Glasgow (updated!)

I spent this weekend in the wackily wonderful metropolis of GLASGOW which is Scotland's largest city. It is also the namesake of the late Professor Eric Glasgow, one of my old anatomy professors of Monash, even though he was from Belfast.

Glasgow is a very old city; in many ways, it resembles a cross between Sydney and Melbourne, although it is much wetter than both. That being said, it was a pretty good weekend as far as the weather went, with only a few showers on both days. I didn't have time to go around the whole city but with the federal election coming I tailored my trip to a somewhat sociopolitical bent.

The Merchant District is a lot like Fitzroy, although somewhat more cosmopolitan. It is here that the Trades Hall is located, a venerable old building, not nearly as big as the one on Lygon Street Carlton, and smack in the middle of Glasgow's queer ghetto. Further east, I dropped into St. Mungo's Museum of Life and Religious Art. This museum was created by leaders of the various religions in Glasgow and was aimed to educate people about the similarities and differences of each of them, through an exhibit about the main principles of each religion and how they treat certain tenets of life, such as birth, marriage, war, peace and death. This was also facilitated by an art exhibition of artefacts from each of the main religions. Outside the museum, there's Britain's only permanent Zen garden, with fifteen stones, some supposedly depicting certain animals, such as a turtle for long life, but the ambiguity is its real purpose.

Directly opposite St Mungo's Museum is the Glasgow Cathedral which is centuries ancient but I didn't have time to have a peek inside. A short walk from here leads you to the Bridge of Sighs across Wishart Street to the Glasgow Necropolis where many of Glasgow's big wigs are buried in elaborate, though crumbling, graves.

A short walk from here is the East End of town. For many decades this was considered one of the most unhealthy and deprived areas of urban Europe. Yet it was the reality of life for the great part of the Glaswegian population. Most people lived in tenements, referring to the stories above shopfronts; they were usually grossly overcrowded and unsanitary. Here were all sorts of shops selling ersatz and dodgy goods like a thousand $2-shops. On the weekend, there's the Barras, Glasgow's famous flea market and one of the largest in Europe; it looked like a watered down version of our own Queen Vic Market, selling just about every dubious-quality product you can think of. For many years, before it became a tourist attraction, it was the happy hunting ground for many less well-off families.

This was all located in the "Gallowgate", which is exactly what it means. Not far from here is Glasgow Green, where people sentenced to death were hanged. At one point, there were over 200 capital offences, most of them relating to theft of personal property. I managed to be in this park on the weekend of the Glasgow Show (Fair), a beer-and-pretzels hotchpotch of children's shows and activities and low-level impersonations of Abba and Elvis Presley. This is a remnant of the Glasgow Fair which for nearly a thousand years entertained the poorest citizens of Glasgow for two weeks each summer.

Here in Glasgow Green was the People's Palace, a museum of Glasgow's social history. There were exhibits of how rich and poor people spent their summer holidays, and on everyday life in the tenements - the crowded housing that was the domain of most people in the city. Sanitation was appalling and general quality of life poor - and predictably, crime came with it. There is also a huge portrait of Jimmy Reid, one of the twentieth century's great trade union leaders, together with an introduction to the trade union movement and Margaret Thatcher's Poll Tax which a third of Glaswegians refused to pay. (The poll tax replaced council rates, but was fixed per person rather than based on the value of the property, making it an extremely regressive tax.) Overall, I found the People's Palace somewhat simplstic, but it's still definitely a place to bring your kids if they ever visit Scotland.

On Saturday night I slept in one of the worst hostels I've ever been to. The Euro Hostel is smack in the middle of town, but it's in a very seedy district. Its incorporated bar, Osmosis, was packed with obnoxious football fans who had just seen Celtic beat Chelsea. The hostel itself was not the cleanest and absolutely shorn of personality. I got about two hours of sleep the whole night.

The next day I spent at New Lanark which is about an hour to the south, not far from the English border. New Lanark was an industrial community that revolved around cotton mills. It is notable because the mill owner, Robert Owen (1771-1858) was one of the few enlightened businesspeople who believed in humanity and co-operation between employers and employees. He set up the first child care centre for employees, allowed children to attend school until the age of 10 (and banned corporal punishment), and introduced a sickness fund (deductions from wages) so that all workers would receive free health care if the need arose. Amazingly, production did not fall under these conditions more humane than at other sites, and a healthy profit was maintained. However, Owen was mocked by his fellow mill owners and they did not follow his lead. Eventually, Owen founded two more of these co-operative colonies in the US before returning to Britain as one of the founding fathers of the Trade Union Movement. A statue of Owen stands in the working-class district of Manchester. His son continued his father's work in the US and went on to become a notable Congressman of the Left faction of the Democratic Party.

New Lanark is also the home of a beautiful waterfall and it is a pleasant stroll there from the township on a warm summer's day. It reminded me of home. In my birth country, cotton mills were also commonplace. Under the Chiang Kai-shek Government cotton mill workers in Shanghai had to work 16 hours a day under appalling conditions, many were underage, they were universally underfed, and many were not even paid their wages, rather, they were on a contract with their families and employers and they had to pay off a "job-arrangement" debt first which took three or four years. Only after this disastrous regime was overthrown in 1949 that these women were granted a modicum of dignity in their job conditions. As for my adopted home, you don't have to look further than WorkChoices - NoChoices or BendOver would be a better name for it.