that whole process? Because they had very short time periods to do.
Kenny Brophy:An awful
Lex Lamb:lot of adverts. And for some reason, they got all the best people. The Garden Festival hovered up an entire generation of Scottish talent in all sorts of areas, in design, landscape design particularly, in architecture, in performance and in all sorts of areas. A whole generation either began their careers or got a leg up from the garden festival, simply because you're required to draw in so many people to make that work. Yes.
Fay Young:And they came from across Scotland?
Lex Lamb:Yes. Yes. Entirely from across Scotland and in some cases beyond. Yeah. And not just to put the thing together.
Lex Lamb:I I would say one of one of the biggest heroes of the Garden Festival to me is is Michael Dale, the director of events, who was able to put on that, as I described, that's 30 to 50 different events every single one of the 152 days, trained up a 1,000 unemployed people, gave them time off in an organization structure to do scotvek modules while they were working at the garden festival, set up a job seeking thing for them afterwards at the conclusion of that. 90 different countries were were providing events over the 152 days. It was a living thing. Mhmm. But you also had you had Gillespie, sort of fantastic and and going on to become an internationally successful landscaping firm.
Lex Lamb:It was very, very, them being lead designers of the garden festival was, I think, very important to them as a company. You just happened to have the best people. I think they were all very, very into it. Brian Evans, who you've known to some of you as the city urbanist, you know, has had a career. There's he's he's designed the expansion of Moscow and stuff like that, and he's done done some quite incredible things, said to me once that out of everything he's done in his career, the garden festival is the only project where he felt that everybody around him was working at the absolute top of their game.
Lex Lamb:And if anyone saw somebody at the desk next to them doing something, they they thought, well, you could probably have another shot at that. You know, do you want to try that again? And you say, yeah. Okay. I will do.
Lex Lamb:Everybody was doing that. Yeah. And right across the board, the quality of what was going on there was was really, really special in retrospect. And in some ways, it's one of the it's one it's one of the things about the Garden Festival I find difficult to explain. I can't I can't really work out why Yeah.
Lex Lamb:That was the case. But you look at what was done and and the time in which it was done, and it's it's it's top rate. It's really and the the whole the whole artworks program, the fact that you had some first rate international names and then contemporary art, all of that, you didn't need to have that. But it did have that.
Gordon Barr:And I think that's that's kind of shown out by by just how well regarded it it still is in in living memory and how many people have have really strong both strong and positive memories of it. And looking at some of the statistics we've seen about the number of season tickets that were sold to effectively to to Glaswegians, to local people who came coming back again and again. So it's not a thing just for tourists. It did bring a huge number of tourists and new people to the city, which was fantastic. But it was not just for tourists.
Gordon Barr:It was for everyone. It was for Glasgow itself. And it really seemed to get that balance right in a way that some other events have struggled to
Lex Lamb:to Totally agree.
Gordon Barr:To just be for tourists or just be for local people. Like, it seems to have really got that balance right in a way. I don't remember the exact numbers, but but we had some some great stats about the number of season tickets they'd hoped to sell in the 6 months leading up to to the festival to kind of have a kind of breakeven number for that. And they outsold that maximum number in in just a few weeks and kept selling and kept selling. Like, 40% or something.
Gordon Barr:It was a huge number. If I remember one of my other memories of the first time we went to the Garden Festival with my father, him complaining to someone at the gate because we had to we had season tickets. We had to queue up to wait to get in. We were supposed to be priority tickets that get straight through. He said, why is there he said, what we've got he said, so does everybody else.
Gordon Barr:It was just huge numbers of people really, really bought into this in a positive way.
Lex Lamb:Mike O'Dell telling me that, that he'd he'd gone to his superiors at one point and said, look, early on and said, this is not gonna work unless the people that live immediately around it are totally on board with it. You can't parachute this in. And had to put a very strong case in order to get the free season tickets that went out, basically, everywhere in g 51, I think. And he was right, you know, because you had the local area. It's an urban thing.
Lex Lamb:You couldn't do that and have a barbed wire fence around everybody else. You had to have those people on board. And and the same goes for the the way that for the recruitment policy, I think. You know? They they had no illusions that the the thing would not work if it was just something exotic located in the center of Glasgow.
Lex Lamb:It had to be integrated and become out of the community as well.
Niall Murphy:It had to belong to the close regions.
Fay Young:And I think we can all think of examples where that mistake is made in in other cities where it isn't rooted and and embraced by by
Gordon Barr:I think it's an easy thing to say you're trying to achieve, but it's a difficult thing to actually do and get that balance right. And I think if if we could distill exactly what it is that worked about it, you'd you'd be doing quite well as an events organizer, as a as a career.
Niall Murphy:How much did all this cost? And how was it funded?
Lex Lamb:Oh, how was it funded? Now that's definitive answer to any of that, but there was quite a lot of wrangling about it. And there was quite a lot of asking for extra money at various points and things like that. And there was a stage of you're not getting any more money kind of thing. But that was very much wrangled over at the time.
