Norry Wilson:
Hello, I’m Norry Wilson. Welcome to If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk, a podcast by Glasgow City Heritage Trust about the stories, relationships between historic buildings, and the people of Glasgow. You’ll usually be used to hearing Niall introduce the podcast, but now, for the final episode in series two, we’re doing something a little bit different and I get to turn the tables on Niall to hear his thoughts and opinions about Glasgow, its built heritage, and how it impacts upon the communities that we all live in. So, to get started, Niall, can you tell us a bit about your own journey, how you ended up in Glasgow, and how you have risen to become the Director of the Glasgow City Heritage Trust?
Niall Murphy:
Gosh, that sounds very posh. Okay. Right, how did I wind up here? It’s a long story. So, yeah, I originally come from Hong Kong, so I was born and brought up in Hong Kong in the 1970s, and I absolutely loved living in Hong Kong. It’s a fantastic city. But both my parents came from Scotland, though my mum technically was born in Birmingham, her family are from Leith and Newhaven, in Edinburgh direction, Leith obviously separate from Edinburgh, so you can’t make that mistake.
Norry Wilson:
Always got to remember that.
Niall Murphy:
Whereas my dad comes from Kilmaurs, which is a wee village just outside of Kilmarnock. And so they both wound up in Hong Kong separately and met there and got married there and had a family with my brother and I. And because they were both employed by the Hong Kong government in the 1960s, they were still on colonial contracts. And so they both come from quite lowly backgrounds. My dad’s family were builders and miners in Ayrshire, and my mum’s family, they were involved in ship building on the Firth of Forth, and so that was their background.
So, anyway, as part of your colonial contract, you could send your children to school in the UK, and their thinking at the time, in the mid ’70s, was they were going to be coming back to the UK at some point, and so they thought they would send my brother and I ahead to school in Edinburgh to get us used to it. And so I wound up going to boarding school in Edinburgh, which was a horrible experience and absolutely not me, and got sent when I was nine, and I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy because it was a really horrible experience and it made me terribly homesick.
Norry Wilson:
I’m not surprised.
Niall Murphy:
But it was funny because I found the Edinburgh Botanics and the glass houses in the Botanics, and I used to escape to them because I was really badly bullied at school. So, I used to escape to them and hang out, and I’ve always wondered whether any of the staff in the Botanics thought, “Why is there this 10 year old kid hanging around in the Botanics all the time?” But in the glasshouses, because they were the tropical ones, they were so nice and steamy, it was a nice escape for me.
Norry Wilson:
I suppose it would almost be like being back in Hong Kong temperature wise?
Niall Murphy:
Well, absolutely, it was that. It made me feel at home because it was like the rainforest in Hong Kong. So, it was nice to discover that. But anyway, the good thing about that school was it had a really excellent art department, which you could escape to, and we had a really good set of teachers there who were fantastic. This husband and wife couple, Mark and Lottie Cheverton, who were really lovely, very Christian. And they went on to establish the Leith School of Art in Leith. And very sadly they both died in a car crash when they were very young, but Leith School of Art has kept on going that they set up. And they believed firmly that anyone could draw, and so they were really rigorous in doing this. And you had to do these exercises where basically you weren’t allowed to take your pen or your pencil off-
Norry Wilson:
Off the page.
Niall Murphy:
You had to do the whole thing in a single line. Oh my God, it was so difficult. But that was the discipline of doing it. That really taught me how to draw and how to look. And then the other thing that they did, which I’ve really appreciated in hindsight, was they sent you out to draw en plein air in the city, and so you got to know Edinburgh. And it’s funny, I hated Edinburgh at the time, because I just wanted to be back in Hong Kong and Edinburgh was so not me. And I now look back and realise, oh, my God, I was so spoiled because Edinburgh is such a fantastic city.
So, it was really interesting and that was what taught me to look at cities and begin to appreciate cities. And because I was growing up in Hong Kong and it was such a fantastic city, it’s interesting because I’ve realised now in hindsight in my life that growing up in Hong Kong would’ve been the equivalent of growing up in Victorian Glasgow, because it was going through that same kind of boom. And then what I’ve done is effectively, by travelling back to Scotland, moved forward in time to a post-industrial city from a city that was going from pre-industrial to industrial to a post-industrial city, which has been quite interesting because I can look back and compare the two, with Glasgow being this incredible Victorian boom town.
And so I realised as I was looking at the city evolving, that I was actually really interested in cities and how they evolved. And I was particularly fascinated, Norman Foster’s Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, which was the world’s most expensive building which was being built in Hong Kong when I was in my early teens, and so it was that that that eventually switched me onto architecture. And when you have to apply for schools of architecture, I had all the wrong exam results, but I had a really good portfolio. And so my school were like, “Yeah, you’ll never get in,” and totally discouraged me from doing architecture anywhere. If you weren’t going to be a doctor or a lawyer, they didn’t want to know. And they were like, “Why do you want to be an architect? Architects don’t make any money.” And it was like, yeah, I discovered that later that they were in fact correct.
But anyway, I applied to the Glasgow School of Art and I got in on the strength of my portfolio. And it’s funny, I also had to apply to Edinburgh as well, but if you put Glasgow first, Edinburgh reject you completely. So, I got unconditionals from Glasgow and from Dundee, and I opted for Glasgow because when I came to Glasgow, the Art school was so fantastic, and it was after I left the interview, I was walking down through the city because I didn’t know Glasgow at all, and got to St. Vincent Street and was walking down St. Vincent Street. And the way that St. Vincent Street, the buildings really rise up and it becomes this canyon of stone and all these fantastic facades, and it really reminded me of Causeway Bay in Hong Kong where it’s really densely packed buildings and you’re in a canyon of buildings and I thought, “I could live here. I like this city.”
And it was a bit of a shock to the system coming here. So, the first night I was here, this is 1981, I was with a Singaporean friend who was studying medicine up at the university and we were going to the ABC. So, we’re standing in the queue to get into the ABC on Sauchiehall Street and chatting away, and this guy taps me on my back and says to me, “Where are you from?” And I’m like, “Should I explain the whole Hong Kong bit or do you think that’s probably a bit much?” So, I said, “I’m from Edinburgh.” And he said, “Right, so you’re a snob.” And that was when I realised that whole public school accent I’d picked up by being in Edinburgh for too long had to go, you couldn’t do that in Glasgow.
So, yeah, on the back of that, I began to get to know Glasgow. The good thing about the Mackintosh School of Architecture, which had a really good reputation, not just in Scotland but in the UK and globally at that time because it was headed up by Professor Andy MacMillan.
Norry Wilson:
Who went on to Chicago School of Art. No, it was the guy after Andy MacMillan that went on and headed up the Chicago Institute of Art.
Niall Murphy:
That’s right, yeah. But Andy was a real salt of the earth Glaswegian, and with him, he was quite funny, so he did the introductory lessons when you start in year one and he’s so no nonsense Glaswegian. He had just come back from a summer in Hong Kong, and he’d been kicked out the Hong Kong Club, which is the poshest club in Hong Kong, for refusing to wear a tie. And he was like, “These snobs, I hate public school snobs.” And I was like, “Uh-oh, I better do something about that as well.” So, it was a bit of a baptism of fire, doing architecture here, but the good thing about the Mac was it was all based in Glasgow. Any exercises you did, any building that you were set a brief to design, it had to respond to a typology in Glasgow. So, you had to design a tenement, you had to design a civic building that had to be on particular sites in Glasgow, you were always set these tests. And so you got to know the city really well as a consequence of that.
And you got the feel of the place as an urban city. And it was unusual because most schools of architecture just focused on the building themselves, whereas in Glasgow there was a real element of urbanism to it. And so you got to have a better feel for how a city actually is pieced together and works so that the city is, not to sound pretentious, but as this spatial experience of being able to pass through and understand the city, you really got to know that at the Mackintosh School of Architecture. And that’s never left me. And it’s something you didn’t get in other schools of architecture, and it’s really tough course. So, it’s a seven year long course and part of it is you get what are called crits where you basically have to pin up your work for the entire school to evaluate.
And you have a panel of lecturers and professors that sit and pass judgement on your work in front of everybody. So, there’s nowhere to hide, so it can be really demoralising, though it can be, if you get good feedback, it can obviously be quite good too. There’s some funny stories there with Andy. There was one time, there was this huge crit space at the back of the Mac where there were three sliding boards, so the first person would be pinning up, the second person would be getting critted, and then the third person would be taking their work down and they would just slide the boards over so that they could get one after the other. So, Andy’s not paying attention to this person in the middle who’s giving their whole spiel on how wonderful their building is. And he’s focused on this guy who’s pinning up, and the guy slides his work over and Andy just goes, “Just keep going.”
