After the Garden Festival, with Lex Lamb, Gordon Barr and Kenny Brophy

If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk

This episode of If Glasgow's Walls Could Talk features a live discussion at the South Rotunda in Govan regarding the legacy of the 1988 Glas

Key takeaways

The 1988 Garden Festival was a pivotal component of Glasgow's cultural renaissance alongside the 1990 City of Culture.
Official historical records and guidebooks often fail to accurately reflect the actual physical objects present during the festival.

Main topics

1988 Glasgow Garden Festival
Urban Archaeology

Notable quotes

Archaeology is better than history.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates how even temporary events can leave a permane

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) 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, a list of artworks, a 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 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. 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 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. That's Speaker 3 (0:55) why archaeology is better than history. Speaker 4 (0:57) Indeed. Speaker 6 (1:06) 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, Garden Bar, which is just over here behind me. But why here exactly? And 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. horses and carts and motor cars and pedestrians would go up and down in. And it's now used for conveying the water from Lake Katrine into the south side as well, which Speaker 7 (2:34) is quite something when you think about it. Speaker 6 (2:37) So the rotundas are obviously a key part of Glasgow's proud engineering history. And the promoters of these are actually the same promoters for the Glasgow subway, which is quite interesting. 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. 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 parlor in that sunny summer of 1988. Over to you chaps. Speaker 7 (3:19) Shall I start off? 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 Nardini's, which is for the people in the room on the screen at the back there, and is also available on our website as well. And I have two strong memories of being in Nardini's here. 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, 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 Nardini's 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 remember it to this very day. From the menu, we can see that it cost... I can't quite read them from this distance with my glasses on, but 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 tunnels under the Clyde. And I was very disappointed when we came in. There was no obvious sign of the tunnels. 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 we'd 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 the 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 such a landmark building that predated the festival was a really important part of the festival itself and has remained afterwards in several different generations of use. And it's really exciting to be back. Speaker 5 (5:08) If you were to walk in that big door at the ground floor, you would see immaculate waitresses, you would see... Speaker 5 (5:16) 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 in holiday. Certainly, I, as a 19-year-old, remember having a drink outside, a beer outside and a bratwurst outside was incredibly... exotic thing to do in Glasgow. Nardini's is probably the epitome of that, I would say, in the Rotunda. If you look at the incredible events programme that's put on during the festival, which is basically 30 to 50 events per day over 152 days, you'll see that the ones that took place in this space tend to be the fashion shows, the string quartets, possibly some kind of cocktail piano thing going on. Speaker 5 (6:15) But it runs a very high quality. Speaker 3 (6:20) Kenny? I don't remember it at all. Speaker 4 (6:23) So you were obviously here. Speaker 3 (6:26) Well, I think that my parents were packed lunch people, so then we just brought our own sandwiches inside our side. Speaker 1 (6:33) I Speaker 3 (6:34) think we went to the cafe instead. Speaker 4 (6:36) So why was Nardini's chosen? I'm not Speaker 5 (6:39) sure. I'm not sure particularly. I think just because of their reputation as... as a caterer through the west of Scotland. One thing I failed to notice there was the centrepiece. It's difficult to visualise because we're in the cupola right at the top of the building and what we were talking about was happening on a ground floor plus a couple 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. Speaker 5 (7:14) which originates, obviously, in the version in Piccadilly Circus, which we might have recently tracked down what happened to the Garden Festival one. But again, it's just a lovely centrepiece to that picture. Sorry, Speaker 7 (7:25) Gordon. Speaker 5 (7:25) I Speaker 7 (7:26) think that's Speaker 5 (7:26) a Speaker 7 (7:26) 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. It was restaurants. It was a chance for Glasgow to show off itself to... both to itself and the rest of the world and that's what's really quite exciting about it. Speaker 5 (7:45) And when you're thinking about the elegance, sophistication, despite the extremely 80s wine list, which is all Piedor and Matias Rosé and etc., etc., Lambrusco... Speaker 5 (7:56) You've got to think about the context. Around the same time in Glasgow you had Prince's Square opening, St. Enoch Centre, the tramway was just getting going with the Mahabharata, stuff like that. I think there was a kind of little bit of a renaissance. Very much. I think it really Speaker 6 (8:13) was a renaissance and a real sense of optimism. Speaker 5 (8:16) Yeah, and to go back to that line, which you... quoted earlier on Neil 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 was, you know, all these cultural, fairly sophisticated, elegant things that were happening. were all elements in that effort to redefine Glasgow's reputation and the kind of confidence, I think, that Glasgow had about itself. Speaker 4 (8:47) Yeah, I remember because I was living and working in Edinburgh and just seeing it from the Edinburgh perspective, incredible buzz and the Glasgow Miles Better campaign. Speaker 4 (9:06) which Edinburgh is pretty rubbish at slogans. And Glasgow has, you know, that miles better really resonated and it did buzz its way across to Edinburgh as well and there was a great sense of what was going on. I'd like to make the point Speaker 5 (9:29) that... Speaker 5 (9:31) Up to this point, the idea of a tourist in Glasgow was the punchline to a joke. Whereas now, anyone who lives in Glasgow, Speaker 6 (9:39) it's a completely different situation. 