Lex Lamb:And there was a lot of efforts made, as you would imagine, to quantify what the economic benefit was versus investment in the whole thing. I think it's quite interesting that nobody thinks about that now. I'm not saying these things aren't material, they don't matter. If we were to have another garden festival tomorrow, it doesn't matter what the hell it costs because, you know, 10 years to 35 years, same old things, you know, it's great. But in the long run, it's not what it's about.
Lex Lamb:I think that the outcomes are possibly less tangible than that. I actually saw a quote today from the colorful PR guy, Harry Diamond, that we mentioned earlier, saying not that, I think it was a few years after the festival, he is saying, I have to admit, I didn't much care about the finance of the operation. That wasn't my responsibility. My own feeling was that as long as it gave the people of Glasgow a new prize in their city, enhanced its image nationally and internationally, persuaded people that Glasgow was a good place to invest in, to visit as a tourist, or to live and work in and bring up one's family, it was worth whatever had to be spent. And sorry.
Lex Lamb:It's a way of brushing aside your question, but No.
Niall Murphy:No. But you're absolutely spot on.
Gordon Barr:In terms of the core funding came from, sort of, UK government. It was part of a program to try and regenerate what were seen as failing in post industrial cities, which is why the the the garden festivals were in Liverpool, in Newcastle, in North Wales, in in Glasgow. And the other thing that that Glasgow did really well was bring in a lot of commercial income as well, and some of that was quite controversial at the time. We understand about what's now seen as quite common kind of commercial public private partnerships to deliver big events. There was everything was sponsored.
Gordon Barr:You know, we heard the RBS fountain. All the different, if you know, different areas had different sponsors. Some of them were public body sponsors. A lot of them were were company sponsors as well, And that was another way of bringing income to pay for the whole thing. My favorite in terms of the sponsorship are the 5 tram stops, which were each sponsored by one of Scotland's new towns.
Gordon Barr:And they each designed them themselves, and and each each had their own sort of character.
Lex Lamb:Like I was saying, some of the criticisms, from the time, which as I said looking back on, I find difficult to argue with some of them. But you couldn't say that it wasn't in the tradition of Glasgow's great exhibitions to not have a commercial. You know, if you look at the 18/88 or 1901, whatever, exhibitions, they're just like adverbs. They're just, look, we make look, we make boilers. Look, we make, you know, we make shoes and what that's all it is, most of it.
Lex Lamb:Yeah.
Niall Murphy:That was Crystal Palace. Was all about promoting trade in the industry. So
Lex Lamb:So in in in that light, I don't think that the Garden Festival looks hideously commercial in the way that No. It might otherwise.
Niall Murphy:In terms of things like legacy though, I mean, that is a controversial thing. You know, it kept on coming up, the idea of why wasn't it saved as a Tivoli Gardens for the city, and yet there had been this deal done in advance, which was part of the, you know, the money for it. The site was getting sold to Laing Homes, was it? Well, they already leased it
Kenny Brophy:to the Yes.
Niall Murphy:Exactly. The Continental Company. So but in that sense, it's interesting because when you look at what happened with the 2012 Olympic Games in London, where there'd been all this you know, a a degree of consciousness that you had all of these other games that happened in places like Athens, where you had the facilities that then nobody used thereafter. And so there was a lot of planning for the aftermath of it, and that seems to have been the case in Glasgow too. They really thought about what was going to happen afterwards.
Lex Lamb:Well, yeah. But a lot of what was I think what Lion said they were going to do, they didn't do. Yes. They took its time. I'm not saying that in a conspiratorial way.
Lex Lamb:I think it might just be the way things turned out. It's just the recession that really nice. It took a long time. I think the people involved in the design of the garden festival would point out justifiably that we got there in the long run. We've got our little media quarter.
Lex Lamb:We've got our, you know, you've got the BBC, you've got the Science Center, you've got the STV, etcetera, etcetera. That's all there. It did take a long time to get there. And I I if you look back, at the press, maybe 90, 92 times like that, people had a lot of stamping of feet and saying what on earth is happening to this site, which was going to be a wonderful, you know, Where was the regeneration remit? Where is that being followed through?
Lex Lamb:It took a long time.
Gordon Barr:I think that is an important point, just to reiterate that the reason the money was there to do it was it was it was designed to be temporary. If there was any chance it was gonna be permanent, the money would not have it would not have happened.
Kenny Brophy:And part
Gordon Barr:of that, it was to do with the land deals and the structuring of the leasing and all the rest of it. And part of it was to do with it was kind of co financed by having effectively presold some of that land for the future redevelopment, some of which never happened. But there was that sense of what elements do we want to retain, both in terms of taking some of the the artworks and things and putting them elsewhere in the city and elsewhere in the country, so some of the things that have gone further afield. But, also, in terms of Festival Park, that corner of of the landscape was always designed to be retained as a new public park for the city. And there were other things as well.
