Like good and evil, Glasgow and Edinburgh are often mentioned in the same breath but regarded as utterly distinct. The rivalry between these cities, which is so long-standing that it has become proverbial, sets them alongside other urban centres—Los Angeles and San Francisco, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo—which like to jockey for supremacy within their nations. Though the two are almost comically diminutive when compared with Madrid and Barcelona, let alone with Beijing and Shanghai, Glasgow (population 600,000) and Edinburgh (population 500,000) are much smaller than most other internationally celebrated pairs of urban rivals. They are also absurdly closer together: only forty miles separates the two lowland Scottish cities; to travel by train from the centre of one to the centre of the other can take as little as forty-five minutes. In spirit, though, each considers itself far removed from its counterpart. Perhaps the most intellectually honest way to go from the west-coast city to the east-coast city would be to fly westward from Glasgow Airport over the Atlantic, crossing North America, the northern Pacific, Asia, and continental Europe, before descending over the Firth of Forth on the eastern seaboard of Scotland and then landing at Edinburgh Airport. That way, at least, one would arrive from Glasgow psychologically prepared.
There have been many books about each of these cities, but no one has ever written a serious volume exclusively devoted to both. To do so seems heretical but necessary. It is impossible to live life to the full in either place without occasionally thinking wistfully or smirkingly of the other, and no visitor can understand urban Scotland or the Scottish nation without comprehending these proud competitors. Beloved of tourists, Scotland is a small country of five million people, more than half of whom live in the area surrounding Glasgow and Edinburgh. This book is written for natives and guests alike. A tale of two cities, it focuses on twenty or so visitable sites (usually specific buildings or clusters of buildings) in the historic core of each, and draws from those present-day locations aspects of the character and provenance of their municipality. Every chapter is constellated around several particular spots. The book does not aim to provide a comprehensive historical map, but strives to trace cultural leylines, some familiar, some long obscured.
The central feature here is a multi-chaptered account of each city; the present opening chapter sets out something of the background to their rivalry; at the volume’s conclusion a short envoi gestures, optimistically, towards rapprochement. Having given Glasgow priority in my book’s title, in ordering the contents I have placed Edinburgh first. In matters of arrangement, prioritizing, and protocol, where Edinburgh and Glasgow are concerned it is impossible to get things right. Yet in the midst of each city, when one eyes the surrounding high culture (which is what this book does), such concerns often drop away. “Look up!” generations of Glaswegian mothers have counseled their children, alerting them to the loftily ornamented Victorian glories of their urban heartland; in Edinburgh, the Castle and other hilltop monuments constantly encourage a raising of the eyes. Visually rich, the centres of both places are best seen on foot. These are not fast-paced metropolises like New York or Hong Kong, but slower, strollable European cities.
Most of this book is arranged sequentially in terms of space, rather then chronology: its core sections progress along streets and through parks. I have cast those chapters mainly in the form of town-centre excursions that use the visible fabric of the city—its built environment—as a gateway into the area’s character and past. Architecture can function as social memory, and there are elements of architectural history in what follows; but more of the book concerns the people of each place. These cities are populated by folk with fascinating stories. To let readers relish some of the more notable achievements of the citizens of both places, I have written about women and children, as well as about famous and infamous men. Often, accounts of townscapes give the impression that cities have been lived in almost exclusively by adults; and it has been all too easy in a lot of Scottish historiography to assume that being Scottish means having two Y chromosomes.
Through attending to nodal sites in either place, then, the chapters that follow try to give the reader a sense of each city’s history and people. Within the main “Edinburgh” and “Glasgow” sections, the principal locations are used often as points of entry into the city’s story, and other notable attractions are mentioned in passing. A few chapters, like the one which discusses Glasgow’s Burrell Collection and Holmwood House, focus on sites that are some distance apart; but often, as in the chapters on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, readers are invited to walk the route. I have tried to present an engagingly detailed continuous account, so that anyone who reads the book from start to finish will get a good sense of both cities and their famously scratchy relationship. Museums and galleries, Adam Smith and Walter Scott certainly feature—but so do small apartments, a poetry library, protean Madeleine Smith, and the entrepreneur Maria Theresa Short. Sometimes, partly for the sake of variety, I have chosen to view sites from unusual angles, looking, for instance, at one of Glasgow’s best-known streets through the eyes of a Victorian child who grew up there, or noting how Edinburgh University was perceived by its most famous student from England. I have sought to mix novelty and familiarity in something like the way each of these great cities does, and to make both places attractive to a reader who may or may not have time to return.
The idea of portraying an entire municipality by means of a panoramic view reproduced inside a large cylindrical surface was first conceived on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill by Irish artist Robert Barker, who patented the device in 1787 and soon had the temerity to exhibit his depiction of Edinburgh in Glasgow. Based around a particular selection of nodal points, this book cannot provide such a comprehensive wrap-round experience; but it does aim to exhibit revealing glimpses of each city to the other, and to a wider international public. Since Barker’s day, each place, like most urban locations, has developed sprawling peripheral housing estates, often with insistent social problems. These, though occasionally alluded to, are not the preoccupation here. In concentrating mainly on city-centre heritage sites that present-day tourists may readily visit, I have adopted a necessarily exclusive focus. My choices can be disputed—another writer might have paid far more attention to football, folksongs, and food, far less to literature, gardens, and murder—but I hope that they work. Centering on permanent places that are open to the public throughout the year, I have given little space to such performance venues as halls and sports-grounds, privileging instead art galleries and historic homes.
At the start and at the heart of On Glasgow and Edinburgh is an extended, treasured rivalry. Competition between cities in a single country is a very ancient phenomenon, going back at least to Athens and Sparta, those famous city-states of classical Greece. Yet in the English-speaking world the rivalry between Glasgow and Edinburgh is foundational in that it precedes and to some extent prefigures all other fully developed, long-standing urban rivalries; those between New York and Boston, Sydney and Melbourne, Toronto and Vancouver come later. In England, London’s overbalancing dominance has gone uncontested, and the jousting between Oxford and Cambridge is essentially between universities. Within Scotland, though, since at least the early eighteenth century, a sense of sparring and sometimes outright competition between the country’s two largest cities has been a defining aspect of the nation.
It continues to be so. These two cities still look, feel, and sound markedly different. Each has its own accent: Glasgow’s is guttural and (like the speech of some New Yorkers) enlivened by glottal stops; Edinburgh’s is more singsongy, often rising towards the end of a sentence. Both places treasure their climate: Glasgow’s is mild from the west-coast Gulf Stream, but damp; Edinburgh’s, sunnier but whetted by east-coast winds off the North Sea. The two are so close that in a more sprawling country they might be seen almost as one conjoined metropolis, but each has its own municipal government, sports teams, universities, newspapers, and sense of direction. Glasgow has long liked to look westwards; I have heard it referred to as “America’s fifty-first state.” Its Herald newspaper, published under several different names during its long history, was founded in 1783, the same year as the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, when the city was rethinking its commercial strategy in the wake of the American War of Independence; today the Herald’s owners are American. Asserting itself as a European capital, Edinburgh looks westward perhaps a little less often; that way it can avoid considering Glasgow. Edinburgh’s resilient Scotsman newspaper, first published on Burns Night 1817, mentioned its native city several times throughout its first issue when pondering issues pertinent to culture, and alluded to Glasgow (once) in the context of gas lighting.
Often misunderstood, the rivalry between these two cities has a lively history. In his 1977 book, Glasgow, the scholar David Daiches argues that its first recorded flare-up occurred in 1656, as part of an argument over the standard of baking: “twa [two] honest men” from Edinburgh thought they could offer Glaswegians a higher standard of bread, and Glaswegians worried about their own “townes credit.” At around the same time, a Cromwellian soldier described Glasgow as “not so . . . rich . . . yet a much sweeter and more delightful place than Edinburgh.” However, the more substantial origins of mutual competitiveness lie in the years which followed the still-controversial 1707 Act of Union negotiated between Scotland and England. Edinburgh had lost its royal court to London in 1603, when King James VI of Scotland, son of the executed Mary Queen of Scots, succeeded Queen Elizabeth of England and moved south to become the monarch England calls James I. Monarchical union between the two kingdoms was followed by the 1707 parliamentary union, which sparked riots in Glasgow and Edinburgh when the independent parliaments of Scotland and England were replaced by one British parliament. For many Britons, since this new institution was based in the English capital city, it seemed very like the old English Parliament refreshed with an exotic sprinkling of Scottish MPs. For Edinburgh, however, the 1707 loss of the Scottish parliament, following on the seventeenth-century loss of the royal court, meant that Scotland’s capital city was robbed of much of what had made it a capital in the first place. Edinburgh, then, was damaged in status by parliamentary Union, but the coming of a London-ruled United Kingdom provided opportunities for other cities, most notably Glasgow, to grow their trade. Commerce and banking, rather than baking, revved up the now centuries-old rivalry between Scotland’s principal cities.
When the Bank of Scotland, Britain’s oldest clearing bank, was founded in Edinburgh in 1695, only one of its subscribers came from Glasgow—which already had substantial mercantile discount houses of its own. Though the subsequent foundation of another Edinburgh-based establishment, the Royal Bank of Scotland, in 1727, trumpeted the capital city’s economic dominance, in many ways it was Glasgow that made the greatest commercial advances. Edinburgh remained Scotland’s cultural centre, a self-conscious capital of art. The Edinburgh Miscellany, a poetry anthology published in 1720, might include verses (such as “A Walk on Glasgow Green”) depicting the beauties of the west-coast city, but the book’s title says it all. Stylish and advanced, Edinburgh’s Fair Intellectual-Club, founded by young women in 1718 and active for several years, demonstrated that women as well as men might participate in intellectual improvement. During an era when A Looking-Glass for Edinburgh Ladies saw spinning work rather than brain power as belonging to “the true Character of a Good Wife,” one of the Fair Intellectual-Club’s members published verse in The Edinburgh Miscellany. This self-help group’s nine teenage members (their number aligned with that of the nine classical muses) studied the Tatler, the Spectator, Shakespeare, Dryden, and other writers. They were, though, advised that “comedies should be read with caution,” and their secret group was “discovered” when one of its members fell in love with a young man from a local “Athenian Society”—an early athenæum, or learned club, probably based on the Athenian Society of London.