It was so cruel, but that’s what the place was like. So, I ended up on the back of that, because I did do lots of sketching en plein air, I won the Robert Lorimer Award for my sketchbooks, which was really nice. I just did that off my own back. I was being encouraged by an American friend of mine who was an exchange student who was like, “You do really good sketches, why don’t you just fire it in and see what happens?” Because at that time I had no confidence in myself. And so I did, and that was all on sketches around Glasgow and some sketches in Boston, and so I won this award on the back of that. And then after that, having finished that, I’d gone back to Hong Kong for a couple of years. I was working in Hong Kong for a couple of years and then you have to come back for your final two years at the Mac, and then after that, basically that’s you. You’ve kind of…
Norry Wilson:
Set free into the wild.
Niall Murphy:
Set free into the wild, though you have to do a further year of professional studies and then you can sit your part three exam. So, that’s why it’s such a long process, so when I got out, there were no jobs in Glasgow at that point, and Hong Kong had been handed back to the Chinese by that point. So, 1997 had happened and the Far East Asian financial crisis was happening, and so I couldn’t go back to Hong Kong because there were no jobs there. And by that point, I’d been doing some work, because I had worked in Hong Kong for two years and I’d been able to save money, I’d spent a summer doing voluntary work for Scottish Aids Monitor, and because this was all part of coming out and accepting that I was gay, and I met my partner there.
And so my partner’s very working class Glaswegian, and so we’ve been together ever since, but still there were no jobs in Glasgow. So, I eventually ended up working in Berlin. I had friends in Berlin who had been at the Mac and they needed people in their office, so I ended up going over to Berlin to work. And at that point I really wasn’t sure what I was doing with my life, and it turned out, ironically, that the one thing the Germans aren’t terribly good at is their postal service outside of Germany. And so I was sitting writing all these letters back to my partner at home and he wasn’t getting anything and he thought I’d just cut him off and that I’d basically just done a runner. And then one night I was thinking about, and this is about three months in, I was living in Prenzlauer Berg at this point, in a tenement in Prenzlauer Berg.
Norry Wilson:
I know the area.
Niall Murphy:
Which is now very posh, but at the time was in the East, and so was still quite impoverished. And the experience of living in a tenement in Berlin is quite tough. When you live in the tenement in Berlin, you realise how well the Glaswegians build by tenements. So, things like our stairs, because all the building code here was pretty strong compared to Germany, the stairs in Germany were timber stairs. Six story tenements with timber stairs, and you used to go up them and think what would happen if there was a fire? You’d be stuffed. There was no way out. It’s shocking, it was so poorly built.
Norry Wilson:
It’s strange. My stepson, who’s a graphic designer, and his girlfriend because he’s a graphic designer, as long as he’s got an internet, he can work anywhere. So, they did about three years of living in Berlin, in various parts of Berlin. And of course it was my first thought, I had been through Berlin a couple of times, Eurorailing years back before the fall of the wall, So I remembered the East West thing. But obviously they were there after the wall was down, so myself and David’s mother were like, brill, we’ve got a base in Berlin. So, it was literally every three or four months we just went, right, cheap flight to Berlin, and we’ll go out and have a weekend.
Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, it was the same thing with my friends, it was exactly the same thing.
Norry Wilson:
And it’s that strange aspects of Berlin I saw there in Glasgow, except for the fact that in Berlin you can catch the U-Bahn at 3:00 o’clock in the morning.
Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, their public transport network is fabulous.
Norry Wilson:
Whereas in Glasgow on a Sunday after 6:00 o’clock. No, sorry. You’ve had your fun.
Niall Murphy:
When you come back from Berlin you think, oh, my God, Glasgow, you’ve really got to up your game, and it still hasn’t upped its game, but it’s got to do so much better. But, yeah, absolutely. That was my experience in Berlin and with my friends there. It was one time, New Year’s Eve, 1995, there was a huge party in front of the Brandenburg Gate, and it was still complete desolation at that point except for the Hotel Adlon had been rebuilt by that point, but nothing else was there. And I remember doing this huge conga at midnight through the Brandenburg Gate and thinking, oh, my God, this is just so bizarre.
Just a handful of years beforehand you’d have been shot because you were in no man’s land. And it was just how much Europe had changed, it was such a fantastic experience. But at the same time I began to realise I actually really missed Glasgow and I missed my partner. So, yeah, this one night he turned up out of the blue, opened the door to the tenement, and there he is sitting on the stairs, and it was like, what are you doing here? And he was like, “I hadn’t heard from you, what’s going on?” And I was like, “I’ve been sending you letters.”
Norry Wilson:
And I take it this was pre-ubiquitous mobile phone days?
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, exactly, pre-mobile phone and internet. And the ironic thing was as soon as he got back to Glasgow, all my letters arrived. I was like, “See? I was telling the truth.” And so after that I decided, right, well… Because Berlin is a really fantastic city, it was great fun living there, but at the same time it’s so flat. And it began to do my head in, because coming from Hong Kong as a harbour city which is all surrounded by steep mountains, and then Glasgow is surrounded by steep mountains and a fantastic harbour as well, really began to miss the sea and began to miss the mountains. And one time someone said, “Why don’t you go and try one of the hills in Berlin?” And it was this mound in East Berlin, which was about 100 foot high.
Norry Wilson:
And is that the one that they built from the rubble?
Niall Murphy:
I think it might have been, yes. That’s it, that’s all. But at the same time you do realise that there are really strong parallels between Berlin and Glasgow, particularly the grids of tenement streets, where you get datums in Glasgow, the three or four story tenement streets that were imposed by John Carrick, the city architect. You get all that stuff happening in Berlin too, these really long linear streets, really appreciated that quality and can see that when you’re standing in areas like Pollokshields, you can really see it, or Govanhill, you can really see that really clearly. So, I appreciated those qualities too. So, anyway, came back to Glasgow, we’d bought a flat in Pollokshields by that point, and fell in quite accidentally with the folk from Pollokshields Heritage. And so that switched me onto conservation.
It was quite funny because it brought down the average age quite a bit, which I think they were interested in. It was, “You’re an architect as well, so we’ll have one of you.” But actually it made me think about conservations and cities and what’s special in cities. And so that did really switch me onto it, and Glasgow had a lot of value in that. And I remember going to an interview as an architect in Glasgow and commenting on how fabulous the Victorian and Edwardian buildings were and how beautifully they were ornamented in the city centre, and this guy in the interview commenting, “I know, it’s such a shame, the planners want us to keep them.”
Norry Wilson:
There’s a problem with that? pointless comment.
Niall Murphy:
I know, absolutely. They wouldn’t let us do anything modern, I’m thinking, but these are so fantastic and you’re never going to be able to emulate them. You’re really going to struggle. And having real debates with people about that 123 St. Vincent Street, I remember having a debate with one well known architect about that, that it was just sham facadism. And I’m like, but it’s such a fantastic series of facades. Okay, I completely agree that the interior shouldn’t have been lost, but he was basically like, it should have been demolished completely, start again, but you’d never be able to match that kind of quality.
Norry Wilson:
It is that strange thing, folk talk about knowing a city like the back of their hands, and there’s hundreds of bits in Glasgow that I know that I could be dropped in and I can tell you within less than a second exactly where I am, exactly which way I’m facing, and what I’m surrounded by. And yet there’s other more modern bits of Glasgow where if you dropped me, I’d be looking about for 30 seconds before I went, “Ah, this used to be…”
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, exactly. And so, anyway, on the back of being involved in Pollokshields Heritage, I wound up sitting on Glasgow City Council’s Glasgow Urban Design panel, and to get to see all the big planning applications that basically affect the city centre or other parts of the city. If there’s a major planning application, it usually gets run past the Glasgow Urban Design Panel for a comment. They don’t have any statutory weight, but if the planning officer is interested in what their commentary is, it can end up being put into the report that goes through the planning applications committee, so it has a bit of influence. So, anyway, I felt that being on that panel, it was incumbent upon me to know something about Glasgow, to know about its history, to know about how it developed urbanistically, and that’s it.
Norry Wilson:
Put your money mouth where your mouth is.
Niall Murphy:
And to get to know what all the buildings were in the city, what was special about them and who the architects were, because I felt that if you were there to serve a civil purpose on that committee, you had to know your stuff. That turned out that not everybody agreed with me on that particular point, but anyway, so that was how I really began to… And I’d also, having been to boarding school and had this pretty horrendous experience there, I still have friends who are from that boarding school, but they’ve been scattered to the four winds, and so they’re all over the world.
And one thing, because I’d been so badly bullied and I’d been so homesick for Hong Kong, I really wanted to put down roots in a place and I didn’t want to be this rootless person that didn’t really know where they belonged in the world. I wanted to be somewhere that I could call home. And so I have done my utmost to make Glasgow my home on the back of that, and so it was all that too. And then it’s just a series of coincidences. So, Doors Open Day came up, this was in 2001, and Alison Grey-
Norry Wilson:
Sorry, I’m laughing slightly because I’d been doing my own heritage thing, the then Doors Open Day came along, and they got in touch with me and before I knew it, I was…
Niall Murphy:
You got sucked into all that?