Gordon Barr:So that it's interesting because we've we've shown some photographs of displays at the festival of what was to come afterwards, including the big road and and and roundabout running past where the BBC is now, which seems seems to us a horrible intervention in terms of what was a lovely green space in our in our memories. But that but that historically was a very industrial area and previously was, you know, not ever accessible either. Yeah.
Lex Lamb:The plan for the area You lose
Gordon Barr:some, you lose some, but
Lex Lamb:was basically Pacific Drive where it is now and loads of housing. Not not any BBC, not any science, etcetera.
Niall Murphy:Yeah. I mean, my recollection, Festival Park just kinda kept on going along the Clyde. Yeah. I know we're gonna be more and more of them, but it just didn't materialize. And then it's interesting because it's like, you know, obviously, you get that great recession at the start of 1990s when things were very bad.
Niall Murphy:And then you get buildings like this, so you get the architectural language of Festival Court stops, and then you get this, which is complete noughties instead. But it does kind of bring it to a full stop.
Lex Lamb:Yes. I mean, Festival Park itself is a conundrum. I mean, that's the 11 acres out of the 120 that were retained as part
Gordon Barr:of the deal. Park, the green space that's still retained. There is also Festival Park, the housing that was built, confusing, with the very the identical name. So it is nomenclature wise, there's a there's a there's a problem there. Yeah.
Lex Lamb:I don't think there's any question that the city has not done with Festival Park what it should have done. I mean, they they it was remodeled in about 1990. Didn't really work out. I begin to suspect Ian White, who designed the landscaping there and did some of the best landscaping in the whole garden. Very good
Niall Murphy:landscape architect.
Lex Lamb:It's no longer with us, but I wonder if the drainage there was designed for perhaps more for a transient event than with one eye to being a permanent feature.
Kenny Brophy:I know
Lex Lamb:it had to be messed around with quite a bit when Pacific Drive took off the top trunk of landscape and scenery zone. But everything else that's gone wrong with Festival Park, I'm afraid, is is could have been avoided, I think, really.
Niall Murphy:It's a it's an urban design problem, unfortunately, because everything turns its back on it. And it's actually quite a potentially really charming little park. I mean, that fountain that we were talking about earlier, the cascading dam fountain that you've got photographs of Yeah. Which survives completely intact and is a lovely
Lex Lamb:space. And yet
Niall Murphy:none of it's overlooked. It's, you know, got industrial sheds down one side of it.
Kenny Brophy:It's one of Glasgow's great monuments.
Lex Lamb:Yeah. I don't think
Kenny Brophy:I think I think it's, you know, it's a it's a stunning thing, the waterfall, because it's
Niall Murphy:It is.
Kenny Brophy:It's really easy. Structure is still there. You can still work out what it was, you know. If only they could turn it back on. But it's really it's really spectacular.
Kenny Brophy:I mean, we tried to do some excavation in the the kind of pond bit at the bottom to see if there was anything that had been thrown or left in there, but we couldn't because it was a new colony. The council wanted to preserve, so I wasn't allowed in there to excavate. So there's also that kind of it's also got this kind of new ecological life as well that's developed afterwards. But yeah, that monument, I mean I'm very keen to explore, trying to use that as a part of Archaeology Scotland's adopt a monument scheme where they get community groups to actually adopt monuments of any period and then try and then look after it, tidy up, try and maintain it and then maybe even help people interpret and understand it. You know, finding the right community who'd be willing to do that would be really a really nice thing to do going forward.
Kenny Brophy:And the archaeologists have gotten their interest because I don't actually think they've got any monuments and they are in portfolio that are 20th century. So I think that's something quite exciting to try and explore there. And so I think it's it's something that you know that should be much better known in Glasgow because it's it's there, you can see it, it's grand, it's spectacular, it's amazing, so
Gordon Barr:And one of the things we hope to do in the next sort of stage of the project and we've just recently secured some additional funding from Glan City Heritage Trust. Thank you very much. To to do, first of all, some some additional archaeology, which Kenny will talk about in a minute, but also hopefully to look in a as as a very small first step to, trying to celebrate that legacy of of Festival Park, the green space park, is to have some interpretation. Actually tells you what was there. Because if you walk apart from the name Festival Park at the gate, there's nothing to tell you what the where this landscape came from, what what the story of it is.
Gordon Barr:Yep. And there's a huge new number of of of housing and and and flats built up roundabout. You can see them from here looking out. And then the new communities moving in that don't know that that history of the area, I think that's a great opportunity to bring in and create to to use that new community that's developing and and engage them with the the heritage under their feet. Yeah.
Gordon Barr:That's quite exciting.