Later—not least during the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, when Edinburgh was home to major publishing houses, to encyclopædias such as the Encyclopædia Britannica, and to internationally influential periodicals such as the Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal—literary learning, as much as anything else, won Edinburgh its soubriquet “the Athens of the North”; and my discussion of the jostling between Glasgow and Edinburgh will be unashamedly bookish. The Scottish capital’s Fair Intellectual-Club, along with more celebrated (predominantly male) “improving” societies and early eighteenth-century publications such as Edinburgh University professor Alexander Monro’s 1726 Anatomy of the Humane Bones, contributed to the burgeoning of what is now called the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet it was at the much older University of Glasgow that Adam Smith’s teacher Francis Hutcheson wrote the books and gave the lectures often seen as the clearest early indication of that surge in intellectual voltage.
Repeatedly, people are tempted to think of Edinburgh as Scotland’s centre of learning, and to gender the Scottish capital as feminine, Glasgow as masculine. There may be lasting truth in such assumptions, but they need to be more subtly nuanced. In Glasgow, women as well as men took philosophy seriously, and sometimes women were at the forefront in commercial wrangling. When in 1725 Glaswegians rioted against the imposition of a Malt Tax, a published “Letter from a Gentleman at Glasgow to his Friend at Edinburgh” recorded that “a Woman, and a great many others with her, did make a Procession through the Town frequently through the Day, with a great many Children and Boys making a great Noise.” This woman, exhibiting “great Majesty and Rage,” was arrested, but was released next day when she quarreled with the city’s Lord Provost and outwitted a force of more than eighty soldiers. If Glaswegian women could be formidable popular leaders, agitating about taxes and commercial threats, Glaswegian men were resolute too. In 1728 that same Glaswegian Lord Provost, Andrew Cochrane, presented £900 worth of Bank of Scotland notes at his local branch of the Bank of Scotland, and demanded coin for it. When the Edinburgh-based bank was unable to supply the cash, the Cochrane family took legal action, which eventually went as far as the House of Lords. The Glaswegians won. Private traders in their city led the way to the founding of Glasgow’s first bank in 1750, followed by other similar establishments, one involving Cochrane himself. All of this indicates that the city in the west was beginning to flex its economic muscles. By the end of the 1750s, Edinburgh’s financial institutions felt obliged to attempt to put their Glaswegian competitors out of business.
With growing commercial clout came civic pride. The first book-length account of a Scottish city was published in 1736 by “John McUre alias Campbel,” a native Glaswegian who stated that his “great Age . . . long Experience and Employment” had given him thorough knowledge of Glasgow’s “Antiquity, the Citizens Trade and Commerce, from what low and small Beginnings was rais’d here, and happily arriv’d once to such a Pitch, that we became the Envy of others.” McUre does not mention Edinburgh at this point, but it is hard to imagine Glaswegians would have complained much if “others” in the Scottish capital had felt any “Envy.” This historian’s pride in his native place is palpable. His View of the City of Glasgow explains how there “stands deliciously on the Banks of the River Clyde, the City of Glasgow, which is generally believed to be of its Bigness the most beautiful City of the World, and is acknowledged to be so by all Forreigners that comes thither.” That panegyric was not quite as improbable as it may sound. Already, three decades earlier, the well-traveled English spy and novelist Daniel Defoe had been impressed not just by the industry of Glasgow’s merchants, but also by their town—“the cleanest and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted.” Even though he relished the capital of Scotland, Defoe had already noted Edinburgh’s “discouragements and disadvantages.”
For the Londoner Defoe and the Glaswegian McUre, the attractions of Glasgow were obvious. Yet McUre’s problem, like that of so many subsequent West of Scotland observers, was the sheer kudos of Edinburgh as the northern capital city, albeit one that had lost both its royalty and its parliament. McUre faces up to this as best he can. He maintains that Glasgow “in respect of its Largeness, Buildings, Trade and Wealth, has been long, and justly reckoned the chief Town in the Kingdom next to Edinburgh, the Metropolis of Scotland.” That last qualification would become a familiar Glaswegian strategy. The preferred response of Edinburgh would be to avoid mentioning Glasgow at all, thereby confirming its own effortless superiority. Nearly a century and a half later, Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1879)—still the finest book about Scotland’s capital—does mention “our rivals of Glasgow,” but tellingly relegates them to a footnote. There he apologizes to his fellow Edinburgh citizens if he has said anything which displeases them or which pleases Glaswegians. Stevenson concludes, “To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, but that is of gold: I have not yet written a book about Glasgow.”
1. Viewed from the south in this 1695 engraving by John Slezer, Glasgow is the city of spires and elegance praised by the Latin poet Arthur Johnston, by the English spy Daniel Defoe, and by the local historian John McUre, who described the way it “stands deliciously on the Banks of the River Clyde.”
Ebullient Glaswegians always love to sing their city’s praises. Edinburgh people usually reply with a lofty half-smile: you can tell that they once had their own royal court. For more than fifteen years after the publication of McUre’s book about Glasgow, no one thought it necessary to counter with a matching tome about Edinburgh. Eventually, in 1753, William Maitland, a native of northeast Scotland who had already written a History of London, published his History of Edinburgh . . . In Nine Books. Comprising 551 large pages with small print and double columns, this magnum opus dwarfs McUre’s more modest publication and marks the start of an ongoing “battle of the books” between the two cities. Over the centuries, well nigh 10,000 works have been published with the word “Glasgow” in their title, relentlessly outgunned by the more than 15,000 whose titles include the word “Edinburgh.” Maitland wrote early in this vigorous bibliomachia. Invoking sources as old as Ptolemy, and asserting Edinburgh’s unassailable status “from its foundations to the present time,” his work is designedly monumental; but its very appearance coincides with—and perhaps in an overas-sertive way articulates—a certain anxiety in mid-eighteenth-century Edinburgh at a time when Glasgow was growing in confidence, wealth, and energy.
Maitland’s way of dealing with Glasgow is to pretend it does not exist. The word “Glasgow” features nowhere in the index to his book, nor is it in the key to Hugo Arnot’s even larger History of Edinburgh (1779). Written with support from the Town Council, these volumes were designed to bolster the Scottish capital’s dominance, making the most of its regal antiquity. Conscious that “the History of Edinburgh” has been “hitherto unattempted,” Maitland mentions “Romantic French Writers” who “about Five hundred Years ago” called the place “Castrum Puellarum, the Maiden Castle, from the Daughters of Pictish Kings said to have been educated therein.” Though he goes on to say such tales “deserve not the least credit,” he invokes them to boost Edinburgh’s ancient allure, arguing that the settlement was probably founded around the year 626. This causes him some problems, since he has then to admit that “Edinburgh seems to have been but of little Note till about the Middle of the fourteenth Century” and that as late as 1400 “it appears to have consisted of mere Houses covered with Straw.” Modern historians attach particular significance to the Northumbrians’ capture of the settlement of Din Eidyn (the first word means “fort”; the second is a proper name) in 638, and its subsequent renaming as “Edineburg”—“burg” being Anglian for a town or stronghold. These historians go on to highlight the place’s tenth-century capture by the Scots of the MacAlpin dynasty, and how its castle passed several times between Scottish and English hands during centuries of warfare from the 1100s onwards. Maitland, however, spent relatively little time on the Middle Ages. For him, it was the coming of a parliament in 1436 that led the city “to be better looked on”; then, a couple of decades later, came “the Time of its Beginning to flourish, and of its justly being reckoned the Capital of the Kingdom.” Maitland’s foundational book-length study of Edinburgh makes much of King James III’s granting of a charter in 1477 confirming the city’s privileges to hold markets, and of quarrels with the neighbouring port of Leith on the Firth of Forth. Mid-sixteenth-century Edinburgh, a place where a hungry shopper could buy a dozen of “the best Laverock or Lark” for four Scots pennies, or “the best Swan” for five shillings, emerges as a capital city of food, but hardly of hygiene. Aware that this latter problem was still pressing two centuries afterwards, Maitland finds evidence that in 1553 “Edinburgh seems to have been greatly pestered with Filth and Dirt, by the Council’s ordering all Dunghills to be removed from off the Streets, and Swine kept from coming thereon.”
Though St. Andrews had been the ecclesiastical capital of later medieval Scotland, while Scottish kings had traditionally been crowned at Scone in Perthshire and had enjoyed residing at Stirling Castle, Edinburgh is presented in these and subsequent histories as the place most closely linked to Scottish royalty and to the nation’s ancient parliament. After the disastrous Battle of Flodden in 1513, the building of Edinburgh’s “Flodden Wall” confined the early Renaissance city within a protective barrier, strengthening the identity of a place that the Protestant Scottish exile Alesius (Alexander Alan) in 1550 compared to Prague, and whose houses he regarded as palaces distributed along its Via Regia, the street now called the Royal Mile. For Maitland, writing two centuries after Alesius, Edinburgh also featured as the key site of the momentous sixteenth-century Scottish Reformation. He recounts how on September 1, 1558, the feast day of St. Giles, “the tutelary Saint of Edinburgh,” monks and priests found that “new Converts” to Protestantism were disrupting the traditional procession which in a “magnificent Pageant” carried a statue of the saint “in Triumph through the City.” The Protestants “in derision” took a rival statue from Greyfriars Churchyard, nicknamed it Young St. Giles, and eventually tore it to pieces.