Norry Wilson:
Yeah.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah. Well, this is back in 2001, and Alison Tanner, who was running Doors Open Day for Glasgow Building Preservation Trust at the time, put out this email to people who she thought might be interested in the city basically saying, “Would you be interested in suggesting any buildings that you want to see opened up on Doors Open Day?” And I was the only person who responded to her email and it was these buildings I’d really like to get into. And so she said, “Okay, right, I’ll do my utmost to get those open for you, but here’s the quid pro quo, would you do a walking tour in Glasgow for me?” And it was like, well, okay. And so I volunteered to do this walking tour up Buchanan Street, and I thought, well, I’ll give that a go.
And then of course this is six months before Doors Open Day happened, and so about a month beforehand, started panicking about the whole thing. Oh, my God, they’re going to rumble me, anyone who comes on this, because it sold out, and anyone who comes in this is going to straight away go, “You’re not a Glaswegian, what are you doing this?”
Norry Wilson:
Imposter syndrome.
Niall Murphy:
Imposter syndrome, and I was really terrifying. So, I dragged both my partner and my mum along on it, which was quite funny too, and we started at what’s now the Caffè Nero in St. Enoch’s Square, which was originally the entrance to the Glasgow subway. And so I was standing in front of it and I suddenly noticed that James Miller, who designed that lovely little Scottish perennial jewel of a building, that the archway has these devils masks around it, and basically this was…
Norry Wilson:
The entrance to hell.
Niall Murphy:
It was the Buffy The Vampire Slayer, is it hell gate? It’s Glasgow’s hell gate, and so I said that, “Here we are at the starting point, this is Glasgow’s hell gate,” and everyone started laughing and I thought, this is good, humour can connect to people. And so we ended up going way over shot, so we ended up doing this two and a half hour walk that went up Buchanan Street and then hung a left and eventually got into Central Station, then we stopped in Central and I left everyone there and this elderly Glaswegian lady grabbed my arm at the end and she was in tears and said, “Son, you’ve completely transformed the way I look at Glasgow. Thank you so much.” And I was really touched.
Norry Wilson:
I’m not surprised.
Niall Murphy:
And meanwhile on this route with my partner and my mum, my mum’s standing there because she’s a school teachers, “No, don’t talk to the buildings, talk to the audience.” It’s like, okay, mum, I will. And so it was training on how to do a walk and it was after that point I thought, yeah, I’m here amongst my people.
Norry Wilson:
I belong to Glasgow and Glasgow belongs to me.
Niall Murphy:
It’s true, and it’s also because it does remind me of Hong Kong in so many ways because Glaswegians are real salt of the earth and the Cantonese in Hong Kong were real salt of the earth too. And they know how to party, so that’s critical too.
Norry Wilson:
Well, it’s strange cause the only times I’ve ever been in Hong Kong, the first time I was delighted and surprised to meet a Glasgow tram.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, I know. Absolutely.
Norry Wilson:
And it’s still running, and then the Coronation trams.
Niall Murphy:
Quite a lot of them were burned, but others of them did wind up in Hong Kong.
Norry Wilson:
And the other amazing thing was getting in the Star Ferry and seeing a Glasgow maker’s plate.
Niall Murphy:
Yes, absolutely.
Norry Wilson:
Everyone else is admiring the scenery and taking photographs, and I’m walking around staring at bits of machinery, looking for Glasgow marks.
Niall Murphy:
See, I used to do that too because the stuff, it was dirt cheap, but you could nip across between the island and the Kowloon side on it, and all the tourists went on the upper deck, but it was like, no, who’s interested in the upper deck? You go to the lower deck because you get to see all of the machinery, it’s much more interesting.
Norry Wilson:
It’s a bit like going in the Waverley and going to see the paddles.
Niall Murphy:
Indeed, it’s exactly the same. Yeah, great fun. I miss old stuff like that. And, yeah, I suppose that when I’m thinking about Glasgow, the first night I spent in here, in Glasgow that is, this is back in 1989, there was a ferry that tooted its horn on the Clyde, and I thought, a-ha, harbour city, I could live here. But I’d never heard a ferry toot its horn on the Clyde.
Norry Wilson:
And it’s one of these strange things because my grandfather, who was born in Aberdeen in 1886, and had been four times around the world under sail before he was 21, ended up being a chief engineer out of the Clyde, 30 years in the Eastern Mediterranean, six weeks way down to Israel. Well, obviously it was at that point it was pre-Israel, but right the way down to the Eastern Mediterranean. And I grew up with him living in the house. And when I was wee, one of the great treats every Hogmanay, apart from the fact that grandpa would give you a cigar and a dram when you were about eight, you were allowed to stay up till midnight. And at midnight he’d rush you out into the garden and at that point there was still a lot of shipping in the Clyde, and you’d hear all the ships’ hooters and bells and everything going.
And my grandpa always said the amount of New Years that he’d spent in foreign ports when he was all alone and he was the only man on the ship, and he said, “Tonight, in Glasgow, there’s shipmates from all over the world alone in those ships, so raise a glass to your shipmates.” I still do it every year I dash out at midnight thinking, “Am I going to hear a ghostly hooter?” It was such a shame, the situation this year that the two cruise liners that are down in the… Is it King George the fifth dock?
Niall Murphy:
Yes.
Norry Wilson:
Might have done their hooters, but probably the wind was in the wrong direction.
Niall Murphy:
Right, you didn’t hear it.
Norry Wilson:
And the amount of fireworks now at midnight. You can’t hear it.
Niall Murphy:
It’s a shame, it really is. We need to get ships back on the Clyde somehow.
Norry Wilson:
Even just some hooters.
Niall Murphy:
So, anyway, fast forward a bit, I was still at that point thinking about being a commercial architect and then mysteriously managed to win this competition for what was going to be Glasgow and Scotland’s tallest building, which was where the Scottish Power building now is on St. Vincent Street. And so that was called Elphinstone Place. And it was on the back of that, it was originally going to be three towers and we’d called it the Trinity Project to begin with in the office, and we had to do wind tunnel testing for it. Because if you’re building a tall building, you can’t make the wind conditions around your building any worse than they currently are. That planning is that that’s not allowed, so we had to do wind tunnel testing, and so it turned out the design was an absolute disaster from wind tunnel testing.
And it was standing, and so we had to build this whole scale model of Glasgow city centre, and this was working with our engineers. And there were only two places in the world that did this at this point. One of them was in London and the other one was in Toronto. So, we were at the wind tunnel in London and we had to basically do 92 different runs to end up with a solution that actually worked in wind tunnels, because it turned out it was one of Glasgow’s big firms of solicitors was in the building right next door. And the wind conditions at that would knock you off your feet, you were thinking, “Hmm, could possibly get sued, that might not be a good idea.” So, we had to rethink the whole thing, and so it was while I was doing that, and I’m standing this wind tunnel looking at the scale model of Glasgow City Centre and everything’s pretty low rise in Glasgow.
And the engineer from Arup is saying, “Yeah, Glasgow’s actually really well designed from the point of view of wind because that four datum tenements actually works really well in deflecting winds, and what you’re doing is basically bringing the winds down into the city centre.” And I’m looking at this tall building thinking, what have I done? And had this complete road to Damascus conversion thinking this is not what I want to do with my life. I want to go more into conservation. And so ultimately that’s what I ended up doing. I got made redundant from a big firm of architects in 2011 and got snapped up straight away by a friend of mine, Peter Drummond, who’s one of Scotland’s top conservation architects, and retrained as a conservation architect. And while I was doing that, I was getting invited in here to give lectures on occasion.
And then the post of grants officer came up here and the then director just asked me if I’d be interested and I had to apply along with with everybody else. And I thought, I don’t know, I’ve really enjoyed being an architect, but maybe it’s time for something different. I’ll give this a go for six months. And I absolutely loved it because it was things that was the educational part of it, being able to connect with people and see what you do to help people about what was happening with their buildings or explain why something has happened a particular way in Glasgow or how the city has developed a particular way. So, it was being able to apply my skillset set to things like that, so from that point of view, it was absolutely a dream job.
I absolutely loved working here, so it was a good fit. And it’s funny, I knew various politicians at the time and they were all having a good laugh saying, “You’re a square peg in a square hole, well done you, and it’s a good fit for you.” So, yeah, I’ve really enjoyed it ever since.
Norry Wilson:
Fabulous. Now, during lockdown, we were all holed up like moles, you started Tweeting about Glasgow’s architectural heritage using the hashtag #MomentsOfBeautyInGlasgow. And you’ve amassed a huge number of followers with that, obviously not quite as many as Los Glasgow has.
Niall Murphy:
He says modestly.
Norry Wilson:
I know. Can you tell us a bit about that? I follow it and have done I think since the earliest days. And again, I think I know Glasgow and then you’ll pick out some tiny, almost unseen detail in a building and I’ll think, why have I not noticed that before?