Kenny Brophy:The council are quite keen to have a friends of group for that park because most Glasgow parks have got friends of groups and that hasn't. So I think that's something they'd quite like to do. So maybe this can be can catalyze that happening as well.
Fay Young:So they're relatively simple things that you can do and and don't cost a huge amount of of money.
Kenny Brophy:Yeah. Yeah. Even just some well placed QR codes Yes. Would be really nice.
Lex Lamb:Somebody got in touch the other day and said, oh, I I've just moved in a flat, you know, down there. Sorry. Yeah. Down there. And, oh, I've got these Just Matt,
Gordon Barr:what were you pointing in a podcast? That's true. Pointing in stereo Towards the left speaker,
Lex Lamb:And by the way, I've got this, here's some nice pictures of the garden festival. Are you interested in my as ever? Yes, we are. And I said, well, if you give us your pictures, I'll tell you where your flat is built on top of. So I went to my handy ghoul overlay and I was able to see, I think she was just out of the walled garden and probably heading towards the dry meadow, something like that.
Lex Lamb:She said that's great. I'll I'll I'll take what you've I'll put it up my wall.
Kenny Brophy:That could have been used in the marketing of those apartments because I mean, there's so many houses built in Scotland now that are actually built on top of past uses of that landscape. I mean, it's amazing how many people are built or have the house on top of an ancient burial ground. It's not even like a horror film cliche, it's true. Because you go to build a housing estate or a school, you find a Bronze Age Kiss Cemetery, you find human remains etcetera. So lots of people live in houses that were ancient burial grounds.
Kenny Brophy:So I think actually we could do a lot more with trying to celebrate the heritage of a place where a new build house is constructed. And this would be an amazing opportunity to do that and actually say and use even, you know, have, street names that reflect what was there before and so on. You know, you could have a Coca Cola Rolla Drive.
Lex Lamb:I'm going to bear in mind that I mean, I don't want to be gloomy, but there will be a time when none of this is within living memory.
Gordon Barr:And that's why we're trying to do it now.
Lex Lamb:That's one
Gordon Barr:of the key things because we're still able to talk to a lot of the individuals that were involved in a way that we can't for Glasgow's previous exhibitions.
Niall Murphy:Yes. Absolutely. The street names for that new development, does anyone know? Do they refer back to the Glasgow Garden Festival?
Lex Lamb:Well, they
Gordon Barr:refer to the docks, I think.
Niall Murphy:Right. Okay. So Glasgow is usually quite good at picking up things like that. So you'd hope. Okay.
Niall Murphy:Other legacy stuff then, how is it going in terms of tracking down other monuments? What are your best finds? How are you getting on with that?
Gordon Barr:Do you want to speak a little bit about the archaeology? Well, I guess In technical parks because we've not really touched on that.
Kenny Brophy:Yeah. I mean, I guess that the archaeology is part of that same process because the broader project has been trying to track down the material legacy of the festival and where is it now. So the other part of that is what's actually stayed on the site, what's still there. So that's where the archaeology comes in handy because ultimately, there are some things that are still visible in Festival Park and also in other areas as well. There's a big set of steps that were next to where the lock in was, and you can still see where that was on the ground as well.
Kenny Brophy:There's a kind of little stream and a waterfall. So that stuff's all visible and the landscaping. But there's also features that were in that bit of the landscape which are although you can't see anymore, they still survive under the ground to an extent. So we know from geophysical survey that we did in 20 22 that the ditch that was created and they held the mini railway line, which ran around the whole circuit is still there. Because ultimately when they correct me if I'm wrong, Lex, but when they level the site, they did the kind of the they did the least effort things for the most part.
Kenny Brophy:So why would they try and remove our underground ditch when you could just fill it back in again. So that ditch is still there. And we know that a lot of the the lock in still retains its original, the original decorative stone work that was there. There's all of the stones at the bottom of the lock in that were put there just just to weigh down the huge thick carpet like textile layer, which was used to keep the water within the kind of internal system. So the archaeologist already revealed that there are both hidden and visible aspects in Festival Park.
Kenny Brophy:And so that's part of the legacy as well is this kind of physical material remnants and that's something we're going to explore further next month. But there are also, you know, we've done a few guided walking tours now and we've really started crawl over the whole of the site. And once you start to walk along the Clyde you can start to see fittings for electrical cables that were for lights on the kind of the fence down by the river. The what was the Stripy bollards? Yeah, the stripey bollards by the what's the artist?
Lex Lamb:Daniel Burns.
Kenny Brophy:Yes, the black and white stripy bollards along there are all an artwork created for the festival.
Gordon Barr:So if you leave the building tonight and just walk down to the river, there's a row of bollards down there that are painted black and white stripes, and that's a garden festival artwork remaining in fits your part
Lex Lamb:of 1.
Gordon Barr:Yeah. Just literally less than one minute from this building as they say in the cinema adverts.
