I do not happen to believe that it is true. Edinburgh has of course great cultural assets, the Festival, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Portrait Gallery, and the copyright library, but they are none of them strictly indigenous. They come from outside or by virtue of capital city status rather than arise out of the life and work of the inhabitants of the city itself as is the case here. None the less, I think Glasgow must be prepared for the going to be a little harder in future. Having caught and mounted the horse of fashion in the early eighties and dashingly ridden it for seven years or so, Glasgow must be ready for its vagaries soon to take the horse veering off in another direction.
Glasgow can, I think, sustain this. It has almost indestructible advantages that should be immune to gusts of fashion. First the site, which is God-given in both the literal and the figurative senses of the phrase, and which helps to make Glasgow an exceptionally vivid city visually, and one to which a strong painting tradition is peculiarly appropriate. The city itself is finely placed with the hills rising on either side of the river in just the right places. Beyond that the estuary of the Clyde, with its associated inlets, islands and mountains, constitutes the most dramatic piece of seascape at the gates of a major city to be found anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of Vancouver Sounds and the Bosphorus. There are I believe equally memorable natural formations amongst the fjords of Norway, or on the western coast of Greenland or on the shores of Antarctica, but they are all wastelands so far as human population is concerned.
Glasgow’s industry also had a peculiar vividness, which is retained by such of it as remains. The cranes of Govan, seen on the drive in from the airport, proclaim that this is Glasgow as emphatically as, and more authentically than, the Eiffel Tower identifies Paris, or the bridge and the opera house do Sydney.
Second, there is the solid base of Glasgow’s educational strength. It is a remarkable double that a century after the narrow strips of flat land along the banks of the Clyde became the greatest industrial focus of the world, the hills behind the riverside on the north side should now have become, with the exception almost only of the banks of the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the most concentrated educational areas: two universities, the 439-year-old eagle of Glasgow perched on its Gilmorehill eyrie and the enthusiastic young pouter pigeon of Strathclyde a couple of miles to the east and hatched only a quarter of a century ago out of a College of Technology; Jordanhill College of Education; four teaching hospitals; three units of the Medical Research Council; a number of specialized institutions of which the Glasgow School of Art is the most famous; all this, plus a clutch of four or five high schools or academies of note, is by any standards an extraordinary cluster and one which, as I believe the Massachusetts experience has shown, is of great economic value in the modern world.
Third, there is the quality of the human resources. Glasgow has its well-known warmth, but that is something on which in my view it is possible to talk a good deal of sententious nonsense. Glasgow people are capable of being very friendly, and they are almost invariably polite, but they are also capable, as are all people of discrimination, of being appropriately chilling when they think it is deserved. When in 1982 I first came to know Glasgow well, and in particular its West End, what most struck me was not so much the warmth as the quiet self-confidence. It was not a complacent or narrow or inward-looking self-confidence. It was not based on a desire to keep strangers out, or I would not have been made nearly so welcome. What it was based on was a consciousness of the contribution which this strip of river and hills had made to the advancement of civilization throughout and beyond Britain, and on a feeling that while it was desirable to go outside the West End from time to time it was as good a place to live as anywhere in the world. It was based neither on complacency nor on any sense of compensating for inferiority, but, as true self-confidence always is, on a desire to learn of outside things accompanied by a contentment within one’s own skin. That is the dominant impression that I retain of Hillhead and of Glasgow as a whole.
So I have no hesitation about putting Glasgow amongst the great cities of the world, and far higher than population alone would entitle it to be. I do so upon grounds of site, metropolitan atmosphere, industrial history, visual impact, educational and cultural resources, and the self-confidence of its inhabitants, powerfully expressed in the architecture of its industrial heyday a hundred years ago, almost equally well exemplified by the City Chambers, the Kelvingrove Gallery and the Central Hotel, the self-confidence always there if sometimes as nearly hidden as the River Kelvin is within its gorges, but strongly resurfacing within the last decade.