Niall Murphy:
That’s well spotted that, yeah. It’s good because there’s a bunch of folk who do that kind of thing, so it’s always interesting to see what people come up with. But, no, the Tweeting was a complete accident, and I was actually getting completely slagged off by Stuart McDonald MP and Paul Sweeney, who’s now an MSP. And the two of them were completely slagging me off, going, “Come on Niall, get into the 21st century, how come you’re not on social media?” And it was things like Twitter and stuff like that, to me it was so easy to trip yourself up. And I was thinking, career suicide.
Norry Wilson:
Just ask Gary Lineker.
Niall Murphy:
Just really not a good idea. And then it was one day, unfortunately I suffer from poor lung health because of having grown up in Hong Kong, and the pollution there was really bad, and I’ve had pneumonia three times, sadly, and I’ve wound up apparently with lungs that would suit a smoker and I’ve never smoked. So, oops, anyway, just one of the things in life. So, after the third time I had pneumonia, I decided I was going to start walking into the city centre and try and use that to get fit. So, I was walking into the city centre down the South City Way one day, and I won’t name the bus company, but this particular bus who were sponsoring, it was world pollution day that day to stop bad emissions, and a bus with this advert on it sponsoring this thing sails past me belching out diesel black smoke down the South City Way.
And I was like, this is ridiculous, got into the office and kind of checked their website and I could not find a phone number for complaints because I was so angry about it. It was like, this is outrageous. And it was Taylor in the office said, “Why didn’t you try Tweeting?” And I was so mad that I forgot all my don’t ever do this and thought I am going to. So, she showed me how to set this up, and that was the first thing I did was like, “How could you do this? It’s a disgrace,” and then was able to copy it to several of Glasgow’s politicians.
And then it took off from there quite accidentally. And it was when lockdown started, I just started deciding I was going to do a Tweet a day of my walks around the South Side. And then it was funny because then the South Side started getting quite busy and I was supposed to be shielding, and then the irony was that my shielding letter turned up six weeks late, by which point I’d been out and about all over the place, and the shielding letter is saying, “You can’t get within two metres of an open window,” and I thought, oh, my God, I’m going to be turned into Rapunzel and I don’t want to do that. So, I just carried on walking and in the end I shifted over to the city centre because there was nobody in the city centre. It was completely deserted.
Norry Wilson:
It was strange because even though, 99% of Lost Glasgow is still Facebook based, but I was about the same during lockdown, because even though we had a Twitter account, I hadn’t really used it that much. And during lockdown, it became an absolute lifesaver, and all of a sudden, before you know it, one minute you’ve got 1,000 followers and three days later, and you look and it’s 7,000, where did they come from?
Niall Murphy:
What happened?
Norry Wilson:
And all of a sudden you’ve built almost a secondary community that would never be on Facebook but are on Twitter. And it’s been a learning experience for me as well.
Niall Murphy:
It really is. The point of doing it, and I was just trying to limit myself, and I still do try and limit myself, to a Tweet a day, so I’ve figured out that 7:00 o’clock in the morning is my time to tweet and it means I can either set it up the night before because I’m always getting woken up by my cats at stupid o’clock in the morning and I can’t get back to sleep again. So, I will set the Tweet then and then it goes out at 7:00 o’clock in the morning on the dot, and I just try and find a different thing every day to have a bit of fun about it. But the point of it is to raise civic pride in Glasgow and show that Glasgow is a really beautiful city, because it is. And so I was just having a lot of fun with that.
And I was trying to encourage people to go out for walks during lockdown, and so it initially started in Pollokshields and just random stuff in Pollokshields, if I saw something interesting on a building, and I knew a bit of history to the building, I would just talk about that. And it got picked up by, it was Janice Forsyth firstly who picked it up at the BBC, and then it was, I got it interviewed by, is it John Beattie on BBC Drive Time as well? Which was quite good fun. And it just snowballed from there. Janey Godley started retweeting me and that was really sweet of her, and I’d loved to meet her. And so it just went from there and it’s just been really good fun. But it has this serious purpose that is to get people out and about and make them look at Glasgow’s fantastic architecture and be able to appreciate it.
Norry Wilson:
Well, it is also that thing, Glasgow is such a wonderfully walkable city, and yet so often we jump in our cars or we jump in a bus, or if you jump in a bus, you look up and down the bus and nobody’s looking out the window, if the window is clean enough to look out. They’ve all got their noses buried in their phones. And you think, look what you’ve just passed, or better still, walk it and stop and actually appreciate what you’re in. You go back to that grid system thing again.
Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, the grid’s fantastic for walking.
Norry Wilson:
It’s absolutely lovely for walking, and particularly the East West accesses, where one day you’re getting a spectacular sunrise over there and that evening a spectacular sunset at the end of the same road. And it’s also the fact that you can, I know myself from looking at historic photographs of Glasgow, it means the tall buildings work almost like the Nomons, but a sundial, so you can almost work out exactly what time of day. You might not know what year the photograph was taken, but you can work out what time of day by the direction and the length of the shadows. And that’s almost like looking at a clock face.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s completely different from living in the tropics because the sun was directly overhead quite a lot. But Glasgow, really long shadows on particular days, which are really quite fabulous, and Glasgow sunsets are phenomenal, absolutely superb. So, the quality of light that you get on the West Coast is wonderful, and I also love down the water and just the Clyde Estuary is so beautiful. And, again, this is another parallel with Hong Kong, because in Hong Kong you’re living in an archipelago effectively off the Pearl River Estuary. And it’s really similar to the Firth of Clyde, and various people as well, Fiona Sinclair, who we’ve just interviewed in this podcast, she thinks I’m completely mad for this, but I’m like, I’m telling you, Fiona, it’s really similar to the landscape around Hong Kong, because you know how you get those windswept trees?
Norry Wilson:
I must admit, I love that. I’ve done enough, not for a long time, but enough walking and hiking on the West Coast of Scotland and all of a sudden you’ll come across a wind blasted Scots Pine, and it’s almost like a Japanese watercolour. It’s almost like one of these Japanese wood block prints, and you just think, hang on, I’ve seen this before and it’s not a Scottish artist, I’m looking at a Hawkerside.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely. But then that touches on all these fantastic… Because Glasgow was a great trading city that had all these great international connections, which is why you get things like the Glasgow Style, and you look at what Charles Rennie Mackintosh and James Salmon Junior are doing, there is an incredible Japanese influence which is what’s coming back with the Glasgow Boys coming back, with bringing all these Japanese art back from Japan. And you can see all those connections, and that’s what I like about Glasgow, it’s an incredible hybrid. And you don’t get that in terribly many places, but it makes it really fascinating.
Norry Wilson:
It is, it’s that river city thing, the Clyde, I regularly bang on about it in talks. The Clyde was our original information superhighway. And everything, there was goods in Glasgow went out to the world via the Clyde, and everything that was good, bad, and indifferent in the world came back to Glasgow up the Clyde.
Niall Murphy:
Totally. And this is, again, where I’m fascinated with Glasgow’s history, and where you look where the grid came from, because I think you get this cliché that Glasgow gave the grid to America, which I’ve never entirely bought because I think it was the other way around.
Norry Wilson:
It’s one of these strange things. I do know that the city father’s of Chicago, after the Great Fire of Chicago destroyed pretty well the entire centre of Chicago, did visit Glasgow and looked at the grid system.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, they did the same thing.
Norry Wilson:
However, they spent a year and visited every other major city in Europe at the same time. It sounds like a wonderful council jolly, if you know what I mean? So, for Glasgow to claim we’re Chicago, or we invented the grid system…
Niall Murphy:
But I think it’s that, because when you look at how after the Jacobite rebellion, how the city takes off after that, when you look at Glasgow’s connections to the American colonies and the Eastern Seaboard and all the way down to the Indies as well, and you see all the small settlements that were springing up where the tobacco lords, the apprentice tobacco lords, all had to be based in those settlements to know their market, they’re bringing back all those ideas to Glasgow. That’s where it’s all to do with commerce, it’s a mercantile city, it is not a major governmental city or doesn’t have a palace in it.
So, it’s not that kind of thing, it’s a pure mercantile city, so having a grid like that is a completely commercial and pragmatic thing to do. But what makes Glasgow more interesting than the American cities, I think, is because we do get that initial very harsh grid on Blythswood Square, that’s the ultimate evolution of Glasgow’s grid, because obviously you’ve got earlier grids that extend out from Trongate and the High Street. By the time you get to the West End and parts of the South Side, the grid is being adapted for landscape, you’re getting crescents introduced, and it’s all becoming softer and more organic. And so I think that’s really interesting too, because you see it developing in a completely different way from how the very ruthless way it developed in the United States, and it gives Glasgow a richness and a great sense of identity.
Norry Wilson:
I like the way that the grids have almost frays around the edges, if you know what I mean. All of a sudden you’re… Hang on, that one’s going off that way and that’s not a right angle.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, that, and I know people aren’t necessarily fans of the motorway, and I’m not much of a fan of it myself, but I do think that the way that Glasgow as a city is an overlay on a mediaeval, post-mediaeval city, and then you get the Georgian city appearing, and then you get the Victorian city appearing, then you get the Edwardian city, and then the War city, and then again this modernist city all superimposed on top of each other. It’s not like Edinburgh, where you get the Old Town and then they make this decision to add the New Town on the other side of the Nor Loch. So, the two didn’t mix and have these different characters.