Kenny Brophy:Yeah. And if you and if you go across to the Canton Key area, which is over the other side of Pacific Key, and there's some lying homes there that were actually built as show homes during the festival, go over to the wall behind those homes, which is actually an incredible palimpsest of Glasgow history because some of the wall has got ceramic tile, which is probably toilet blocks from 19th century factories. But then other bits of the wall have got little screws in them. And those screws held hanging baskets for the Glasgow Garden Festival. And we could match the way from the photographs.
Kenny Brophy:Yes. So they're still there. So I've had students, like, walking along this wall looking for screws on a wall. And it's like you can see the ghost of where electrical cables were. There's actually plastic bits of signs that are still there as well.
Kenny Brophy:So there was also screws that held signs up that were labels, and one of them is still there that says red fuchsias spider?
Lex Lamb:Yeah. Spider fuchsia.
Kenny Brophy:Yeah. Yes. That's there. And also down by the side of the down by the the Clyde, there's also a little plaque for an artwork which Lex had spotted, which is still there. So there's actually there's actually a really amazing material physical legacy on the site, which is completely a mismatch with no information whatsoever for visitors.
Kenny Brophy:So one of the things that we are doing is this year we'll be carrying out a detailed digital survey of the whole site so that we can then have something like an app or a downloadable map where people can self guide and walk around the site and actually say, wow, there was a hanging basket there in 1988. And actually those kind of those tangible connections are really powerful because you know, that you you kind of think it's all swept away and it's gone, but there's actually lots and lots of stuff left. And so that kind of really fine grain archaeological survey is going to be something that will be a real legacy going forward, I think.
Fay Young:So it's knowing how to look
Kenny Brophy:at Yes. It's kind of retraining yourself to actually really observe for the minutiae and actually think, why is there a screw there? And then start to think that's really
Fay Young:There's quite a lot about screws and nails in on your website. Yeah. Some of the things that you're finding, you know, you do find a lot of
Kenny Brophy:nails. Yes. So in the trenches we've excavated in the lock in area, the reason why we put trenches there was because watery places are good receptacles for things. So we're not going to find anything in the grass or lying about. But it could be that for instance, someone threw a coin into the water during the festival or when the festival was being dismantled, people threw in screws and bits and pieces.
Kenny Brophy:So we opened those trenches, we did find quite a lot of coins which we then had conserved and tidied up by a metal conservator and quite a few of those coins dated to the 1970s. So there's a possibility that those coins were thrown in there during the Glasgow Garden Festival. They may have ended up there later, but that's part of the magic of archaeology is about wild speculation with a a sort of factual basis on it there somewhere. So And
Gordon Barr:at the
Kenny Brophy:other end of
Gordon Barr:the scale was buildings like this, Again,
Lex Lamb:that are
Gordon Barr:part of the legacy of the festival that they have the other sort of scale. And and other big scale things that survived that have gone elsewhere, things like the like the Coca Cola roller coaster, which does still exist down at Theme Park and is at Suffolk. I always call it Cape Kent, but it's Suffolk. Suffolk. Or the Clydesdale Bank Tower, which I visited last year in Rhyl in North Wales.
Gordon Barr:It's lost it doesn't we can't go up and down anymore, but it's now just a beacon, but it's still the cloud recognizing the Clydesdale Bank Tower. And even there, there's nothing to tell you what where it originally came from, although it's been there a lot longer than it was in Glasgow. But it it it's finding there's these things all over the the little, trains that run the railway around the site of miniature railway. Those engines still run at a theme park in Japan. You know, there's a global diaspora of garden festival ness that we've been trying to track down, which is fascinating.
Lex Lamb:Thinking about this building again, this building was rehabilitated and refurbished for the Garden Festival, as was the Four Winds building, and a hydraulic power station down there. And in terms of what we've I mean, we are building up a really substantial digital archive of all this. I think we've got well over 3,000 photographs, hundreds of pages of documents, all basically acquired and scanned at the moment. So there's that ongoing digital archive. Everything we can find in local authority archives that's we've collated and indexed all access.
Lex Lamb:More than 17 hours now of interviews that I've conducted with various staff at all levels, if you like, which hopefully, thanks to the help we were receiving from the Heritage Trust, Keep plugging away. Transcribing, and and because I would really like to have this in a searchable format, because I keep thinking somebody told me something about whatever. So hopefully, all that will be there, for posterity apart from anything else because it's such a pivotal event. And it was, I think, an important stage in us coming together as after the garden festival, an important stage was the realization that there was no central archive for this, and there was nobody recording this really, really important thing that happened in Glasgow. Could be controversial, but it was certainly colorful and it certainly had an impact in all sorts of ways.
Lex Lamb:Absolutely. But yet, no proper record of it.
Niall Murphy:So it's falling into this kind of what you called earlier a memory hole?
Lex Lamb:Yes. I think it would have done otherwise.
