Bigger Than Texas

In the early years of posting galleries here and in Detail I put up a lot of photos of Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland, but hardly any of its biggest city. Although I visited Glasgow plenty of times for work and leisure, I never got around to collating my random snaps into something more substantial, even though several times I was photographing the city and its attractions intensively with eventual galleries in mind.

Time to do something about it. Twenty years’ worth of photos (well, nineteen, as I haven’t been over there since the pandemic hit) include a great many of our growing children enjoying its playgrounds, but looking past those there are plenty that capture the spirit of the place. So many, in fact, that I’ve split them into not one gallery but three.

Glasgow covers the city itself, focussing mainly on the centre, but also along the Clyde, around Merchant City and the East End, and out to Kelvingrove and the University of Glasgow. My handful of photos of the Glasgow School of Art from 2008 are particularly poignant now, as they predate the two fires that devastated Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece in the 2010s.

Trying to include photos of the city’s museums and their collections would have made the first gallery too unwieldy, so I’ve given them a gallery of their own, starting with our initial visits to GOMA, the Burrell Collection and Pollok House on arriving in Scotland, and finishing with the more family-friendly Riverside Museum (of Transport) along the Clyde and the National Museum of Rural Life on the city’s outskirts. Along the way, there are regular appearances of the famous Duke, including a rare one without his usual traffic-cone hat.

Glasgow isn’t just about sights but about experiences, so I’ve gathered a handful of significant events into a third gallery. They’re a bit random—a night at the Stand, the Christmas lights in George Square, two recordings of Robot Wars in a giant warehouse near the airport, the start of Pedal for Scotland at the People’s Palace early one morning, and two days of the European Cycling Championships in 2018—but give yet more of the texture of the city and its life.

Until the next time I’m in Glesga, then, here are the city and all some of its wonders. And yes, the title of this post is a Glasgow reference.

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