A few years later, during the reign of the Catholic monarch Mary Queen of Scots, the now-dominant Protestant Reformers wanted a fresh identity for Scotland’s capital: “The Reformation of Religion in Edinburgh being carried to such a Height, the Council . . . caused the Picture of St. Giles (by them called the Idol) to be cut out of the Town’s Standard, and the Thistle to be inserted in its stead.” Mary Queen of Scots had been welcomed home from France at New Year 1562 with a great Scots-tongued flourish:
2. Another engraving done by John Slezer in 1695 shows Edinburgh in the distance, with the village of Dean in the foreground. Edinburgh’s castle, on its lofty rock, led the sixteenth-century writer Alesius to compare the Scottish capital to Prague.
WELCUM, illustrat Ladye, and oure Quene!
Welcum, our lyone with the Floure-delyce! fleur-de-lys
Welcum, oure thrissill with the Lorane grene! thistle; Lorraine
Welcum, our rubent roiss vpoun the ryce! ruby; rose; twig
However, as Maitland’s History of Edinburgh makes clear, Mary’s later marriage to the overbearing Earl of Bothwell, accused of her first husband’s murder, was seen by many as “to her eternal Reproach.” Some Edinburgh people chanted “Burn the Whore!” Retelling this history in the mid-eighteenth century was a way of asserting that Scotland’s capital, even without a resident monarch or parliament, was still the central city of Scottish life and continued to preserve a keen sense of its links to the national past.
Maitland’s rhetoric makes this subtly apparent. He describes, for instance, how in 1579 Edinburgh greeted Mary’s son, James VI, the last monarch of an independent Scotland, with a masque that included “a large polished Brazen Globe; from which, in a Machine, descended a Cupid, who presented him with the Keys of the City-gates, made of Silver, in a Silvern Bason, (which is lost: but the Two Keys, with a Silvern Chain, are still to be seen in the Town’s Charter-house).” So modern Edinburgh, for Maitland and the city’s successive historians, acts as a receptacle of treasures from the nation’s past, rather than simply of items from municipal history. Moreover, this eighteenth-century chronicler implies that in some ways the city’s glories have actually increased since the days when it hosted Renaissance Scottish monarchs. Commenting on late sixteenth-century medicine, Maitland in 1753 remarks that “the Art of Surgery was then but little known in Edinburgh, though at present it may justly vye with any other City in the Knowledge and Practice of that very useful and curious Art.” In retelling Edinburgh’s stories, Maitland also boosted the city’s standing as an Enlightenment centre of “Knowledge.” This is the city to which David Hume returned after writing his Treatise on Human Nature (1738–1740), and where William Smellie, local founder of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1768), later maintained that an English immigrant in the Royal Mile had told him, “Here I stand at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand.”
Glasgow had not the same cards to play, and its first historian, McUre, knew it. Many of the western city’s ecclesiastical records had been taken abroad at the time of the Reformation; committedly, McUre tracked them down. Not content simply to quote a Latin poem from William Camden’s Renaissance survey, Britannia, which sings “Happy Glasgow, Clyde’s chiefest Pride,” he maintained that Druids had once lived in his native town “in Cells near the Blackfryer Church adjacent to the College.” After this druidical rhetorical flourish, McUre saw Glasgow’s early history almost entirely in terms of religious life: “The City owes its Rise and Progress to its antient Patron St. Mungo, who, some say, founded here an Episcopal See.” Drawing on John Spottiswoode’s History of the Church of Scotland (1655), McUre retells legends of this saint, to whom Glasgow’s “Cathedral Church was dedicated, and is called St. Mungo’s to this Day.” For all that McUre in 1736 appears to write as a Protestant, he records that Mungo’s saint’s day is January 13, “and that Day is the End of a Fair that holds in the Town for twenty Days preceeding, and is commonly called the twenty Day of Yuill, or St. Mungo’s Fair, (which is very beneficial to the People twenty Miles round Glasgow, resorting to the Fair).” For McUre, Glasgow’s past is principally a religious one. Its beloved cathedral had been consecrated in the summer of 1136, in the presence of King David I of Scotland (who had also endowed the site of Edinburgh’s Holyrood Abbey—though McUre makes no mention of that). A papal bull of 1172 had termed Glasgow a civitas—a city—and Archbishop William Turnbull is credited with the founding of Glasgow University in 1451. Too polite to point out that Edinburgh would have to wait nearly a century and a half before getting a university of its own, McUre does occasionally glance across at the Scottish capital when writing about his beloved native place—a city surrounded, he wrote, by “corn-fields, kitchen and flower gardens and beautiful orchyards.”
Chronicling Reformation Glasgow, this Glaswegian writer is disturbed that its learned early sixteenth-century archbishop Gavin Dunbar, though “not of himself a Biggot,” allowed two young men to be put to death as early Protestant martyrs. The archbishop, it seems, was in favour of sparing the youths’ lives, “but these others who were sent to assist, told him expressly, that if he followed any milder Course than that which was kept at Edinburgh, they could not esteem him the Church’s Friend, whereupon he was compell’d to give Way to their Cruelty; and these Innocents were condemn’d to be burnt alive.” It is revealing to see McUre here directing his attention to the perceived vicious authoritarianism of the east-coast city, a sternness that curbs the more generous instinct of the west-coast archbishop. If Edinburgh chroniclers could simply ignore Glasgow, it was not so easy for Glaswegians to ignore Edinburgh. The latter, after all, was their capital city—and sometimes a good place to blame.
Yet this author of the first book on Glasgow was keen to show that local patriotism crossed sectarian divisions; he made it clear that the Cathedral of St. Mungo continued to matter as a civic icon to most Protestant Glaswegians after the Reformation. Whereas Edinburgh was a municipality often characterized by its awareness of its authority, in Glasgow there was a certain pride in the way the populace could challenge—even override—the wishes of those in power. This aspect of Glaswegian society is still treasured, and an early instance of it occurs in an anecdote which McUre recounts about an armed uprising by Glaswegians against their magistrates and their university principal, the learned Latin poet, iconoclast, and leading Presbyterian Andrew Melville, who had been educated at St. Andrews, Paris, and Poitiers, as well as in the Geneva of John Calvin’s successor, Theodore Beza.
It was while he [Thomas Crawfurd] was Provost that a Design was laid down to demolish the Cathedral, anno 1578, as Bishop Spotswood in his History tells us, and the Town hath the constant Tradition of it to this Day, that when Mr. Andrew Melvil the Reformer was the Head of the University, he and other Ministers of the Town plied the Magistracy with such Importunity, that at last they consented; several Reasons were adduced to it, viz. That it was a Resort for superstitious People to their Devotions in the Church; but the great Topick of all was, That the Church was a Monument of Idolatry, and the only unruin’d Cathedral in the Kingdom; but when the Masons were brought to take down the Building, the Crafts of Glasgow ran to Arms, and threatened immediate Death to them who should pull down the first Stone. Thus by the Bravery of the Trades of the City, the Cathedral, which is the greatest Ornament of the Kingdom was preserved.
Tellingly McUre writes here as an authority on his city and as a municipal official, yet also as a Glaswegian who sympathizes with revolt against authority. Such a combination came to characterize Glaswegian behaviour in later centuries and may be bound up with Glasgow’s perception of itself both as powerful and as a perennial underdog. McUre’s city must acknowledge from time to time that it stands second in status to Edinburgh, the capital, yet frequently its instinct is to resent the imposition of power. In the use of that phrase “the greatest Ornament of the Kingdom” one also senses that for McUre, as for other Glaswegians, their medieval cathedral was at least as important to their city’s sense of itself as was the Castle to Edinburgh’s folk. Eighteenth-century municipal historians drew on the past to assert civic importance in the Enlightenment present. They did so during shifting political and economic conditions which saw growth in Glasgow accelerating even as Edinburgh realized there was a need for citywide reconstruction.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the burgeoning of Glasgow’s power as a city of international traders. As early as 1647, when the city’s population numbered only about 12,000 people, a Glaswegian ship, the Antelope, imported a cargo of tobacco from Martinique. By 1662, Englishman John Kay was describing the settlement on the Clyde as “the second city in Scotland.” Caribbean and North American sugar and tobacco became traded commodities on which the city grew rich; after the 1707 Act of Union gave Scottish merchants official access to English colonies, Glasgow prospered as never before. In the second book devoted entirely to this emergent western commercial centre, John Gibson’s History of Glasgow, from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time (1777), “the prosperity of the city” is the paramount modern theme. Just a few years before Gibson wrote, Glasgow in one single year imported 47 million pounds of tobacco. Working with nearby ports farther down the Clyde at Greenock and Port Glasgow, the city’s merchants and importers looked as if they might begin to monopolize aspects of Scottish trade.
Edinburgh, for all its tendency to ignore its western rival, began to realize that since the Union other parts of Scotland such as Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Dumfries had seen their trade grow, while that of the capital risked stagnating. In Proposals for Carrying on Certain Public Works in the City of Edinburgh (1752), Gilbert Elliot, Lord Minto, might note that “a trade has been opened from the port of Leith to the West Indies,” but east-coast commercial engagement with those slave-dependent Caribbean colonial economies was not thriving to anything like the same degree as that of Glasgow. Minto makes cursory mention of Glasgow, but prefers to align Edinburgh with its fellow capital city, London, albeit to the Scottish capital’s disadvantage. Complaining of “neglected arts and industry” in Edinburgh, he is proud of that place as “the metropolis of SCOTLAND when a separate kingdom, and still the chief city of NORTH BRITAIN,” but he worries that its situation, “placed upon the ridge of a hill . . . admits but of one good street” (the historic Royal Mile), while “narrow lanes leading to the north and south, by reason of their steepness, narrowness, and dirtiness, can only be considered as so many unavoidable nusances.” Glasgow, relatively close to the spectacular scenery of Loch Lomond and the Highlands, increasingly relished its fine situation. Historically trapped by its old Flodden Wall, Minto’s Edinburgh is stymied because it is boxed in.