Kenny Brophy:And it's and it's one of the reasons why the archaeology is part of the project because, when I there was quite a lot of media coverage of the first excavation, and I was asked constantly by journalists why is this archaeology? Why are you even doing this? Because aren't there photographs? Aren't there records that tell you what's going on? So I think that it was it's actually archaeology is a really good tool for understanding human interactions with the world from any period in time.
Kenny Brophy:It doesn't really matter when because we've got the same methodologies. I excavated the Garden Festival site in the same way I would excavate a prehistoric site. So there's no difference there. So the advantage I've got here is that I can also look at photographs, plans, maps, talk to people, look at Lexi's interviews, all the other stuff we've got together on the website. So the archaeologist filling in some of those gaps or down that memory hole because ultimately this is only 30 odd years ago and there is misremembering.
Kenny Brophy:There are things that have not been documented. I mean, one that we talked earlier on, Gordon's got us photograph of him as a 10 year old child standing beside 2 really big megalithic stones. And we've got no idea what that is. There's no record any there's no record anywhere in the official program, in any documentation. We don't know where that is or why it's there, who put it there.
Kenny Brophy:Whether it was ever it was always meant to be there, whether there was an improvisation because it was a space, someone has a big standing stones and they thought they'd put them in there. You know that the most exciting example of that is that I knew about the Strathclyde Regional Council Roman Villa because I've been thinking about the archaeological the archaeological representation at the festival site. But next to that there was a full size replica of a gatehouse of the Antonine Wall. And there's no mention of that anywhere in any of the literature about the festival. It doesn't appear in the program.
Kenny Brophy:There's I can't find any documentation about it. Lots of people have photographed it and it's absolutely spectacular. And no one's ever done a replica of any bit of the Antonine Wall in Scotland before and yet it was there in Glasgow for a summer of 1988. So there are these things that are just, you know, that there we can't get to through traditional documentary means because so much of this was it wasn't improvised but there was an element of that. And also people were just doing stuff really creatively and not necessarily blueprinting all and documenting all.
Kenny Brophy:So I think that there's the the archaeology is part of the solution for this memory hole, but also tracking down memories, photographs, and all of the archive we've been looking for as well.
Lex Lamb:I think the challenge, if you like, is that the event is so important that that and and so well remembered and so pivotal that it needs to be recorded, but yet it was a transient, temporary thing. It was one lovely summer for Glasgow, and that's it.
Fay Young:There's something incredibly romantic about that in a way, isn't it?
Lex Lamb:You mean because it's a fleeting
Fay Young:Yes.
Lex Lamb:Thing. Yes. It's not a big, funky stone building, and it's not a, you know, something that leaves a massive trace in the landscape. But it's
Gordon Barr:it's left a massive trace in millions of people's psyches.
Niall Murphy:Absolutely. 4.4.3000000 people saw this. And it has it. It has really it shifted perceptions of the city.
Fay Young:So That's no small claim, is it, that it changed the world's view of Glasgow?
Kenny Brophy:Yes. And that's that's why it's mind boggling because I just assumed when we started this, right, I'll just go and read the books about this. I'll just go and read the academic papers that have been written, and there's and there's nothing. I mean, this person I can I don't think there's any academic paper written in any journal I can find I can access that mentions at all? It's in a few gardening magazines and things like that.
Kenny Brophy:So I was completely astounded there wasn't someone who, you know, goes to the library and does research, that there was nothing like that at all. You know, that was so in a sense we were we were almost like creating the history as we were going along, which is really Yeah.
Lex Lamb:But it matters. And that's the thing. And and I try and quantify why it matters. And the best I can do is because it shows what Glasgow is capable of
Niall Murphy:in
Lex Lamb:a in a really striking, unignorable way.
Niall Murphy:Absolutely. And so optimistic as well.
Lex Lamb:Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Niall Murphy:Very much.
Lex Lamb:And even that just in itself is to to my mind is is sufficient.
Niall Murphy:Yes.
Fay Young:It does raise that question that's similar in, perhaps, in that it was such a transformative event. Could it happen again?
Gordon Barr:Well, we're coming up to a year with an 8 in it soon.
Lex Lamb:Yes. There's a there's a planning for perennial perennial question, isn't it?
Fay Young:And and I'm just wondering how we're doing for time if we talk about that now or if or if it maybe feeds into
Lex Lamb:I'm happy to talk about Yeah.
Fay Young:Now. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Because it it it does seem a question worth asking or discussing.
Lex Lamb:It's one that it always comes up. I think I've said to you before, Faith, that instinctively, the answer always comes out of me. No. No, of course not. But then when I stop and think about it, I think, well, why?
Lex Lamb:I think there's the garden festival has happened in other parts of the world to this day, you know. And I go through all the reasons I can't. And I think the best I can do is to think the more I've researched and learned about it, the more I realize how incredible it was that that happened at all. And it happened the way it did. And I think it would be easy to sort of be cynical about it, and think if I was lazy, I would feel myself thinking, well, you know, things are different now.
