This fits in appropriately with the recent revaluation of fashion against excessive size in cities. And with the prestige of size so has its precision disappeared. An encyclopaedia published in the early 1920s, to the study of which I devoted many childhood hours, gave with complete confidence the exact population of every major city down to the last digit. I can still remember many of them. Glasgow then scored 1,111,428, as opposed, say, to 648,000 for Madrid, which now rates four and a half million, or 412,000 for São Paolo, Brazil, which now rates twelve and a half million. Modern editions of encyclopaedias are much more uncertain. They give alternatives - within the city limits and within the conurbations, and conurbations are rather vague concepts. But what is more significant is that nobody is now proud of being big. London and New York used to compete with each other for first place like two Atlantic liners passing and re-passing each other in bids for the blue riband of the fastest crossing. Now both competitions are as out of date as are the liners. New York and London have dropped far behind, being overtaken by Tokyo and Shanghai, and Calcutta and Bombay, and Seoul and Cairo, and Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo, and maybe Teheran, and above all Mexico City. But Mexico City, far from being proud of its pre-eminence, keeps its monstrous size and rate of growth as quiet as any ageing beauty used to do with her age, and hopes that it can escape too much obloquy for further engulfing the country and polluting the sky.
Glasgow has therefore chosen its time to shrink with great skill. The days when the claim to be ‘the second city of the Empire’ was a proud boast are as far past as is the Empire itself. And although the claim had a certain essential truth, as was symbolized by those great exhibitions of 1888, 1901, 1911 and 1938 in the parks of first Kelvingrove and then Bellahouston, I wonder how statistically accurate it was unless the population of Calcutta was calculated on the basis that you needed several Bengalis to count as the equivalent of one Scotsman.
In those days, however, it would have been a tragedy to have gone down in population from 1,100,000 to the present 750,000 (although of course the Clydeside conurbation remains much more like two and a half million). Now it does not matter in the least from a prestige point of view. Indeed, it is if anything an advantage, and excites the greater admiration that Glasgow’s cultural impact, which I regard as comparable with that of Chicago, has been achieved on a population, city for city, of a fifth the size, and conurbation for conurbation, of a third the size.
There is only one word of warning that I must give to Glasgow. Glasgow has ridden high on a mounting wave of fashion in the 1980s. It amuses me to look back over the change in the outside perception of Glasgow during the period that I have been closely associated with the city. When I became Member of Parliament for Hillhead in 1982 I derived a lot of pleasure from surprising people all over the world with the wholly accurate information that my Glasgow constituency was, according to the census, the most highly educated in the whole of the United Kingdom. And I added for good measure that, while it was geographically only one-eleventh of the City of Glasgow, it contained at least fifteen institutions or monuments of major cultural, intellectual or architectural fame. That was all in the days before the Burrell Collection was open. The Burrell (not in Hillhead but three miles away on the South Side), while it is a fine heterogeneous collection, housed in perhaps the best building for a gallery created anywhere in the past quarter century, adds to what was previously in the Kelvinside Gallery and other Glasgow collections before but does not qualitatively change it. 1982 was also at the beginning of the ‘Glasgow’s miles better’ slogan, and before there was much thought of Glasgow being either an important centre of aesthetic tourism or the European City of Culture.
What has changed since then has been that for three or four years everybody has come to accept these earlier facts without the previous surprise, while for me the sad fact amongst them is that Hillhead has ceased to be my constituency. (But if it no longer enables me to sit in the House of Commons it is at least now part of the name under which I sit in the House of Lords.) My warning is that fashion is a fickle jade. Glasgow has been tremendously à la mode for the past five years. But la mode, by its very nature, cannot remain constant. Last week, for the first time in my experience, someone said to me that he thought Glasgow had recently achieved an exaggerated reputation, and went on to add that he thought Edinburgh - admittedly he lived there - was the cultural as well as the political capital of Scotland. I rocked on my heels in amazement. No one had said such a thing to me for years.