Confined by the small compass of the walls, and the narrow limits of the royalty, which scarcely extends beyond the walls, the houses stand more crouded than in any other town in Europe, and are built to a height that is almost incredible. Hence necessarily follows a great want of free air, light, cleanliness, and every other comfortable accommodation. Hence also many families, sometimes no less than ten or a dozen, are obliged to live overhead of each other in the same building; where, to all the other inconveniencies, is added that of a common stair, which is no other in effect than an upright street, constantly dark and dirty.
The phenomenon of these twelve-storey tenements would lead to Edinburgh’s being described in a later century as a precursor of Manhattan, but this eighteenth-century observer noted only that “several of the principal parts of the town are now lying in ruins” while “many of the old houses are decayed.” For Lord Minto in 1752, “The meanness of EDINBURGH has been too long an obstruction to our improvement, and a reproach to SCOTLAND.” He suggested ways “to enlarge and beautify the town, by opening new streets to the north and south, removing the markets and shambles, and turning the North-Loch into a canal, with walks and terraces on each side.” In “Turin, Berlin, and many other cities,” he argued, “what is called the new town, consists of spacious streets and large buildings, which are thinly inhabited, and that too by strangers chiefly, and persons of considerable rank; while the old town, though not near so commodious, is more crouded than before these late additions were made.” Today Edinburgh’s New Town, laid out from the 1760s onwards, is seen as the world’s greatest surviving example of large-scale Georgian town planning. Yet when Minto was writing in 1752, many observers in search of urban beauty perceived it not in Edinburgh, but forty miles west on the prosperous banks of the Clyde, a place surrounded (as McUre had pointed out sixteen years earlier) by “open and large streets” with “a pleasant and odoriferous smell.”
Still, proposing that Edinburgh had to be redeveloped, Minto looked for models everywhere but in Glasgow. In Dublin he found that “manufactures and commerce” had grown as a result of the city’s being “enlarged”; in England he saw commercial and urban expansion. The growth of Edinburgh, he was convinced, would help to promote a “UNITED BRITAIN.” This Scottish lord’s Unionist dreams show how much Edinburgh’s nascent New Town was a political project designed to cement a sense of the United Kingdom.
Others in the Scottish capital were more down-to-earth about practical solutions. Today we may think of mid-eighteenth-century Edinburgh in terms of its great atheist philosopher Hume or its kirk-dominated university and lively Enlightenment debating clubs; but in a 1752 pamphlet, judge and historian David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, described the townscape as primarily a place of human excrement. Poor sanitation, he argued, was the reason “that so few people of rank reside in this city; that it is rarely visited by strangers; and that so many local prejudices and narrow notions, inconsistent with pleasant manners and growing wealth, are still so obviously retained.” Dalrymple’s solution to the stench of Edinburgh was simple: the city needed a new castle in the form of a great public toilet. Building more “necessary-houses” or “houses of office” (restrooms) would enable the Scottish capital to become “the centre of all possible refinement.” In touch with Maitland (who was then at work on his pioneering History of Edinburgh) and an avid reader of Minto’s Proposals for urban improvement, Dalrymple tetchily put Edinburgh’s still-medieval sanitary arrangements down to a residual anti-Englishness in the Scottish capital.
Every art cultivated, every blandishment of life invented, or improved, by the English, has by our deluded countrymen been held in utter abhorrence. Among their other prejudices, that at houses of office has not been the least inveterate. And indeed the situation of the necessary-house erected upon the wall of the castle of Edinburgh, might induce many of the lower sort among us to imagine, that our independency was annihilated, by a standing army’s being maintained, to sh-te down upon the faces of the much injured Caledonians. That ærial necessary-house seems to lord it over our capital.
In the sixteenth-century, Alesius had written of Edinburgh Castle as a place from which “enterprising youths” were lowered in baskets to rob the nests of vultures on the rock below; later ages would see the Castle solely in terms of romance and heritage; Dalrymple here regards it, with Aristophanic gusto, principally as a source of shit. Edinburgh’s eighteenth-century nickname, “Auld Reikie” (Old Smoky), may relate to the smelly smoke from the town’s chimneys glimpsed from afar, but also calls to mind the stench evoked in many accounts of the place written by its inhabitants. Such folk were used to the quaintly frenchified cries of “Gardieloo!” (a Scots version of Gardez l’eau!—“Watch out for the water!”) shouted by residents of tall “lands,” or tenements, as they emptied the contents of their chamber pots from an upper storey onto the roadway below. When Robert Fergusson (1750–1774) wrote the greatest of all Edinburgh poems, “Auld Reikie” (1773), he was, like Maitland, singing the glories of the place:
3. Arthur’s Seat (an extinct volcano) and the cliffs of Salisbury Crags dominate the Edinburgh skyline in this view from the New Town’s Princes Street, looking over Waverley railway station towards some of the spires and tenements of the Old Town. In the eighteenth century, residents of the Old Town would yell “Gardieloo!” (“Watch out for the water!”) as they flung the contents of chamber pots from upper-storey windows.
AULD REIKIE, wale o’ ilka town best of every
That Scotland kens beneath the moon! knows
But Fergusson soon moves on to calling attention to the “morning smells” unleashed by vigorous housemaids who, with an “inundation” as big as eighteenth-century Edinburgh’s central lake, the North Loch, emptied their chamber pots brimming with what the poet euphemistically terms “Edina’s roses”—“To quicken and regale our noses.”
True to the spirit of the often bookish rivalry between the two cities, Fergusson’s blazoning of Auld Reikie’s glories and stink called forth a rival Glaswegian poetic production a decade later. Writing three years before Robert Burns published his first book, John Mayne begins his “Glasgow” with an opening whose “ilka thing” parallels Fergusson’s “ilka town” and so seems like a sly, competitive wink towards “Auld Reikie”:
Hail, GLASGOW! Fam’d for ilka thing
That heart can wish or siller bring . . . silver
Mayne’s poem uses “Standard Habbie,” a stanza form different from the one Fergusson used in “Auld Reikie.” But Standard Habbie (which some later called the Burns Stanza) was then often associated with the Edinburgh poets Allan Ramsay and Fergusson; so in form as well as content the work can be read as asserting Glasgow’s importance in the face of Edinburgh’s cultural productions. In addition to its rotting housing stock, Edinburgh may have had its own decaying monarchical palace, but in Glasgow, Mayne insists, “the houses here / Like royal palaces appear.” In the western city, “bus’ness is brisk” and the arts are flourishing “wi’ gowd [gold] galore.” Alert to the value of his city’s situation on the “bon[n]y Clyde,” Mayne knows and celebrates with a Scots accent the source of Glasgow’s prosperity; he offers a vignette in which traders with the British Empire’s colonies and former colonies parade at the start of a town-centre afternoon at Glasgow Cross:
’Tween ane and twa, wi’ gawsy air, one and two; handsome
The MERCHANTS to the Cross repair;
And tho’ they shine like Nabobs there,
Yet, weil I wat, well I know
Commerce engages a’ their care,
And a’ their chat:
Thir wylie birkies trade to a’ These wily men
The Indies and America . . .
Transatlantic trade had made Glasgow great, even though commerce had been damaged by the recent “American War.” The city’s traditional motto—“Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the Word”—was later abbreviated to simply “Let Glasgow flourish.” The place certainly flourished commercially, and the arrival of manufacturing associated with the Industrial Revolution (a development to which Glasgow-based men such as Adam Smith and James Watt contributed much) enhanced the city’s growth and standing. Edinburgh (“not a manufacturing town,” as Robert Forsyth put it in 1805) scarcely invested in heavy industry; Glasgow did so with a vengeance. Glaswegians were keen to protect their commercial interests, and eager to ward off any economic challenges from Edinburgh and its hinterland. Hugo Arnot’s 1779 History of Edinburgh had complained, for instance, that although there were “four sugar-houses on the east coast of Scotland,” including one in Edinburgh and another in Leith, “these, at present, are mostly supplied from Glasgow.” Arnot’s use of the phrase “at present” was carefully judged; he argued that, in future, Edinburgh’s port should compete more vigorously for trade with the West Indies, so that sugar could come as direct “consignments to the port of Leith.”
Such Edinburgh efforts to curb or compete with Glaswegian enterprise were not appreciated in the west. Just three years after Mayne’s poem praising the way “A’ hands in GLASGOW find employ,” the Town Clerk of Glasgow helped to arrange for the publication “in the Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers” of resolutions designed to fend off a perceived threat from landholders in the area around Edinburgh known as the Lothians. These men of the east sought to alter laws governing the importation of meal and grain into Scotland in ways that the Glaswegians regarded as a challenge. First of all, Glasgow’s merchants resolved that “manufacturing” depended on stable, affordable food prices.
Secondly, That the method proposed at a meeting of some Landed Gentlemen, lately held at Edinburgh, as the standard for opening and shutting the ports, would tend to advance the price of grain in this and the neighbouring Western Counties.
Thirdly, That it is well known the price of meal in Glasgow and its neighbourhood, is always higher than in the Lothians; and if the price of meal and grain in these counties is to be the standard for opening and shutting the ports in Scotland, this great manufacturing district, which, even in plentiful seasons, requires importation from other counties, can never expect to see the medium price of meal as low as it has heretofore been.
Glasgow guarded its commercial assets, determined to fuel its strength as a manufacturing and trading centre. Often this led to east-west disputes. The 1790 opening of the Forth and Clyde Canal, which allowed vessels to cross Scotland for the first time, marked the culmination of a scheme that had been envisaged more than a century earlier and that had led to tension between the two cities. Proposals drawn up in the 1760s by engineer John Smeaton had outraged Glasgow entrepreneurs because Smeaton planned for the canal to bypass their city entirely. Edinburgh worthies had scorned Glaswegian counter-proposals for reducing the projected waterway to “a ditch” or “a mere puddle,” and insisted that “the fools of the West must wait for the Wise Men of the East.” Further wrangling had followed. If the canal’s opening created a physical link between Glasgow and Edinburgh, arguments over its route and specification also intensified the mutual wariness between these traditional competitors.
