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Glasgow Quotes

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Glasgow Quotes

“Maybe it wasn’t that job particularly; maybe it was just working for someone else. It’s so brutal and tiring, the way it can push you down and knock the heart out of you. It’s not getting up at a certain time and arriving at a certain place at a certain time and leaving at a certain time and coming back again at a certain time — it’s knowing that you have to. What’s worse is that, through age or job-experience or academic qualification or sheer good luck, one adult is in a position to order and insult and abuse and shout at another adult who isn’t in a position to reply in kind. It makes everyone a tin god. Everyone likes having slaves to beat, as they’re beaten themselves. And working on the grind wears you out. After a week of it you’re so tired that you use the weekend just to catch up on your rest before going back to another week of it.”

WorkClass StruggleGlasgowScottish Fiction
Book:The Book of Man
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“Now I am sitting in the Botanic Gardens. Though the puddles are frozen in the shade, you could sit out for ever so long in the sun without feeling cold. No one there but children with their nurses, and old men with pale, dreamy eyes thinking of nothing, perhaps wondering vaguely if they will hold on to see another spring. I am on a bench overlooking the Kelvin, and have been watching the seagulls. Whole flocks have come up inland from the Clyde. There are rooks too, very noisy and restless, deceived perhaps by the sunshine into thinking the winter is over.”

WinterGlasgowOld MenSeagullsGlasgow Botanic GardensRiver KelvinRooks
Book:The Camomile
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“Opposite the gates was a low concrete building. Dozens of men were spilling out of its windowless structure and stood in dark clumps on the Pit Road. At first it looked like they were leaving chapel, but as the diesel engine roared nearer, they turned as if they were one. The miners stopped their talking and squinted to get a good look. They all wore the same black donkey jackets and were holding large amber pints and sucking on stubby doubts. The miners had scrubbed faces and pink hands that looked free of work. It seemed wrong, these men being the only clean thing for miles. Reluctantly, the miners parted and let the taxi go by. Leek watched them as they were watching him. His stomach sank. The men all had his mother’s eyes.”

ShameMinersGlasgowLeekShuggie Bain
Book:Shuggie Bain
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“It is perhaps surprising that in eighteenth century travellers' accounts Glasgow is most often compared with Oxford for the beauty of its prospect and the excellence of its ambience. It was post-industrial Revolution accounts of the city that began to articulate the 'Glasgow discourse' which was to become hegenomic. Initially signalled in urban planning and public health reports of the nineteenth century, this discourse was powerfully accelerated by tabloid journalistic accounts of gang warfare in interwar Glasgow and by folkloric embellishments of these. The result was that a monstrous Ur-narrative comes into play when anyone (not least, it should be said, Glaswegians themselves) seeks to describe or deal imaginatively with that city. In this archetypal narrative, Glasgow is the City of Dreadful Night with the worst slums in Europe, its citizens living out lives which are nasty, brutish and short. The milieu of Glasgow is so stark, so the narrative runs, that it breeds a particular social type, the Hard Man, a figure whose universe is bounded by football, heavy drinking and (often sectarian) violence. The image of Glasgow, which beckons, Circe-like, to any who would speak or write of that city, is one of men celebrating, coming to terms with or (rarely) transcending their bleak milieu. An order of marginalisation, if not exclusion, is served on women.”

ViolenceIndustrial RevolutionSectarianismGlasgowHard ManHeavy DrinkingGlaswegians
Book:The Cinematic City
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“Billy Rankin is a true Glasgow rock legend. He has everything going for him: he's a brilliant guitarist, he writes killer songs, he's worked with the best, toured the world and he is one handsome-looking chap. I know all of this because Billy told me.”

GuitarScotlandRockNazarethGlasgowMark RiceBilly RankinRobert Fields
Book:Minstrels, Poets and Vagabonds: A History of Rock Music in Glasgow
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“...how can I describe Endrick Street to anyone who has never been in it? 'Ugly' is not the word that describes it. it is just one of those desperate streets which we have here and there in Glasgow and, so far as I have seen, you have not at all in London. It is long and black and melancholy as a stone chasm. All hope abandons you as you enter it. From morning till night there is the sound of worn carpets being beaten, and of stone steps being scrubbed by landladies in Hinde's curlers. The great windows are always left dirty, the broken black railings are never repaired, and there is a smell of soot as if a chimney had just been on fire. Nothing seems to thrive in the back greens but soot and cats. I have never once walked down it but there has been a half empty coal-cart on the roadway with a man standing up in it his hand to his mouth, wailing the words 'Coal briquettes!”

CoalGlasgowSootBack Greens
Book:The Camomile
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“In SMT Magazine and Scottish Country Life, Alastair Borthwick informed would-be visitors that 'Facing you as you enter... are the Cascades - seventeen waterfalls pouring 400 feet down the hillside - and the Grand Staircase, which is a double flight of steps running on either side of the cascades'. Soaring above these at the crest of Bellahouston Hill was the exhibition's 'sensational and symbolic centrepiece' - the 300-feet-high Tower of Empire which Thomas S. Tait designed with assistance from Launcelot Ross and from structural engineer James Mearns... In height, it was equivalent to a skyscraper - a building type most Scots would have known only from illustrations in newspapers and magazines - but the effect of slenderness Tait achieved also made it suggestive of some sort of futuristic scence fiction fantasy structure that might be used to tether airships, for example. Its design captured the imaginations of all who saw it and it was undoubtedly the exhibition's one truly awe-inspiring building.”

Glasgow1938Art DecoBellahouston ParkBritish Empire ExhibitionThomas S TaitTower Of Empire
Book:Art Deco Scotland: Design and Architecture in the Jazz Age
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“To perform at the Cardiff Millennium Centre was amazing in itself - the theatre is an incredible venue and it was great to be performing so close to home. For me the best experience was in Glasgow, where I got to play Dee Dee for two weeks! The audience sang along to every song with such enthusiasm you actually couldn't hear yourself singing! That was incredible!”

TwoPlayHomeSongAudienceWeekSingingIncrediblesTheatreEnthusiasmPerformingCentreTwo WeeksMillenniumVenuesGlasgowBest ExperiencesCardiff
Author:Francesca Jackson
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