Lex Lamb:You know, there's too many commercial pressures. People are looking out for themselves, and you know, it would be the dead hand of money would kill the whole thing, and you wouldn't have the No. I mean, it does happen. And how'd you
Niall Murphy:get that fairy dust? How'd you get that recipe from from the early 19 eighties, all those people together to do something
Lex Lamb:like that. You had to have a hell of a lot of ducks lined up in a row for for the garden festival to happen. But the more I learn about it, the more surprising it seems that it all actually came together. And that I suppose it it's that that makes me think that, no. You can do it again because it it was so remarkable that it actually happened.
Lex Lamb:Yeah. But that's that's not based now as in rational, personally.
Gordon Barr:Not sure about the about the future, but in terms of what keeps me interested in what we're doing or have been doing the last couple of years is there's there's always more to learn. Know, as we think we've kind of got a got a handle on the scale and the scope of it, we find something new. A great cache of new ephemera got passed to Kenny just yesterday. Some of it's on
Kenny Brophy:the table over there.
Gordon Barr:I've been
Kenny Brophy:on the audience.
Lex Lamb:You
Gordon Barr:know, it's with some stickers, some leaflets and things that that that people turn up and email us with photographs of a garden festival tea towel that they've kept, so they now live in Papua New Guinea. You know, there's it's it's it's again that that worldwide connection, but there's always more to learn. And, I'm fascinated with the idea that of that difference between what was written about what was in the festival at the time and what was actually there and how much of that is true for Glasgow's other exhibitions where we only have that written record to rely on? What else happened that we don't know about? Because it there wasn't a similar sort of, you know, in-depth recording done at the time when people were still alive to do that, which is really interesting thing.
Gordon Barr:So that's why we we continue to say, if you have some old photographs at home, in the loft or wherever, or old sunny footage or whatever, do please dig it out. Let us see it. Even if you think it's stuff we've already seen, it's amazing what details we can pick out. The background of photographs, just a slightly different angle reveal reveals a whole different view of things that we've not seen before. There's still loads more to learn.
Gordon Barr:So, you know, get in touch with us. Our website is www.glasgogardenfestival.org. Nice and memorable, URL, that one. Amazingly, it was available. But we're really keen to to to learn more and to to to see more, and we're really excited to see what other things continue to come out of to come out of the woodwork.
Gordon Barr:And there's still more to learn. That's the fun of it.
Lex Lamb:What if somebody in the early seventies was going about speaking to the people that were doing the 38 Empire exhibition. Mhmm. You know, our understanding of that would be
Niall Murphy:Very different. Yeah. Yeah. More nuanced. Absolutely.
Niall Murphy:Okay. Final question then. Faye,
Lex Lamb:on you go.
Kenny Brophy:It's yours. It's yours.
Niall Murphy:This is this is the loaded question, which we ask everybody
Lex Lamb:who goes to our
Niall Murphy:podcast. So can take it all in turn. What is your favourite building in Glasgow, and what would it tell you if it's all good talk?
Lex Lamb:Go on, Lags. If you're asking me which building, whose walls I would like to speak to me, it would Roman fort at on the Antonine wall, but that's there's no walls there. It could be a place. There was some tremendous stories to tell you. Feeling that the Anderson Centre, but that's just that's just a romantic attachment, really.
Gordon Barr:I always like the Anderson Centre as a child, giving up those those big, long, travelators. But I I think for me, a slightly less modern building, but we'd given we're, just along the river for it, would be the Lyceum Cinema in Goven, with this amazing curved streamlined modern corner, which in in in the best tradition of of cinema design is a complete fake, and there's nothing behind that facade. It's just for show. When you look at in Google Maps and the the the the aerial views, you'll see it's just empty space in behind the actual cinema setback from the main street. And it's such a great example of cinema architecture as the building's own advertisement and being a little bit fake.
Gordon Barr:And it's the best piece of cinema design in Scotland. And hopefully, that's a build hopefully, that's a building with a future ahead of it. Yes. We've got to
Lex Lamb:see that.
Niall Murphy:We'd we'd be keen to
Gordon Barr:see that happen. So that would be the life saving government for me. Yeah. Kenny? I don't think
Kenny Brophy:I'm allowed to say the town center in Cumbernauld.
Gordon Barr:It's not Glasgow.
Niall Murphy:It's a good diaspora.
Kenny Brophy:It could be a fantastic place to get lost. I challenge you to go there, and then look at the map as you go into the shopping center. Choose a shop to find and then try and find it using the map. It's absolutely impossible because it's like a three-dimensional map on multiple different layers, and I've challenged people to do this and we just cannot. Yeah.