The rivalry took in commerce and engineering, but flourished especially in the written word and the field of culture. In his posthumously published Autobiography, Edinburgh-connected Alexander Carlyle, who had studied in 1740s Glasgow, wrote that the west-coast city was “far behind” in “taste.” Brought up in a zone of “warerooms” and “trade,” its females, he claimed, were “entirely without accomplishments,” since “there was neither a teacher of French nor of music in the town.” Glasgow, for this east-coast writer, could be summed up in the phrase “coarse and vulgar”—a snooty Edinburgh perception of the place which has not entirely vanished today. To many in nineteenth-century Edinburgh, Glasgow seemed anxiously provincial. The Scottish capital’s literary lion, Walter Scott, wrote about “St. Mungo’s favourite city” briefly in his 1818 novel, Rob Roy, giving a warmhearted portrait of a fictional Glaswegian civic “dignitary,” the sagacious Bailie Nicol Jarvie, who is first introduced as “breathless with peevish impatience.” From Edinburgh’s point of view, Glaswegians could appear not just peevish but nervously full of themselves. In the early 1800s, Glasgow-educated, Edinburgh-domiciled Robert Forsyth contended that this attitude stemmed from a yearning for status:
As the rise of Glasgow has been very rapid, its inhabitants have not yet entirely lost the sentiment usually found among those who reside in small towns, of a great fondness for their own town, and a patriotic zeal for its respectability, and for the fame of whatever is connected with it. Hence the people of Glasgow seem much more anxious than those of the more ancient city of Edinburgh, to exhibit to strangers their public buildings and the beauties of their city, and are much more anxious that it should obtain applause.
Some Glaswegians still exhibit such zeal—and Edinburgh continues to respond with an amusedly superior silence.
As the eighteenth century ended and the nineteenth began, the nature of each municipality and its self-perception subtly altered, further emphasizing differences. The building of Edinburgh’s New Town reinforced the capital’s sense of itself as Scotland’s metropolis; the speedy growth of Glasgow’s population (66,000 by 1791) made it one of the most rapidly expanding cities in Britain, adding to a pride in its own energy. Yet the development of cotton mills and (thanks to James Watt) steam-powered industrial manufactories, as well as chemical plants like the vast Tennant’s St. Rollox bleach-works, which employed more than a thousand people and was considered the largest concern of its kind in the world by the 1830s—all these changed Glasgow from the idyllic area noted by earlier travelers into something altogether darker.
At one point in the nineteenth century, Glasgow could claim to be Europe’s fourth-largest city; its population growth, which eventually peaked at a little over a million, was phenomenal. In 1834, out of Scotland’s 134 cotton factories, almost all were within a twenty-five-mile radius of the city centre. It is conventional to demonstrate the changes in the urban environment through statistical tables and sociological accounts, but relatively early the metamorphosis of the place was registered shrewdly by local writers of verse. In his 1824 “Verses Composed While Walking on Gadshill, on the North Side of Glasgow,” William Harriston was excited to see that
By Glasgow’s enterprising race,
Changes daily still take place,
Where late were fields and gardens green,
Lofty tenements are seen.
But as Harriston also noted,
Chemistry proficient here
New triumphs wins from year to year—
Here funnels of majestic size,
Ascend, and mingle with the skies,
Tow’ring like spires of pop’lous town,
Of metropolitan renown;
They vent the smoke aloft in air,
For passing clouds away to bear . . .
Reaching a height of more than 460 feet, the tallest tower of the St. Rollox works, nicknamed “Tennant’s Stalk,” was erected in 1842—the highest chimney on earth. Yet decades earlier, other Glaswegians had been quite aware that not all of their city’s pollution was being borne away on “passing clouds.” The Romantic poet Thomas Campbell was born in Glasgow in 1777; by the time he reached the age of fifty, he was anxiously writing his “Lines on Revisiting a Scottish River.” He began with a telling question:
And call they this Improvement?—to have changed,
My native Clyde, thy once romantic shore,
Where Nature’s face is banish’d and estranged,
And heaven reflected in thy wave no more;
Whose banks, that sweeten’d May-day’s breath before,
Lie sere and leafless now in summer’s beam,
With sooty exhalations cover’d o’er;
And for the daisied green-sward, down thy stream
Unsightly brick-lanes smoke, and clanking engines gleam.
Glasgow is one of the first cities in the world to beget a poetry of industrial pollution. There is even an 1842 poem by John Mitchell written in Standard Habbie and spoken in the voice of the city’s newest northern chimney, or lum: “St. Rollox Lum’s Address to Its Brethren.” In a contemporary engraving of the great lum of the St. Rollox Works, a further eighteen chimneys are visible in the background. This “PREMIER LUM” may boast of “how on upper air / I spread my smoke”—but for those working below, the city could take on apocalyptic resonances. James Macfarlan, a working-class Glaswegian pedlar-poet and weaver’s son who died at the age of thirty, wrote in “The Wanderer” of a place of demonic “mighty furnaces,” of “deaf’ning anvils,” and of forges “like great burning cities” amid the urban “thoroughfares of tumult.”
Toiling there the poor boy-poet, grimed, within a dismal den,
Piles the fire, and wields the hammer, jostled on by savage men;
Burns his life to mournful ashes on a thankless hearth of gloom,
For a paltry pittance digging life from out an early tomb.
Resentfully, Macfarlan complained how, destitute, he had written to Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers for help, and had “proceeded to Edinburgh” in search of assistance: “For three successive days did I call at that gentleman’s office, but on no occasion had an answer been left.” Edinburgh had its own poor, and its own social problems, but those of Glasgow were regarded as worse, and even at times as untouchable.
Not just for boy-poets, but for many of its male and female, adult and child inner-city workers as well, Scotland’s western industrial hub was Old Testamentally hellish. Yet its citizens felt pride in the resolution and big-heartedness that, sometimes apparently in spite of itself, the place might produce. This is palpable in a sonnet entitled “Glasgow,” published by Mary Macarthur, widow of a local merchant, in the year that the great St. Rollox chimney was constructed.
I trod thy streets, proud city of the Clyde!
Great mart of commerce! And on every hand
Were sights and sounds to trade alone allied,
Yet fraught with dreams of many a distant land.
Thou art,—as cities from remotest time,
Tyre, Sidon, Babylon, and all have been,—
A very world of wretchedness and crime;
At once rich, poor, magnificent, and mean:
Still, there are human hearts within thy walls,
So purified, so broadly stamped with “Heaven,”
That thou—’tis known on high, what’er befalls—
Not wholly to idolatry art given;
And works of mercy have been done in thee,
That towns and nations might repent to see!
What emerges here alongside the note of piety is something very Glaswegian: a generosity of spirit that comes from shared endurance of an often adverse urban predicament. Other nineteenth-century Glasgow women were more straightforward about the conditions. “Wanted a filter, to filter the Clyde, / After some hundreds of people have died, / Chancing to fall in its poisonous tide,” wrote Marion Bernstein in the 1870s; the river that had once been an emblem of the city’s beauty now epitomized Glasgow as a place of industrial filth. An 1842 report by Edwin Chadwick considered the city “possibly the filthiest and unhealthiest of all the British towns.” A popular soubriquet—“Workshop of the World”—asserted local industrial eminence but glossed over the darker side of things. Another phrase, much prized by Victorian Glaswegians and still uttered today, was “second city of the Empire.” This formulation acknowledged the commercial and heavy-industrial strengths of Glasgow in a way that let it leapfrog over Edinburgh: the first city of the British Empire was patently London; then came Glasgow, Birmingham, and other manufacturing giants, with Edinburgh lagging far behind. Yet the Glasgow which had been seen in the eighteenth century by John McUre as Scotland’s “chief Town in the Kingdom next to Edinburgh” was fated to exchange its Scottish second place only for another (albeit greater) status as the imperial number two.
4. The cupola of Holmwood House, designed by Alexander Thomson in the late 1850s, is an arresting emblem of the Victorian wealth of Glasgow, known in those days as the “second city of the Empire.” Above this spacious villa’s main staircase, the cupola is supported by sculpted chimeræ. Its curved glass is etched with stars, but its paintwork is troubled by damp.
For the Victorian poet Alexander Smith, who worked at various times in both cities, the differences were extreme. Smith’s “Glasgow” sees its urban subject in terms of “the tragic heart of towns”; here is a zone of apocalyptic “Terror! Dream!” where “Black Labour draws his weary waves” and where the person who dwells “within a gloomy court, / Wherein did never sunbeam sport” longs to escape to the beautiful surrounding countryside. Smith finds in Glasgow a new kind of impressiveness: “In thee, O City! I discern / Another beauty, sad and stern.” Yet the speaker of his poem also urges on this place’s enormous energy and seems to feel for Glasgow familial love, as well as awestruck fascination:
Draw thy fierce streams of blinding ore,
Smite on a thousand anvils, roar
Down to the harbour-bars;
Smoulder in smoky sunsets, flare
On rainy nights, with street and square
Lie empty to the stars.
From terrace proud to alley base
I know thee as my mother’s face.
Smith did know Glasgow well, but Edinburgh (where he later worked as Secretary to the University) was gloriously exotic. If his western city is invariably “smoky” and even hellish in aspect, throughout his poem “Edinburgh” the Scottish capital is glimpsed “high in heaven”; Smith is struck by the east-coast city’s unpolluted “mistless firmament.” This urban landscape shines rather than smoulders: “Thou hangest, like a Cyclops’ dream, / High in the shifting weather-gleam.”
In the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid, a poet with no great love of either Glasgow or Edinburgh, would rewrite Smith’s line as “Edinburgh is a mad God’s dream”; but the Victorian Smith, from the west of Scotland, delights in orientalizing Edinburgh as “a very Persian tale,” a marvellous hallucination: “Mirza’s vision, Bagdad’s vale.” In this Scottish capital, the recently erected Scott monument still “gleams,” not yet blackened by smoke from the nearby railway; the delicate, fair “Great City” calls to mind “Venice, ’neath her mellow moons,” and, like Venice, is a tourist venue saturated with the allure of its own history:
Within thy high-piled Canongate
The air is of another date;
All speaks of ancient time:
Traces of gardens, dials, wells,
Thy dizzy gables, oyster-shells
Imbedded in the lime—
Thy shields above the doors of peers
Are old as Mary Stuart’s tears.