Norry Wilson:
Never the twain shall meet.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, Glasgow is different, it’s all superimposed and it makes it such a fantastic, cinematic city. So, I find all that really interesting.
Norry Wilson:
So, moving onto the podcast, and I realise that this is the last episode of two series, how have you found working on it? Obviously you don’t have any trouble speaking to folk, a bit like myself, is there anything in particular that has stuck with you, struck you, or stayed with you from the conversations you’ve had across the two series?
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely. Two episodes in particular, and the first one was talking to Dr. Jeff Meek about mapping queer Glasgow, which also touched on Scotland as well, because I had this revelation halfway through that… So, it was from a personal side of things, and it was a horrific revelation about my family, which slightly disturbed me, and I was having it in the middle of this podcast and it was like, I better not show my emotions at this point. And that was, we were talking about James Adair, who was a prosecutor in Glasgow who sat on the Wolfenden Committee in the 1950s, which was the thing that ultimately led to the legalisation of homosexuality in England, though it doesn’t happen because of him in Scotland until the early 1980s.
And it was we were having this discussion about him and various people around him, and one of whom was William Merrilees, who was this very famous policeman in Edinburgh, in the City of Edinburgh police. And I had this sudden thought, because my granddad on my mum’s side was a sergeant in the City of Edinburgh police, and I really loved my granddad, I really looked up to him. And I had this sudden though, I bet my granddad knew this guy, because this guy was at his height in the 1950s, and he conducted a war on Edinburgh’s gay community and was arresting people, and it was a real awful time for repression.
And there’s a really good book, Peter Wildblood, he writes this book against the law at the time, and he ends up being one of the people who’s witness to the Wolfenden Committee. And it was all about what was basically a sting operation which arrested him and it was on the basis of these letters that were written between him and this RAF airman that he was having a relationship with, which were found on an RAF base I think and thereby exposed him and he was arrested on that basis and several of his friends were arrested too and he ended up being flung into prison. But he got an awful lot of public sympathy because all he was doing was he was in love with somebody.
What’s the harm in that? But there was this real atmosphere of repression, and I wondered, did my grandfather know this guy? And afterwards, I went and spoke to my mother, and she was like, “Yeah, they were friends,” and my grandfather knew him very well. And it all made sense, because when I did come out in the ’90s to my parents, both of whom have been completely fantastic and I’ve been really lucky from that point of view, what they did say to me was, “Don’t tell your granddad.” And I never quite understood why would I not want to tell him something that’s so key in my life, why would I not want to say anything?
And it wasn’t until years later that I’ve realised that was why, because he would reject you and you don’t want that kind of blow. And that was it, and at the same time, you can say, well, he must have been an awful person, but that was the context at the time, was that there was this whole thing going on and the police were not very liberal, and still have problems obviously. So, he was part of that context, and you can’t just divorce people from that context that they’re in, so it was a horrible realisation. But it happened right in the middle of the podcast, so I’ve never really forgotten that one, so that was interesting from a personal point of view.
And then the other one I really enjoyed was talking to Reverend Dr. John Harvey, and it was Stuart from the…
Norry Wilson:
Stuart Baird from the Motorway Archive.
Niall Murphy:
What was the Motorway Archive and is now the Scottish Road Archive, and I really enjoyed that discussion, particularly we weren’t quite sure whether to stop it at the end because there’d been a technical issue, so we just carried on talking between the three of us, and it was really interesting because the Reverend Dr. John Harvey was in his late 80s, sharp as a tack, and he had been one of the Glasgow Group who had done all this fantastic, very religious based, but had done this fantastic work in the Gorbals, and I’d been asking him, he lived in Abbotsford Place, and so I’d been asking him about what it was like to live through the clearances in the Gorbals, what the poverty in the Gorbals had been like.
What it was like to live through the shattering of this community, had they resisted at all? And he said, yes, that they had gone and spoken to and made petitions to the city and asked them to think again, that they were going to destroy this community, and the Gorbals, when you look at it, obviously there was real poverty at that time, and not helped by, first of all, after the First World War, when you get the rent strikes and Mary Barbour, and obviously that’s a good thing because they were being exploited. But when the cap was put on rents then and it stops things like the factoring profession, and investment in tenements and the maintenance of tenements, and it was basically just shift the responsibilities towards the maintenance of tenements, which is why the tenements in Glasgow by the 1950s were in such a bad way, because they hadn’t had maintenance for the best part of four decades, and are not in a good way.
And that’s why so many of the owners then sell them off to the individual people living in the flats and you get this fractured ownership, which is something we’re dealing with now. Because the buildings were never meant to be like that originally, they were built for rent rather than for ownership, so it’s something we’re still trying to deal with. But with areas like the Gorbals, effectively they were the equivalent of what happened in the United States with redlining, and so I was really interested in that point, because I’d come across Dr. Mindy Fullilove, fantastic name, who’s this African American sociologist.
And so it was her, she was doing this whole analysis of this African American community in Pittsburgh that had been destroyed, which had a really vibrant community, which had major links to jazz, and it had been destroyed by the authorities in Pittsburgh, and they rebuilt it as a convention centre with this huge motorway running through it. And I was thinking, oh, my God, the parallels with Glasgow are fascinating, and then discovered that Glasgow had sent a delegation to go and have a look at it. And I’m thinking could you imagine now sending, let’s go and have a delegation to look at the redlining and removal of an African American community.
Norry Wilson:
How we destroy a city.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely. Just completely horrific. And that was exactly what had happened with the Gorbals, and the authorities had made up their mind that they were getting rid of it, nobody was going to change their mind, and so this whole part of the city was just wiped from the face of the map, and the community shattered. Yeah, absolutely. Which I just think has been such a disaster for the city, and I do think that this is one of the reasons why Glasgow suffers from poor urban health, it’s exactly what coming up, what the Nazis did with Warsaw. It was about destroying the culture of the place to destroy people’s sense of sense, and inadvertently we ended up doing that to ourselves in this idea of urban renewal. And rather than invest in the building and the infrastructure of the neighbourhood, it was just like, we’ll start again.
Norry Wilson:
And going back to your earlier point about enjoying living and working in Berlin, I always found it that very strange thing when I’ve visited German cities that were almost wiped off the map during the Second World War, and yet they managed to restore particularly their old towns, almost as was but with new infrastructure and better facilities and all the rest of it. And yet Glasgow, which stayed pretty well unscathed apart from a few individual stray hits during the Second World War, as soon as the Second World War is over, we set about doing the work that the Luftwaffe didn’t do.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely. On the other hand, you can appreciate when you look at the statistics that Glasgow had major problems at the time. The overcrowding is really bad compared to any other UK city, we were an order of magnitude worse. But you could have thinned out the population, you didn’t have to destroy the actual fabric of city to do that. And you.
Norry Wilson:
Yeah, it was almost about…
Niall Murphy:
… better homes, and you could have had a much more sense of conservation surgery approach to the whole thing, like what Patrick Geddes was promoting in Edinburgh back in the Victorian times. You could have something that had a much more sensitive approach to it, you didn’t have to throw everything out. But there’s this whole worship of the car. The car is a machine, it doesn’t feel. People need environments that are going to nourish them, not something that’s going to prioritise the car, I’m so sorry. My feelings about that are getting in the way.
Norry Wilson:
It chimes in particularly with a lot of things I think about. Obviously we talk at the moment about 15 minute cities and all the rest of it.
Niall Murphy:
Glasgow was built as a 15 minute city, so you’ve got the city centre, you had roughly 700,000 people living within a mile of the city centre, so it was incredibly dense, twice the density of London at the time. And that’s why you get things like the strength of the theatres, the Empire Theatre, because they could get audiences, people wanted to escape from their lives and be entertained.
Norry Wilson:
Yeah, you’ve got audiences on your doorstep.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, so you’ve got all of those things on the back of that. Now it’s operating a third of the density of London. How did we manage to scatter people so far about?
Norry Wilson:
And also it drives back again to the building of the M8, where Glasgow ends up with the largest inner city motorway system in Europe, and yet Glasgow per capita has perhaps the lowest car ownership of any city in Europe.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, and has the worst health problems.
Norry Wilson:
The worst health problems.
Niall Murphy:
So, active living, things like that, they do help. So, I do think about those kind of things, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m interested in Glasgow’s tenemental neighbourhoods in particular, because they were 15 minute cities, and it’s weird how suddenly 15 minute cities has become a culture war kind of thing, and it’s like, where did this come from? People have been talking about this since the 1990s or 1980s.
Norry Wilson:
Yeah, planned gardens, suburbs and all the rest.
Niall Murphy:
I know, and suddenly it’s become a culture war thing. It was like, where did that come from?