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 of Art, went to the Macintosh to do architecture instead. And somebody in Edinburgh said to me at the time, you are so lucky. Do you realize that that city is going through a renaissance? And of course, I didn't really know because I didn't know Glasgow at all. But now, looking back decades later, it really was going through a renaissance at the time. Speaker 5 (10:09) I should say, I don't think it was without controversy at the time. If you look at what, you know, there were alternative viewpoints on offer. I'd solicited Elspeth King to get her angle on the Garden Festival and I got an excellent, very full two or three pages with footnotes response. Some of the points of which I would find quite difficult to challenge, even in retrospect. 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. Speaker 5 (10:47) The Garden Festival wasn't unique in that respect. Presumably we could talk about the city of culture, etc., etc., and all the other things I've just mentioned. But it was the pivotal event, I believe, of that Renaissance. Speaker 4 (11:00) So can I maybe ask you guys to introduce yourselves and explain? Because you were all just youngsters in 1988. I mean, I was a lot older. Speaker 4 (11:17) So you had a very different perspective of this grand event that was happening. So why are you revisiting it now? What's the lure? Speaker 5 (11:27) From my perspective, I really have no background in this kind of thing. I've always been interested in design spaces. So this is Speaker 4 (11:35) Lex Lamb speaking for our listeners at home. Speaker 5 (11:38) I went to the Garden Festival twice and I wasn't actually that bothered about it. Which is odd, but you know, as a ball tree teenager, you know, I've always had this in my mind. Gordon, I think, had the most. Speaker 7 (11:50) Well, yeah, so I'm Gordon Barr. 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 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 was very annoyed because I was a small chap for my age and some of my classmates at the same age were big enough to ride and I'm still slightly bitter about that. So with that one exception I was just the right age to really appreciate the festival, possibly not the sitting outside drinking a beer element. But 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. 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 focus on. And some of it's the really interesting art and sculpture. There's a random goat. There's me meeting David Bellamy. There's attending one of the BBC recordings of something being live in the Central Pavilion. 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. Speaker 3 (13:10) 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, 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. So I didn't go on the roller coaster because I would have been too scared rather than too short. Or too Speaker 4 (13:36) bullshit. Yes, well, yeah. Speaker 3 (13:39) And all I remember is I've got these two fake Daily Record front pages. One of them is about me signing for Hamilton Accies for a million pounds. And one of them is about me scoring a goal for Scotland or something like that. And so I've got those, but my parents kept the copy of the official programme. 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 archaeologist. I should just point out that I Speaker 5 (14:35) did go on the Coca-Cola Roller. Speaker 1 (14:37) One out of three in that. I've since met the Speaker 5 (14:40) person who claims to have named the Coca-Cola Roller. My now wife persuaded me to go on the Coca-Cola Roller, 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. Speaker 5 (14:58) And I said, yeah, okay. Since then, I have spoken to people involved in the Garden Festival who've explained to me why they never went on the Coca-Cola Roller. And because it's still running, I can't say any more about that. Speaker 6 (15:12) I have to confess, I went on the Coca-Cola roller coaster. Oh, did you? I did, yes. I was 16 at the time. We had a school trip over from Edinburgh to Glasgow for it. Which was my third time that I was ever in Glasgow. So, yeah, it was a really interesting experience. And it's funny because my memories of that, I remember recycling the main street and how there were the silhouettes of all the buildings in a later architectural project in 2010. and being criticised by my boss for it. And it was like, that's very nostalgic. And it was like, but that's the point. So I remembered all of that. It kind of lodged... The street thing, the outlines of the great towers of Glasgow. Yes. Speaker 5 (15:56) It wasn't that Glasgow thing. It was a very different place entirely. But I was playing on that kind of idea. They ended up rotting in a warehouse in Speaker 7 (16:04) Hillington, as far as I Speaker 6 (16:05) can Speaker 7 (16:05) remember. Speaker 6 (16:05) No, really? That's such Speaker 5 (16:06) a Speaker 6 (16:06) shame. They were really good fun. Yes. Speaker 7 (16:09) I think that's a nice kind of segue into why we started 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? Speaker 6 (16:21) Because Speaker 7 (16:21) there was a huge amount of things created for the festival, both objects and sculptures and things like the roller coaster itself or 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. I think Richard Speaker 5 (16:56) Groom's floating head was a trigger. Yeah, Speaker 3 (16:58) absolutely. Yeah, so I did a couple of blog posts. So I blog about... prehistoric sites and things in urban places and so obviously the the garden festival 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 web page of this monstrous huge head perched up on the side of the Clyde and asked the person who posted the picture what's that and he said oh I think it's something to do with the garden festival so it struck me it had a kind of a moa type quality, a kind of Easter Island quality that I really found. It was megalithic, it was monumental. So I went down and photographed it from the other side of the Clyde from Yorker. And then I went after that to the scrapyard, just behind it in Erskine. And after kind of negotiating my way into the scrapyard with these guys who 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 scrapyard. And I went round and it was just this massive face facing out to the Clyde, covered in graffiti, lichen growing on it. So everyone who went past the Waverley 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. 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 scrapyard and then the sculpture placement group had a project where it was refloated during the pandemic. So that was one prompt. 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 prehistory because when 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 a roundabout in Mill Guy, where it now stands. And it's now a lovely garden. It's run by a local garden organisation just across from Waitrose and Aldi's. So I blogged about these things and I tweeted about it and Lex got in touch.