Smith’s Edinburgh is a wonderful museum of itself; his Glasgow, a working industrial city. This contrast perceived by a poet of both places was true to the self-image of each. It hints, too, at ways in which Edinburgh (not just Glasgow) had had to reconcile itself to coming second.
No more the capital of an independent country, and no longer even a great city of the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century Edinburgh increasingly mined its own past. Walter Scott, its greatest writer, showed it how to do so. In fictions like The Heart of Midlothian and Chronicles of the Canongate, or in his antiquarian researches (such as his discovery of Scotland’s ancient crown regalia, hidden in Edinburgh Castle), he rebranded history for eager consumer culture and Romantic æsthetic taste. Soon the magnificently inventive Scott became, himself, a monumental part of Edinburgh’s cityscape; and in the decades that followed his death, the Scottish capital made itself a great polis of museums—the National Museum of Scotland, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Edinburgh—all of which helped to enhance its national significance, but also increased the sense that it was a city averting its eyes from the here and now. Whatever else, Glasgow was very much a site of the heavy-industrial and commercial Victorian present. If the Edinburgh of the book you are reading is essentially inflected by its Enlightenment and Romantic cultural inheritance, then this volume’s Glasgow is a city crucially shaped by the Victorian British Empire.
Edinburgh’s soubriquet “the Athens of the North,” first bestowed in 1762 but popularized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, also speaks of pastness. A place of antiquities, Edinburgh might have its own acropolis, its own partially completed replica of the Parthenon, monuments based on smaller Athenian temples, and even, in its Art College, a fine collection of plaster casts of classical sculptures which, developed from the late eighteenth century onwards, remains splendid; yet Edinburgh was Athenian, too, in the sense that it had been surpassed by a more modern imperial metropolis. If the Pax Romana of the ancient world empire had given way to the Pax Britannica of Victorian imperialism, then London was the new Rome. Edinburgh, so proud of its northern memorials and long-gone independent past, liked to claim the sort of relationship with London that perhaps Athens had had with the capital of the Roman Empire. Like ancient Athens, Edinburgh prided itself on its intellectual nimbleness. Calculating that in 1805 it contained as many as 3,000 lawyers and 1,500 academics, Robert Forsyth maintained that there was “probably no city in the world of the same extent in which so great a proportion of the inhabitants consist of well-informed persons.” Glasgow’s professional class was much smaller: by 1883 it made up just 4 percent of the Glaswegian workforce, whereas the comparable figure for Edinburgh was 12 percent. The east-coast “modern Athens” rightly thought well of itself as a city of the mind, but increasingly what once-great Edinburgh possessed was a kind of secondary, already historical allure; it could not claim to be the second city of the modern empire, but could assert the distinctiveness of its lost independent heritage. Edinburgh never called itself a “second city”—it left that to Glasgow—but its status as “Athens of the North” announced it not just as second to the Athens of Greece, but also more subtly as a cultural centre of curious and noble antiquity now rendered politically redundant by modern imperial London.
In addition to an eighteenth-century canal, a nineteenth-century railway linked Scotland’s two Victorian second cities. Opened in 1842, this railway came with its own published Guide hymning “the extensive and rapidly increasing intercourse between Edinburgh and Glasgow, and their intimate commercial and social relations.” Valiantly, even breathlessly, the Guide set forth the splendours of both places, and of everywhere in between. Edinburgh was given the first twenty-five pages of descriptive coverage, which were headed by an epigraph from the national bard, Robert Burns, and emphasized the importance of the city: “As the metropolis and principal seat of the legislative and executive estates of the kingdom, it appears to have enjoyed an eminent celebrity from an early period of our national history.” At the far end of the line, Glasgow came last and was afforded nineteen pages, which were headed by an epigraph from someone called Bell (who?) and explained: “Glasgow derives her principal claims to high consideration among the cities of the British Kingdoms, from the extent and enterprise exhibited in the manufacturing and commercial undertakings which are conducted by her adventurous sons.” This was the railway Guide’s way of saying what Alexander Smith would put more magniloquently in verse. Soon, and predictably, the railways, rather than simply increasing “intercourse” between Glasgow and Edinburgh, provided a new outlet for their mutual competition. Rivalry developed between the Caledonian Railway Company, which used Glasgow as a hub, and the North British Railway Company, which ran trains from Edinburgh to Carlisle. As each company tried to muscle in on what was perceived as the other’s territory, their jousting led to some of the greatest engineering projects of the age, culminating in the construction of the Forth Rail Bridge during the years 1883–1890.
By then, resurgent Glasgow-Edinburgh rivalry had spread to the sports field, but not in quite the way modern observers might expect. Historically, sports in each city have always been numerous—from the inner-city bowling greens of an eighteenth-century Edinburgh, where a fencing teacher called Machrie extolled the glories of “cocking” (cockfighting), to the 1930s, when Glasgow boasted 131 tennis courts, nine cricket grounds, and seventeen hockey pitches. Scotland claims to be the birthplace of golf, and in recent times Scots have excelled at cycling, curling, and tennis. Yet, perversely, many of today’s Scots assume that the great national game is soccer, a sport whose familiar modern, fast-flowing style of play may have been pioneered in the later nineteenth century at Glasgow’s Cathkin Park by Queen’s Park Football Club (founded just outside the city in 1867), but in which Scotland has shown little international distinction within living memory. Cheered on with good humour and patriotic fervour, the national football team has never won a World Cup, and no Scots have snatched the European Cup for almost half a century. Though Edinburgh and Glasgow each have several soccer teams, by far the most famous are Glasgow’s Rangers (founded in 1872 and placed in financial liquidation in 2012) and Celtic (founded 1888); from their beginnings, as the twenty-first-century historian of Glasgow, Irene Maver, puts it, “As a large percentage of their revenues came from playing each other, it came to be realized that there was commercial potential in exploiting religious and ethnic differences, with Rangers representing an assertive “true-blue” brand of Scottish Protestantism and Celtic the Catholic Irish.” To this day, these clubs (collectively known as “the Old Firm”) and people claiming to support them are often associated with sometimes violent Protestant-Catholic sectarianism; unwary visitors to Glasgow might be wise to avoid their sometimes toxic rivalry. As well as giving rise to brutal high passions (domestic violence in Glasgow escalates markedly after Old Firm matches) and even to sectarian murders, football in Glasgow has had other tragedies. At Ibrox Stadium, home ground of Rangers, a stairway collapsed on January 2, 1971, killing and injuring many supporters. Edinburgh football, in comparison—even the ongoing struggle between long-term rivals Heart of Midlothian (“Hearts”) and Hibernian (“Hibs”)—is a tamer, sometimes lamer, affair.
Fortunately the internecine sectarian rivalries often visible around Glaswegian soccer, in a city which struggled ineptly and sometimes vitriolically to come to terms with substantial nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish Catholic immigration, did not infect the older rivalry between Glasgow and Edinburgh when it first progressed to the sports field. On November 23, 1872, in “miserable weather” on a West-of-Scotland winter Saturday, the first “inter-city football match” between Glasgow and Edinburgh took place. The “football” was rugby football, rather than the soccer which later came to be the most eagerly followed sport in both cities. The Glasgow Herald, which thought the contest “truly splendid,” registered something of the excitement with which the game was greeted, and managed to be magnanimous in declaring “the Edinburgh team the winners of one of the best matches we have ever seen played.” From the Edinburgh end, the Scotsman, used to sunnier east-coast climes, rather relished making much of the Glaswegian “heavy rain falling during the morning, and continuing at intervals all day, several drenching showers descending during the progress of the game,” covering in mud the Glasgow players’ “snow-white jerseys.” Teams still compete for the 1872 Challenge Cup in the twenty-first century. Edinburgh boasts the national rugby stadium, at Murrayfield; and Glasgow, the national soccer arena, at Hampden Park. Today’s Challenge Cup players comment that “there is rivalry between the two teams because of the history of the fixture, but there is also rivalry between the cities on the whole as far as any sport is concerned.”
For all that its origins lay in the eighteenth century, by the later Victorian era that rivalry was a subject of international attention—and sometimes slightly patronizing amusement. Reprinting a piece from the London Times on September 18, 1881, the New York Times regaled its readers with an account entitled “Edinburgh and Glasgow, Wherein and How Widely the Two Scotch Capitals Differ.” The ordering of the names here may be significant, but more shocking is the designation of Glasgow as a western “capital” to match Edinburgh—seen here as “capital” only of the east. No one in Edinburgh would dream of calling Glasgow a “capital.” Regarding Edinburgh as having grown from “feudalism,” but Glasgow as having prospered through “trade,” the anonymous 1881 writer enables readers to discern fairly easily where his sympathies lie; equally revealing is the way he takes it for granted that “there has always been a rivalry between the neighbors.” In this piece, Glaswegians, characterized by their city’s “riches, energy, and liberality,” seem the people of the present and future: “While spending their gains freely, they have never been addicted to show: they have lived within their means, and laid money by, and so they are likely to go on flourishing.” Damned with faint praise, Edinburgh people, on the other hand, are a bunch of the “eminently steady and respectable”—lawyers, professors, doctors, and clergy; “there are no colossal fortunes and few really wealthy men.” This sounds like a city ever so genteelly on the slide. “Scotch people, like Swiss and Savoyards, love to end their days in the land of their birth; but those who have been exceptionally fortunate seldom care to settle in Edinburgh.” A city sometimes berated for its macho values, Glasgow comes over as modern, even in terms of gender; Edinburgh, with its retired Scottish civil servants from British-Empire India and its struggling widows, seems bound to the polite past. “In Glasgow it is nothing unusual to see the door of an imposing mansion opened by a trim maiden. In Edinburgh one man, at least, in decorous black appears to be insisted on as a voucher of respectability.”
