It’s a big summer for Glasgow. Fresh from twinning with Boston after the Tartan Army’s World Cup antics entranced the Americans, Scotland’s metropolis is now welcoming visitors for the Commonwealth Games. Those in town for the week and a half will find a city of underrated beauty – but one which seems strangely determined to let its impressive Victorian and Edwardian heritage crumble.
The latest example of Glasgow’s apparent death wish came this week when it was announced that a lack of cash means that Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterwork at the Glasgow School of Art, destroyed in 2018 by a second fire in four years, won’t be faithfully rebuilt after all. The school says it can’t afford the £265 million bill to restore the building alone and has come up with a vague plan for the site to act as a ‘heritage “anchor” for a wider innovation cluster that supports local regeneration objectives’. Call me unconvinced.
That punch in the gut came after the vape shop conflagration in March which shuttered Glasgow Central Station and took down the historic Union Corner. Just down the road, the majesty of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson’s derelict A-listed Egyptian Halls (completed 1872) has only just been partially revealed again, after one of the finest buildings in the city spent decades covered in scaffolding.