Norry Wilson:
Yeah, who doesn’t want a nice café and a nice park?
Niall Murphy:
I know, yeah, exactly.
Norry Wilson:
Good public transport links, [inaudible 00:55:22].
Niall Murphy:
Why wouldn’t you enjoy that? How is that something evil?
Norry Wilson:
No, I demand to be allowed to drive 15 miles across the city. No.
Niall Murphy:
It’s very odd.
Norry Wilson:
And it’s also the working from home thing during COVID. I know I’ve certainly got to know my own area so much better during that, simply because I have been out walking about. There’s a new café opened, go inside and speak to the folk behind the counter, and before you know it, three weeks later and you’re walking down the road and somebody says hello to you, and you go, that’s the guys from the café. And before you know it you’ve got that nice mesh and it’s not so much a support network, it’s just that lovely… Embedded.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, it’s a feeling of community and being embedded in a community, and I have been very community focused, I joined things like Pollokshields Community Council, got involved in things like Govanhill Baths, which to me is incredibly important health and wellbeing.
Norry Wilson:
Right, it’s one of these things, I know you’re a member of the trust, but in my early, more radical years, I was very much one of the occupiers.
Niall Murphy:
Because it’s all about working… They have such a fantastic archive to do with working class heritage, which I think is incredibly important, so that’s Paula Larkin who’s really been leading on that, but I really admire it, the community trust. So, I’ve ended up being the chair of the building preservation trust part, because I’m a conservation architect, so I’ve ended up being the chair of that. So, we’re actually leading on the physical rebuilding project, but the community trust [inaudible 00:56:53], I was the chair of the community trust at one point, and I did remark to them, are you sure I’m the right person for this? Middle aged, balding, and at the time a little bit rotund.
So, jokingly said that, “No, we want you to be chair,” okay, fine. So, the first thing I did is I ended up going on a diet because I thought it’s not the right perception, if anyone can do it, I’m going to show if I can do it, anyone can do it. So, I did that, which was good.
Norry Wilson:
Get to your fighting weight.
Niall Murphy:
Yes, exactly. But, yeah, it’s been a really interesting project to be involved with doing something like that.
Norry Wilson:
Yeah, I’m still very peripherally involved. But one of the joys of it has been meeting up with Bruce Downey.
Niall Murphy:
Bruce is great.
Norry Wilson:
Who has written two absolutely fabulous books, and is now doing I think walking tours and stuff. Oddly enough, I recently was asked very much last minute, the Australian version of Who Do You Think You Are? You know, the family genealogical thing, and it was a guy who’s very well known in Australia, but he’s got connections to Govanhill. So, Bruce had him out filming one day in Govanhill, showing him the tenements where his grandparents and parents had grown up, and the next day I got to take him to the school that his father and his two uncles went to.
And of course they’ve still got the record books all the way back to the 1920s, showing you what they’d done right that day, six of the belt today. No explanation, just six of the belt today. And it’s lovely because, again, it looked into that idea of knowing where you are in a city and being embedded in your own corner of the city, and Glasgow, God, as you know probably more than most, Glasgow as a city is the small thing North of the river. Everything else that we consider Glasgow is villages that have been sucked up.
Niall Murphy:
Subsumed by the city, yeah.
Norry Wilson:
Subsumed by this monster that is now Glasgow. So, you meet somebody outwith Glasgow and you hear a Glasgow accent and you ask them where are you from? They don’t say Glasgow because they hear your accent. You both know you’re from Glasgow, so you say where you’re from. I’m from Shawlands, I’m from Govanhill, I’m from Partick, I’m from Finnieston, I’m from Easterhouse, I’m from Govan, I’m from the Gorbals. Because you pin each other down, and as soon as somebody says, “I’m from Govan,” you say, “You don’t maybe know so and so and so and so?” And before you know it, there’s this spider’s web of six degrees of separation that runs through the city.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, which I also really enjoy as well. So, yeah, Glasgow’s a great place. It’s good fun. And that’s what I like about it, and that’s what makes it feel like home.
Norry Wilson:
So, we’re coming towards the end, there’s a real theme of change, disruption, and displacement across the conversations in all the podcast series, and this is the proverbial $64,000 question, because we can probably talk about this for the rest of the day, how do you feel the city has changed over the past 200 years?
Niall Murphy:
Well, I suppose it brings me back to that point about… And this is what I really like about Glasgow, and I feel like it’s a really cinematic city from that point of view, is that unlike the preciousness of Edinburgh, people in Edinburgh probably hate me for saying that, bu Edinburgh is terribly precious. Glasgow has never been really precious about it and it’s always been it has to see itself on the edge, and doing what’s going to be the next big thing. So, yeah, it has tended to go in great leaps forward and white heat of technology solutions stuff.
Norry Wilson:
Yeah, three steps forward, two steps back.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, exactly. But it is that layering up of the city I think is really fascinating, but it does mean that you do get mistakes. But I’m fascinated by the idea, because obviously history isn’t a static thing, it’s always ongoing, cities are always about change, and you have to deal with those kind of things, so it’s all about each generation adding something to the city. So, I’m very interested in that and how you do get this layering up of different cities in Glasgow, so one of the things I’m interested in is future conservation areas. I was thinking about this with, is it the Wyndford?
Norry Wilson:
The Wyndford Estate, in Maryhill.
Niall Murphy:
Wyndford Estate. Yeah, because Wyndford Estate, actually when you look at it, it’s a real period piece now. And I was thinking that as well, we were down at the Boathouse yesterday, and there’s the huge RMGM towers directly opposite the Gorbals, that are on that weird angle because they’re North-South East-West facing, whereas obviously Glasgow’s grid is not the same. And you’re looking at them, and I remember seeing them, they were used in the BBC series, The Nest, a couple of years back.
And I remember thinking then and thinking again yesterday, that’s a future conservation area. And it’s the same with New Gorbals as well. New Gorbals has been a fantastic piece of work, and people have put a lot of thought into those areas. And I think those kind of things is where you’re seeing, that’s actually a conservation area of tomorrow, because it’s really good work and it’s really helped heal that part of the city. And, yes, that kinda rum drum scheme is a rupture in the city, but it has its character, and I find that really fascinating.
And that is what I like about Glasgow, you have these shifts in character, so it’s literally that’s what’s cinematic, because you splice different bits of different cities together. And that’s I think why filmmakers enjoy Glasgow as a city, and it was fantastic last summer seeing it kitted it out for Indiana Jones Part Four. The Dial Of Destiny?
Norry Wilson:
I’m not sure.
Niall Murphy:
I’m not sure about that title.
Norry Wilson:
I was coming in and out of the city a little bit and I had just started coming back into the office, I came about one day a week, and I remember one day coming out of Central Station, and cutting along Gordon Street, across the Union Street, round Field Street, and looked up and it was just like, oh, God, it’s the Fourth of July up here.
Niall Murphy:
I know, it was amazing. What a transformation, but Glasgow just has such an American appearance to it. And because of that, the grid, and also because of, particularly after, at the start of, the First World War, you get this whole wave of American classicism appearing, particularly under James Miller. And I love those aspects, that influence of the city. I suppose in terms of where it goes to next, and I’m interested in things like what happens with George Square. I did this whole conservation management plan on George Square hopefully will be getting published shortly, but that was really interesting.
What I decided to do when I was doing that, because I didn’t think anyone had done it before, was actually track the different landscapes of the square and where the statues had been at different points, because…
Norry Wilson:
Well, they were, yeah.
Niall Murphy:
Glasgow’s stodgy statues moving about and…
Norry Wilson:
A great game of chess,.
Niall Murphy:
So, I decided to track all of the things like that. And, yeah, the statues have moved at various points, particularly for the Cenotaph, and also when the square, because it originally started off as no man’s land, without a real, defined idea of what people were going to do with it.
Norry Wilson:
Yeah, it was originally a swamp where folk used to drown dogs and slaughter horses.
Niall Murphy:
Exactly, then it becomes this pleasure garden that’s planned by the guy who does the botanics, whose the head gardener of the botanics.
Norry Wilson:
Which was fenced in, and the locals kept tearing down the fences.
Niall Murphy:
Exactly. And ends up with this very grand, quite like Charlotte Square and St. Andrew’s square, fence around it, which ironically the city fathers paid for and took possession of it at the same time, so they actually had legal title to it, not the owners of the townhouses around the square who thought they did. And then in 1866, it’s that that allows John Carrick to transform it into a public square when he’s trying to find a location for Prince Albert, the equestrian monument to Prince Albert, and that’s when Victoria moves into the square from St. Vincent’s square.
And so it was like mapping all of those, the moves of all the monuments, which was really interesting. And I’m interested to see where the square is going to go now, because it peaks between 1924 and the 1950s and it’s downhill thereafter, particularly in the 1990s when it gets really bad. So, I’m interested to see what’s going to happen with the square, and what the council are doing at the moment with things like the avenues programme, and introducing trees and softer landscapes in the city centre I think is really interesting too.