If a North American audience was expected to smile at the rivalry and divergence between the two cities, in Scotland itself those differences intensified, permeating diverse areas of life. Stereotypically, Glasgow has gone on being regarded as more vulgar than Edinburgh, but in terms of coarseness it would be hard to beat the epithet of the eighteenth-century Edinburgh legal grandee Lord Kames when he bade his last adieu to his judicial colleagues: “Fare ye a’ weel, ye bitches.” Glasgow’s supposed vulgarity can emerge as radical artistic vitality, a spirited challenge to the status quo. So, for instance, in the late nineteenth century the generally conservative artists of the Edinburgh-based Royal Scottish Academy regarded with some scorn painters who were unprepared to work in the capital—particularly, upstart artists from Glasgow. Attracted to modern French plein-air landscapes, a group of younger Glasgow artists mocked their staid Royal Scottish Academy antagonists in Edinburgh, bestowing on them, and on the West-of-Scotland artists who respected them, the nickname “Gluepots” because of the way they attempted to give their works a spurious patina of age by applying a thick “megilp” varnish. Though locally a few people denounced them as “a coterie of self-idolaters,” the ambitious, unapologetic young “Glasgow Boys” achieved international success, exhibiting in cities ranging from Munich and Paris (where they were described as “making art history”) to St. Louis and Philadelphia. Their bold brushwork and sense of light also appealed in London, where their work seemed closer to Impressionist painting than to the much more conventional pictures associated with Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy.
Some found it hard to understand how such work could emanate from artists linked to Scotland’s grimiest and reputedly coarsest industrial city. English writer Israel Zangwill suggested in 1896 that “Glasgow is all glorious within and its inner artistic aspirations make up for and are perhaps inspired by its outer unloveliness.” Admittedly, and perhaps revealingly, few landscapes by the commercially and artistically successful Glasgow Boys picture Glasgow itself; most are of rural scenes. Exceptions are John Lavery’s series of oils portraying fashionable society at the 1888 Glasgow International Exhibition, and his elegantly contemporary canvas (now in Aberdeen Art Gallery) depicting a middle-class tennis party on the grounds of a wealthy solicitor’s house in the Glasgow suburb of Cathcart. Such scenes have dash, poise, and energy; they give the lie to reductive attempts to define Glasgow simply through a perceived coarseness or “unloveliness.”
Trade had made this western city at once parochially proud and internationally minded—not a bad combination. Mercantile links to America went back to the seventeenth century; connections with Japan prospered in the second half of the nineteenth. Admirers alike of Japanese prints and of the art of James McNeill Whistler, the Glasgow Boys helped persuade Glasgow Corporation to become the first public collector to buy a painting by that American artist, who later arranged for some of his best work to find a permanent home in the city. Two Glasgow Boys, Edward A. Hornel and George Henry, were financed by local shipping magnate William Burrell and art dealer Alexander Reid to make a fruitful 1894 painting tour of Japan, even if the Glasgow Herald, complained: “Why Mr. Hornel should seek inspiration in Yokohama or its neighbourhood we are at a loss to understand.” Pictures such as Hornel’s adventurously coloured canvas The Balcony, Yokohama (now in the Yale Center for British Art) or Henry’s exquisite Japanese Lady with a Fan (painted in Tokyo in 1894 and now in the Glasgow Art Gallery at Kelvingrove) are among the Boys’ more surprising triumphs, and are fascinating to contemplate alongside the uncharacteristically industrial mural Shipbuilding on the Clyde, painted by Lavery on the wall of the Banqueting Hall of Glasgow City Chambers—a picture which shows in detail the construction of a warship for the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Such was the international fame and appeal of the Boys that even the place they called the “Edinburgh Academy” could not resist them forever, however hard it might try. When the Academy’s new president pontificated in February 1892 at the Glasgow School of Art, apparently speaking dismissively of Impressionism as “an ‘ism’ with a devoted band of followers in Glasgow,” the visitor from Edinburgh was pilloried in the “Letters” columns of the Herald for having “sneered at Glasgow art.” His having come to “cosmopolitan Glasgow” to “speak words of wisdom to the West” was particularly resented: “The West has developed its art independently of the Academy’s power to fetter or to blight, for Glasgow enterprise, without an Academy, has grown its new notable ‘Glasgow school,’ which is recognized throughout the art world—a thing that the chartered Academy has not yet been able to do for its parish.”
Ever prickly about its east-coast rival, this confidently cosmopolitan Glasgow was the city that produced the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the designer Margaret Macdonald. At times, it seems to have enjoyed asserting its own fierce local pride by implying that Edinburgh and Edinburgh’s supposedly national institutions were in fact rather more provincial in outlook. As the nineteenth century passed into the twentieth, there was indeed some truth in this. Though from 1885 Edinburgh had hosted the Scottish Office, an outpost of the British Civil Service tasked from London with the job of administering Scottish affairs, the Scottish capital could strike visitors as oddly powerless and spectral. Convalescing there during World War I, the English poet Wilfred Owen noticed in Princes Street not so much the Castle or the Scott Monument as a newspaper seller standing in the gutter, a “pale rain-flawed phantom of the place.” Orkney-born Edwin Muir, who saw Glasgow as a hell on earth, regarded Scotland in the 1930s as having at its heart “a blank, an Edinburgh.” This was the early twentieth-century capital which nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid regarded simply as “too stupid yet / To learn how not to stand in her own light.”
Edinburgh’s age of Enlightenment glory was now long gone. For all that it was not nearly as hard hit by the Great Depression as industrial Glasgow (many of whose shipyards stopped all production), drab, underpowered Edinburgh nonetheless seemed fated to be depressed. Its careful but restrictive Presbyterian prudence made it the city that Scotland’s greatest twentieth-century novelist, Muriel Spark, simply had to get out of. She wrote of it with devoted attention in her autobiographical Curriculum Vitæ and in her celebrated novella set during the 1930s, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; but it became for her the place, as she put it, “that I, a constitutional exile, am essentially exiled from.”
Arguably, what saved Edinburgh was high culture—but not, on the whole, its own. The coming of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 was part of a postwar British effort to rebuild political bridges through the arts, and to counter the lingering austerities of World War II rationing. A picturesque historic city, Scotland’s capital was selected as a suitable British venue for a cultural jamboree; perhaps it could even become a Salzburg. First dreamed up by the director of the British Council in Scotland, Harry Harvey Wood, the ambitious festival of high art—opera, symphonic music, drama, ballet—brought fresh cosmopolitanism and vigour. Rightly complaining that the Festival eschewed Scotland’s own greatest art forms, such as poetry and traditional song, local writers, artists, and others set up rival events which can be seen as ancestors of today’s Festival Fringe. Though the early mélange of official and unofficial events sometimes evolved uneasily, it grew into a triumph. Held each August and September, the Edinburgh International Festival and its Fringe now constitute the world’s largest, most successful arts festival. There are satellite festivals, too—from the International Book Festival (again, the biggest of its kind) to the annual “Edinburgh’s Hogmanay” celebrations, billed as “the World’s Best New Year Party.” Today most outsiders regard Edinburgh, rather than Glasgow, as Scotland’s cosmopolitan city of art. In the twenty-first century, it is the people of the east-coast city and the surrounding area who buy more than half of the Festival’s tickets. Yet in the earlier decades of the 1900s, no one would have thought of the modern capital of Scotland in terms of global festivity. In the city itself, until relatively recently, there was an assumption that all this cultural splash was mainly put on for visitors. At Festival time, locals departed on holiday (perhaps renting out their apartments to tourists), or simply went off by themselves to hide in what Wilfred Owen had once termed “their quiet home.”
A sense of the subdued, rather downtrodden city that persisted even during the early decades of the Festival can be gleaned from Sylvain Chomet’s 2010 animated film L’Illusionniste, an extended cinematic love letter to Edinburgh. Set in a 1950s milieu of dark buildings whose grimy, uncleaned sandstone seems to invite louring skies and rain, this modern classic of cinematography draws on the Gallic legacy of Jacques Tati as it tracks the progress of a fading music-hall performer around the Scottish capital, featuring depictions of famous buildings as well as visually stunning panoramas. Touching, beautiful, and amusing, L’Illusionniste offers many glimpses of still utterly recognizable landmarks, but its loveable Edinburgh is quirky, small-town, provincial—at quite the other end of the spectrum from the city of the glitzy International Festival.
One can only imagine the effect that the success of that Festival over many decades has had on Glaswegians. They have hit back with smaller-scale and distinctive carnivals of their own, from the popular “Celtic Connections” music extravaganza to “Glasgay,” a celebration of gay and lesbian arts, and the “Aye Write!” festival of literature. Some may take solace from the realization that to this day no song about Edinburgh is as well known as a composition by the early twentieth-century music-hall artiste Will Fyffe—a lyric of benign Sauchiehall Street intoxication entitled “I Belong to Glasgow.” More controversial (in Glasgow because it was boycotted by some local writers and artists, in Edinburgh simply because it seemed so astonishing) was the selection of Glasgow in 1990 as European City of Culture. This followed hot on the heels of a clever advertising campaign that deployed a smiling “Mr. Happy” logo and proclaimed from 1983 onwards, “Glasgow’s Miles Better” (the words “than unsmiling Edinburgh” were never included), and that was part of a strong strategy for what planners term “culture-led urban regeneration.”