Kenny Brophy:But no. I I mean, I'm not I'm gonna cheat again, not really building, but the site house stone circle is is my favorite Glasgow structure, built by Duncan Luna in 1979 and rebuilt again in 2019. And that for me, that's just an example of the enduring power of megaliths, of standing stones, of places of memorialization, of pagan worship, of astronomical observation, of place making of the new site hill. You know, so I think that Glasgow needs more stone circles.
Lex Lamb:Oh, and reconsidering, can I put a late shout in for the, the sculpture garden at the Hunterian? Uh-huh. That's was on my favorite. I slightly compromised its brutalist duty now that they recladd the library, but it's still one of the finest places in the city to be in a summer's day. Mhmm.
Kenny Brophy:Well, I should have said the University Bowering in case anyone from works listening. But I think I covered Scott building, but oops.
Niall Murphy:Well, thank you very much. Should we open it to the floor for questions?
Speaker 6:Earlier, thank you so much. I was sort of reminisc first. I was in Lucky doing the Coca Cola roller coaster twice. I was actually on this second last ever spin and it it was really so got to take us somewhere. Hopefully, there's a big capture for for Speti prosthetic because it's my idea.
Speaker 6:But with modern technologies, do you think with AI and VR, you could ever recreate a lot of virtual reality Glaston Festival?
Lex Lamb:I've wondered about that. It's really complicated. I don't see how it could be done. There's no one big plan. There's no one set of drawings.
Lex Lamb:There's hundreds of different sites. Some of whom you'd be able to get hold of the drawings and reconstruct them. Others, no chance. And if you were on one of the few walks that we've done as a group, you would understand how difficult it is to you can stand, well just I'm getting my bearings again, but just down there somewhere and there's nothing you can see to locate yourself in the Garden festival, and it would be lovely to have, you know, augmented reality type thing going on or whatever. But how you would get the data for that?
Kenny Brophy:I mean, I would I would I would counter that because you can have an augmented reality walk around Pompey. So if you can do that, which is a ruin, why can you not do it at the Glasgow Garden Festival? We've got much better documentation of the Glasgow Garden Festival, what it looked like we have on Pompeii.
Lex Lamb:Yeah. Pompeii is Pompeii. You just make this stuff up.
Kenny Brophy:Yeah. Well, like, there's a commitment to that as well. But, you know, I've got I've got a colleague that, you know, that that what that's what he does, his AI and VI stuff, you know, and he he thinks it can be done. So I think that we could we could have be in a position where you could be standing down there, and you could have a mobile phone or tablet, and then you could look and see the Coca Cola roller coaster in front of you. And I think that can be done.
Kenny Brophy:And I think we can do that.
Lex Lamb:Sorry about my lack of ambition. The thing is Pompeii, nobody's gonna come out of Pompeii and say you got that bit wrong.
Gordon Barr:Well, that's the other one. That's the joy of doing the walks, things. People come and tell us new stuff, all the time and tell us when we get stuff wrong, and that's how we learn. I know they've done a little bit of that sort of thing with the some of the with the Empire exhibitions and 3 g modeling and things.
Lex Lamb:Of course. So
Gordon Barr:I think it's something that that that certainly could be looked at in the future, where funding to allow it.
Kenny Brophy:Yeah. Yeah. We need a lot more It would be expensive. We need a lot more photographs, but you could with enough photographs, you could create a 3 d digital model of large elements of the the site.
Lex Lamb:I'd forgotten that the art school did the 38 exhibit in Paris fishing thing, which proves me entirely wrong. Yeah. If you
Kenny Brophy:know we can quid, we can do it.
Gordon Barr:Yep.
Niall Murphy:Any other questions?
Lex Lamb:Would you put the garden festival or the city of culture as the main? Which one would you say had the biggest effect in the regeneration of Glasgow? In purely regeneration terms, it's got to be the Garden Festival because of just because of the physical regeneration. The fact that the site was cleared and made ready for development. Yes, also the thought process of people coming to the place and looking at
Gordon Barr:That's a good point.
Niall Murphy:I don't know.
Gordon Barr:I think for me I think for me, there's a slightly copper answer. I think it's the 1 two punch of the 2 of them combined. I think it's The Garden Festival 80 and then followed very quickly, relatively speaking, after the City of Culture kind of building on The Garden Festival's success. And that combination of the 2 really lifts lifts the whole thing. Either one individually would have been fine, but I think having the 2 big events so close together, I think that's the thing that was transformative.
Gordon Barr:Other
Niall Murphy:question?
Katharine Neil:No. Okay. I think then we just say thank you so much to our hosts and to our guests, and thank you all for coming and also to Mal for having
Lex Lamb:us. Yes. Thank you.
Katharine Neil:Glasgow City Heritage Trust is an independent charity and grant funder that promotes the understanding, appreciation, and conservation of Glasgow's historic built environment. Do you want to know more? Have a look at our website atglasgowheritage.org.uk and follow us on social media at Glasgow Heritage. This podcast was produced by Inner Ear for Glasgow City Heritage Trust and is sponsored by Tunnock's.
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