I remember there was a PhD student that came into talk to me a number of years ago now and wanted to know why there weren’t really any trees in the city centre, and I was like, well, you just have to think about it, Glasgow was a really polluted city, so that was going to go against the trees, and then the second thing was that it’s built for commerce, it’s not like Paris or London, where you would have-
Norry Wilson:
It’s not Boulevard City.
Niall Murphy:
It’s not like that, so it’s built for commerce, the trees would get in the way. So, you see these stray specimens from what were country roads which have been urbanised and then they gradually die off and they never get replaced. So, that’s why it had been like that, so I think if we want to attract people back into the city centre, and this is one of the problems with Glasgow post-COVID is that Glasgow was the busiest city centre in the UK outside of the West End of London prior to COVID. But because Glasgow has a really good transport network and is very commutable, people don’t necessarily have to come back into the city centre because you can work from home now.
And so that’s had a real impact on the city center’s economy, and it’s about how we get that going again, it would be better if we actually encouraged some of those 700,000 people that ended up leaving that area around the city centre to come back into it once more, and the only way you’re going to do that is to get more amenity back into the city centre. So, it’s looking at things like with the Avenues Project, what they’ve done with Sauchiehall Street about getting trees down the streets, and that will really help soften some of the vistas.
Norry Wilson:
It is that strange thing, Glasgow and the Dear Green Place, and actually in most of the city centre, the lack of greenery is noticeable.
Niall Murphy:
Yes, we have the least greenery of any city centre in the UK now. So, it’s about working some of that back in and making it more pedestrianised, friendlier for everybody, and getting a lot more planting back in. And I think that’s going to have a phenomenal effect on the city, and it will make it more attractive. We have something like 3,500,000 square feet of upper floor space in the city centre which is not in use.
Norry Wilson:
Yeah, which is lying empty.
Niall Murphy:
And what do you do with that? And that’s not including the new buildings that are getting built, which I’m still puzzled why we’re building such enormous new buildings when people are working from home. I think we’re going to end up with a hybrid scenario, but it doesn’t seem as though people are crying out.
Norry Wilson:
I’ve got this horrible idea that they’re actually going to make us live and work in our own office in the city centre.
Niall Murphy:
See, that did my head in. After a while, it was like it was okay for the first six months, and then after a while it was like, I need some space between work and home, not just a two minute walk.
Norry Wilson:
And you know yourself, it’s not for the work, it’s for the water cooler moments.
Niall Murphy:
It’s chatting with everybody in the office, and I miss that camaraderie.
Norry Wilson:
The city is a hive, it’s a human hive, and having even just that good morning, how are you, nice weekend, did you watch the football? That human connectivity, that’s what I really miss.
Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, it’s absolutely critical, so I’m getting really frustrated with Royal Exchange Square at the moment, which should be a thriving European square and is not. And I realise in part that’s because a whole section of it has been basically left vacant, which I think is a great shame, but that should be full of street cafés and full of life and a real hubbub, and it could be that throughout the year, and yet just isn’t operating to its potential at the moment, and it needs people to look at that and we need to get that character into a lot of…
It’s ridiculous, I remember being out in the West End just about a month ago, and Byres Road, I was walking back across Byers Road about 11:00ish, and Byres Road, absolutely thrumming with people. Couldn’t move for folk, and getting on the subway, back in the city centre in about 12 minutes or so, getting out, George Square being pretty deserted, getting into the Brunswick and there being nobody around. And you’re like, what is going on here? This is ridiculous, it’s totally topsy-turvy. So, we have to get people back in somehow.
Norry Wilson:
It’s that doughnut effect as well, where the city centre is busy during the week, and every night almost come 5:00 o’clock there’s a changing of the guard, all the sensible people go home to the outskirts, and certainly during lockdown it was young people that came in and basically took over the streets.
Niall Murphy:
There was one night, I had to come into the office, and I’d suddenly realised that I needed this document, and it was a legal document which are all in our archive, and so I had to come into the office, it was 9:00 o’clock at night. And I was like, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back as soon as I can,” and there was literally no one around, so I just legged it into the city centre, because no trains were running. And legged it into the city centre as fast as I could, and I walked across the car park at St. Enoch’s East, and was heading up past The 13th Note, and it’s how you’ve got parallel streets, I could see this whole crowd walking down the High Street, and I’m thinking, it’s 9:00 o’clock at night, what are they doing? And all I was thinking of was The Warriors, that film in 1970s New York.
Norry Wilson:
Warriors, come out to play.
Niall Murphy:
I was thinking, oh, my God, it’s The Warriors, and absolutely legged it to the office to get inside, thinking, I’m going to get mugged and help, because there was no one around. Yeah, that was a weird night.
Norry Wilson:
Zombie apocalypse.
Niall Murphy:
It was like Glasgow was the zombie apocalypse. So, yeah, keen to see people back in the city centre, and it is important because Glasgow’s city centre is one of the drivers of Scotland’s economy and should be seen as a national priority. So, getting people back living in here and actually making whatever you create here in terms of residential space attractive and desirable and for everybody, so it’s affordable for everything, I think that’s absolutely key and how we go back to it.
Norry Wilson:
Because Glasgow’s always been about that mix of not just building types but social classes and all the rest of it, living on the street by jowl, which you don’t so much see in Edinburgh, whereas Glasgow, I don’t know if it speaks more to an egalitarian spirit or simply the organic development of Glasgow rather than the great planning development of Edinburgh, things are amorphous. One minute you’re in the most expensive bit of the West End, and you turn two streets and you’re actually in a pretty poor bit of Maryhill. And it’s the same on the South Side as well, all of a sudden you turn the wrong corner and you’re like, how did I get here? Which way is North from here?
Niall Murphy:
I quite like that.
Norry Wilson:
I like it as well.
Niall Murphy:
Because it gives it a completely different character. And it’s much more it’s for everyone. So, yeah, really value that.
Norry Wilson:
It’s the grit that makes for peril.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, I couldn’t live in Edinburgh.
Norry Wilson:
It’s nice for a fence game.
Niall Murphy:
You’re a very beautiful city.
Norry Wilson:
Well, we’re drawing to a close here, and, again, this is one of these killer questions, because I remember when you asked me it when you interviewed me.
Niall Murphy:
I know, I’m like, oh, God, the tables have really turned.
Norry Wilson:
Yeah, I know, I’m thoroughly enjoying watching you squirm here. So, we’ve talked about all sorts of Glasgow buildings, but what is your favourite building in Glasgow and what would it tell us if its walls could talk?
Niall Murphy:
Oh, God, it’s such a loaded question, and honestly, my favourite building in Glasgow changes every five minutes. It’s a new one every week. So, when I first thought about this, there are obvious classics like I absolutely love, and it’s such a shame what’s happened, the West Elevation of Glasgow School of Art, which is Mackintosh at its absolute height. And one of the things about being in the architecture school, the Mac, is you’ve got these huge windows that look onto that. And seeing that and the sunrise, because we used to do all nighters in the studios, you can’t do that now apparently.
Norry Wilson:
Probably it’s a fire risk.
Niall Murphy:
We used to do all nighters in the studios. Yeah, I know, funny that. And so everyone would go out and get pizzas in the middle of the night and then we’d end up having a little dance party in the middle of the night to keep everyone’s energy up, and then you would watch the sun rise over the art school, and it was fabulous. And I wonder whether they do that now. Anyway, so that has been a favourite, but, of course, after everything that’s happened, I just don’t want to think about it. Other things that have been really influential, I’m never quite sure how to pronounce it, is it the Athenaeum Theatre or is the Athenaeum?
Norry Wilson:
The Athenaeum.
Niall Murphy:
It’s the Athenaeum, see, I’m never quite sure how to pronounce that. But the Athenaeum, so Burnet’s Athenaeum extension I absolutely love, and I was lucky enough to see-
Norry Wilson:
And that’s, which is going to be the Hard Rock Café.
Niall Murphy:
which is now the Hard Rock Café, I was lucky enough to be at the last performance in there by complete fluke. And it would have made such a good jazz club, and it’s a shame that it’s got the stuffing knocked out of it, but still, key features are being saved at least, but all the auditorium and the seating and everything has all been stripped out.
Norry Wilson:
It was, it was a beautiful.
Niall Murphy:
It was a lovely wee theatre, really beautiful. But from an architect’s point of view, it’s a really interesting building, because it’s about the first time you can take a Georgian townhouse plot and then go high once you’ve got electricity to get lifts into buildings, so it’s one of the very first lift buildings in Glasgow. But it’s also about how Burnet and his then partner, John Archibald Campbell, handled the programme in the building, because every floor has a different purpose to it, so you’ve got dining rooms, music rooms towards the top. It’s a really fantastic building programmatically, and then you’ve got the lift, which is one of the first examples of a lift in Glasgow.