Yet at the start of a decade when unemployment hit 30 percent in some of the city’s surrounding housing estates and almost 40 percent in the central district, and when nearly 30 percent of Glasgow’s social housing (the largest such concentration in western Europe) suffered problems with damp, the 1990 designation “European City of Culture” seemed to some a bad joke. Ironically, this title owed not a little to the prominence of Glaswegian novelists, who soon resisted being co-opted by what they saw as a public-relations exercise. In Lanark (1981) and in a series of fictions beginning with The Busconductor Hines (1984), Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, respectively, gave Glasgow its most convincing (usually male and bleak) fictional voices. Each of these very different authors writes of working-class urban culture in ways perhaps more attuned to American than to English literary sensibilities. In Gray’s 1977 ink, watercolour, acrylic, and oil portrait of Kelman, the books on the bookshelves behind the writer include texts by Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, and Henry Miller: works which have mattered to both of these authors and which signal a re-energized cosmopolitan sophistication in west-coast Scottish writing. Stylistically, Gray’s imaginative use of Glasgow itself and Kelman’s fusing of the narrative voice with the speech of his largely working-class characters have been influential for a younger generation of fiction writers including, at times, the Glasgow-based Janice Galloway and A. L. Kennedy, as well as the Edinburgh novelist Irvine Welsh. Welsh, the most commercially successful of these, has certainly learned from Glasgow writing, though much of his work lacks the strong ethical and political commitment of Gray, Kelman, Galloway, and Kennedy. Simply because of the story’s gritty subject, people sometimes mistakenly assume that the internationally acclaimed film of Welsh’s distinctively Edinburgh-centred, heroin-fuelled Trainspotting must be set in the badlands of Glasgow.
Occasionally trying on each other’s artistic clothes, Glasgow and Edinburgh continue to be markedly different, as well as mutually competitive. Their personalities are still part of their street life, and insistently seep into print. Among recent nonfiction books that best give a flavour of these cities are Alasdair Gray’s A Life in Pictures and the Edinburgh parts of Candia McWilliam’s memoir, What to Look for in Winter. If Glasgow writing has tended to win most of the artistic plaudits over the past few decades, Edinburgh fiction has enjoyed the greater popular success. From J. K. Rowling to Alexander McCall Smith, authors based in the Scottish capital have become international celebrities. Though individual writers may eschew the old Glasgow-Edinburgh rivalry, their cities have hardly done so. No sooner, it seems, had the twenty-first-century capital been designated UNESCO’s first City of Literature than Glasgow followed up a few years later by bagging the title UNESCO City of Music. Glaswegians, after carving motorways brutally through parts of their downtown area in the 1970s and securing money to upgrade their much-loved underground railway system (the world’s third-oldest), have taken quiet pleasure in the recent utter mess that Edinburgh has made of trying to re-install an inner-city tram line.
Central Edinburgh, the Edinburgh dealt with in this book, can seem something of a splendid stage set, even a museum exhibit. In a city of grand, often riverless bridges, some historic streets are windswept in their elevation, others oddly and fascinatingly sunken; among the latter, the sixteenth-century Mary King’s Close (whose remains now lie beneath the Royal Mile’s City Chambers) has a haunted, museum-like stillness. “It is hard to think of another British city that has changed so little,” writes its twenty-first-century historian Michael Fry. In this, as in so much else, Glasgow might seem Edinburgh’s antithesis: areas of central Glasgow—near the north end of the Kingston Bridge, for instance, or down by the Science Centre—are almost completely and exuberantly of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is now nearly a hundred years since the great tower of the St. Rollox complex was demolished in 1916, and a long time even since the young Alasdair Gray was fascinated by the site of the derelict north-Glasgow chemical works nicknamed by locals “the Stinky Ocean.” Though there remains shipbuilding on the Clyde, and there is still some manufacturing, Glasgow was traumatized by the loss of its heavy industry and by social problems so persistent that some might wonder why anyone would want to visit Edinburgh’s western rival. Glasgow has a significantly higher murder rate, more acute addiction problems, lower life expectancy, one of the world’s highest obesity rates, and a lot more unemployment. Yet, for all its history of social inequality, Glasgow retains a sense of protean energy, and I have never met anyone (including people from Edinburgh) who did not assert that it was the friendlier of the two cities, or who failed to be impressed by its architectural and artistic treasures. “Edinburgh,” the New Yorker essayist Alastair Reid once wrote, “seems too leisurely to be a proper city.” No one would write that about Glasgow.
Overall, Glasgow has managed the often painful metamorphosis from a past dominated by heavy industry to a largely postindustrial present more successfully than almost any other comparable city in the world. Vast tracts of Detroit and areas such as Highland Park in Michigan have become venues for urban “ruin porn”; but in the one-time Scottish capital of heavy industry, iconic modern buildings such as the strikingly carapaced Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre have given the city a confident new identity—and, despite the serious social problems that it continues to wrestle with, a sense of continuing prosperity. For Glasgow, much of the twentieth century involved painful and momentous metamorphosis. In Edinburgh, with the exception of the coming of the Festival and the university’s construction in the George Square area of what Michael Fry denounces as “a concrete desert of dreary, shabby buildings from an era at the nadir of British architecture,” it would be easy to think that relatively little had happened. Glasgow, the Glaswegians’ narrative might claim, adjusted to modernity and even fell too much in love with modernist ideas of redevelopment, boldly punctuating its skyline with high-rise buildings; Edinburgh dreamed through its Festival and slept.
Yet Glasgow—which has since razed several of its tower blocks with characteristically “gallus” (bold) vigour—has no monopoly on stories of change. For the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first was also the era when Edinburgh, apparently against the odds, became once again the seat of a Scottish Parliament. In its historic heart it built a confident new legislative building—the most stunning contemporary architectural statement in the nation. Edinburgh started awake, proud of its past, and suddenly realized that it was part of a country ready to look to the future. Today it is the capital city, playing host to a pro-independence Scottish government, which seems linked to ideas of major political change; while Glasgow, more politically conservative (with a small c), saw little alteration in the complexion of its Labour-dominated socialist municipal politics for more than half a century. Only in the Scottish parliamentary election of 2011, when the western city elected several representatives committed to Scottish independence, did its politics significantly shift.
During recent times, rebirth has come to these two cities in very different ways. Edinburgh has begun to rediscover what it means to be a capital, albeit one of a still-dependent country. It has lived through the financial woes of 2008, when on October 14 the Scotsman’s front-page headline read simply, “The Downfall of the Scottish Banks,” and a leading article spoke of “catastrophic failure” as the Royal Bank of Scotland and Halifax Bank of Scotland, both headquartered in Edinburgh for centuries, were “forced to collapse into government ownership.” The east-coast city, which had been marketing itself with the slogan “Inspiring Capital” and had relished its status as Britain’s leading financial centre outside London, could only lick its wounds. Glasgow, perhaps more used to traumatic upheavals and always with a fondness for grand-scale, somewhat Stalinist planning, drew breath; eighteen months later, it published proposals to transform itself into one of Europe’s greenest hubs, with schemes ranging from hydro power generation by means of urban canals and rivers to a series of wind farms on brown-field former industrial sites, new trams, a network of urban woodlands, congestion surcharges for motorists, and biogas plants. A senior advisor for climate adaptation at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stated that “the Sustainable Glasgow Initiative is a model for cities around the world.” However, this plan to reduce the city’s carbon emissions by 30 percent by the year 2020 assumes investment from the private sector of almost £1.5 billion, an amount that seems ambitious during an economic recession. Successful in its bid to welcome the 2014 Commonwealth Games (which Edinburgh has already hosted twice in the past half-century), Glasgow has been an ambitious place for hundreds of years, and shows no sign of stopping now. For centuries, too, its (usually undeclared) aspiration has been to live up to one of its traditional soubriquets as “the dear green place”—and to outsmart its sly rival, Edinburgh.
Since 1995, Edinburgh’s Old and New Towns have been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The area’s twenty-first-century assets range from its Parliament to its pandas, the latter presented to the city’s beautifully situated zoo on Corstorphine Hill in 2011 by the People’s Republic of China. Fiercely proud Glasgow may be destined always to be Scotland’s second city, especially now that there is no British Empire to allow it to outflank its nation’s capital. But the rivalry between these urban stalwarts has run for more than three hundred years and shows refreshingly little sign of abating. In Glasgow not long ago I bought a joke book by Ian Black called Weegies vs. Edinbuggers: Why Glasgow Smiles Better than Edinburgh; later the same week I saw in an Edinburgh bookshop Edinbuggers vs. Weegies: Why Edinburgh Is Slightly Superior to Glasgow. It was the same paperback book, which can be turned upside down and reversed to show whichever “front cover” is appropriate to the city in question; revealingly but unsurprisingly, there are almost twice as many Glaswegian jokes about Edinburgh people as there are jokes by “Edinbuggers” about “Weegies.”
An appetite for the jousting between these two cities is ultimately a hunger for life itself. Their prickly, often jokey relationship offers a metaphor for human vitality. Yes, worthy institutions assure us that the two urban centres must collaborate to win more attention, greater investment, and enhanced opportunities in a globalized economy—but that is marketing-speak. Would the world really be so interested in Glasgow and Edinburgh if they merged into one neat corporate alliance? It is in part the centuries-old rivalry, the differences, the splendidly distinct flavoursomeness of these almost-but-never-quite neighbours that constitutes their enduring yet dynamic allure. Edinburgh, say Glaswegians, is all “fur coat and nae [no] knickers”—gorgeous, but suspect. Edinburgh chooses not to reply to that. In both cities, there is the assumption that Glaswegians are rough diamonds whose hospitality, especially to those in need, is legendary; whereas in Edinburgh, folk wisdom has it, at whatever time you arrive on someone’s doorstep you may be welcomed with the words, “You’ll have had your tea”—meaning that the visitor will have already eaten and so the host will not need to provide any nourishment. Such caricatures are unfair, yet far too much fun to jettison. Only people from Edinburgh could dwell in a universe without Glaswegians; only Glaswegians could live on an Edinburgh-less planet. Everyone else may enjoy this pair of stubborn cities; no one can understand Scotland without paying attention to both. I hope this book gives a necessarily partial but nonetheless rich sense of each entity, occasionally winking across at the other. To love these two places feels like bigamy. It is.