And at the top of the building, he has this little tower of winds, with wind gods around it, which is like the lift going up and down, it makes wind. And I think that’s quite witty and funny, and the whole narrative, it is an elitist building, because that narrative, this whole classical narrative of Athena, who’s the goddess of the arts and everything, you would only know that if you were educated on that kind of thing, so it is quite elitist. But I like narratives in building, that’s something that appeals to me. So, that’s been a favourite for a very long time.
But my ultimate favourite would have to be Glasgow Central Station. But it’s not so much a building, it’s the space and the experience. So, I just think it’s fantastic, because obviously the station was built over the top of Grahamston, the village that disappeared underneath it and allegedly survives, but it doesn’t actually. Though there are a couple of buildings that are still there in Argyle Street and on Union Street which come from the original village. But it’s the space, because it’s not a single building, it’s a whole multitude of buildings that form the urban block around it, and obviously you’ve got what’s now Grand Central Hotel on the corner, which is supposed to be the landmark that identifies it within the city. But it’s the fact that the Victorians somehow managed to conceal this enormous station within an urban block.
Norry Wilson:
It’s a city within a city.
Niall Murphy:
It is, it’s completely concealed. You would not know until you’ve seen the Hielanman’s Umbrella that there is this enormous station sitting there, completely concealed within the heart of the city, because they handle it so well, and if you look at, say, a relatively modern example, of St. EnochCentre, which I can’t stand, and how that effectively internalises the city because it’s got blank frontages all round. Absolutely not the way to handle it. You have to have active streets around it, which is what the Victorians did so well, and I just love the whole concourse.
It’s the original 1879 to 1880 84/85 concourse, and then you’ve got the later 1900 extension by James Miller and Donald Matheson, which has a subtly different character. But it’s a very amorphous space, but Donald Matheson and James Miller had this idea of making people flow through the station as though it’s a river, and you use these organic curved pods to shift people, make them flow towards the platforms, I think is a really beautiful moment. And it’s like the Cunningham and Blythe trusses from the original concourse are really quite aggressive, big, I think they’re Vierendeel trusses. They’re so matter of fact and blunt, but then Donald Matheson has those bowstring trusses which are much more elegant for the extension.
But it’s just this incredible organic space, and it’s so lovely. You see all of life there, and whether you’re coming into it during the day and it’s a beautiful sunny day and you’re getting this beautiful blue sky over the space, which I assume must be larger than George Square, maybe it’s not. But it’s one of the biggest space, and technically it’s a public space, it’s kind of public private, I’ve taken tour groups in there before and been told off for doing it. You’re very naughty, it’s like there’s a yellow alert at the moment, what are you doing.
Norry Wilson:
Obviously I’m going to agree with you because you asked me that question and I said Central Station.
Niall Murphy:
Did you? There you go, whoa.
Norry Wilson:
But the wonderful thing that’s happened with Central Station just in recent years, the TV programme, Inside Central Station, which I’ve guested on a few times, and fortunately through that I’ve got to know Paul and Jacky, the two tour station guides.
Niall Murphy:
I really need to meet them.
Norry Wilson:
And they are just the most passionate, knowledgeable, they know every brick, they know every story, they know every mote of dust that goes through. And what they have done around Central Station, which I’m quite sure even 10 years ago, if somebody had said, “Do you want to organise tours underneath Central Station?” Folk would have gone, “There’s no interest in that.” And yet, now their tours are booked up months in advance.
Niall Murphy:
I know, it’s fascinating.
Norry Wilson:
Because everyone wants to know what goes on underneath Central Station.
Niall Murphy:
The old platforms are amazing. I went to see them several years ago. It’s the most wonderful space. Even at night, when you’re coming into it, then when you come in from the back of that huge advertising screen and you can see the light from the advertising screen cast over the concourse as you’re coming in on the train, it’s a real Blade Runner-esque moment that I absolutely love, because it’s really cinematic. And then there was one morning a couple of months back when there was something weird going on with the weather, and it was colder inside than it was outside because it had been really cold for a while and then suddenly this warm front came in.
And it was this weird moment where as I was leaving the close, I realised there was condensation on the outside of the door, which was a bit weird. And got into Central, and it was like Central had its own microclimate, and there was mist in Central, which was bizarre to see. And, yeah, completely amazing, and just fascinating, it’s such a fantastic space, and there’s so many people in it. It is like a city in itself, I absolutely love it, it’s my favourite moment in Glasgow.
Norry Wilson:
And it’s that strange thing, you were talking about the quality of light.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, the light is beautiful.
Norry Wilson:
When I was growing up and coming through Central, it was always dark.
Niall Murphy:
Really?
Norry Wilson:
Because during the War years, they had painted black tar across all the glass ceiling panes, so that it didn’t show light to bombers. And it was only in the early 1980s when they added on the extra platforms and so on that they actually scraped it all off.
Niall Murphy:
I didn’t know that.
Norry Wilson:
And all of a sudden, the place, even on the brightest sunny day, you used to go into Central Station and all the lights would be on because there was no light coming from above apart from the end of the platforms. And it was only when they took that off, all of a sudden you’re just like, hang on, this is how it was meant to be.
Niall Murphy:
I know. One thing I’ve never seen a photograph of but which I really would like to see a photograph of was apparently the champagne bar, the dome over the champagne bar was a stained glass dome. And it’s been turned into a plaster dome subsequently, and that would make sense, because James Miller also did all of the liners, the great liners, and he was using Oscar Paterson for his stained glass on the Lusitania, that was Oscar Paterson did the stained glass on the Lusitania. And Oscar Paterson did the stained glass in Central Hotel as well, and there used to be stained glass panels in each of the windows, which all disappeared when it was refurbished, and I have no idea what happened to them, but they were Oscar Paterson stained glass.
Norry Wilson:
Any idea what period that refurbishment would be?
Niall Murphy:
Well, this was the latest refurbishment, but it was when James Miller added the extension to Grand Central, that’s when Oscar Paterson did the work in it.
Norry Wilson:
No, that’s interesting, because my uncle, I say my uncle, technically a cousin of my mum’s, started off age 14 in the Central Hotel pre-World War Two, and he ended up being the chief barman and worked there until he was 70. And his knowledge of the Central Hotel is just mind blowing. He used to make cocktails for Frank Sinatra and all the rest of it, he met everyone.
Niall Murphy:
See, that’s fascinating, it’s all part of the history of that whole place, and John Logie Baird and the television signal. Fascinating stuff.
Norry Wilson:
And I know that Central Station commissioned, now, is it Henry Bedford Lemere?
Niall Murphy:
Mm-hmm, yes, to take photographs of it, yes, [inaudible 01:23:38].
Norry Wilson:
I know there are some fabulous interior, there must be photographs somewhere.
Niall Murphy:
So, there must be. But weirdly it’s English Heritage that have them and not Historic Environment Scotland. But you would be able to get your hands on them, so it would be worth actually having a look to see whether it was actually genuine, I’d really like to know.
Norry Wilson:
I’d imagine it must have been photographed at some point.
Niall Murphy:
It must have been photographed, because James Miller would have been so proud of it.
Norry Wilson:
Yeah, it would have been a tour de force.
Niall Murphy:
Absolutely. I’ll end with there’s this great quote from the American architectural historian, Vincent Scully, he was talking about the loss of Penn Street Station in New York, which was one of the great conservation cases, and just when you see it, it’s an astonishing station, and can’t believe they destroyed it.
Norry Wilson:
I’ve seen photographs, that’s where they built… What’s the huge stadium?
Niall Murphy:
Madison Square Garden. And his quote is that you used to come into, because it was modelled on a Roman baths, and you used to come into the city, “Like a Roman god, and now we come in scurrying like a rat.” And he see’s that quote, who’s going, “The West End is much better than the South Side,” and I’d say, “Yeah, but I get to come into Central Station every morning, I come into the city like a god through this fabulous station, whereas you come in at Buchanan Street Underground like a rat.” That’s why the South Side is better.
Norry Wilson:
Well, I don’t know how long we’ve been going, but it’s been great fun, Niall, as ever, chatting with you.
Niall Murphy:
Absolutely, Norry, it’s always a pleasure.
Norry Wilson:
And this is the end of the wire, as it were.
Niall Murphy:
It is, yeah.
Norry Wilson:
We’ve hit the buffers and appropriately enough we’ve hit the buffers at Central Station.
Niall Murphy:
Last episode of the second series, so, yeah, it’s been a pleasure doing this with everybody, so, really enjoyed it.
Norry Wilson:
So, thank you for interviewing me, and thank you very much for allowing me to pick your brains.
Niall Murphy:
Turn the tables on me.
Norry Wilson:
Yes.
Niall Murphy:
It’s been a pleasure, great fun.
Norry Wilson:
Thank you.
Niall Murphy:
Thank you.
Katharine Neil:
Glasgow City Heritage Trust is an independent charity and grant funder that promotes the understanding, appreciation, and conservation of Glasgow’s historic built environment. Do you want to know more? Have a look at our website at glasgowheritage.org.uk, and follow us on social media at Glasgow Heritage. This podcast was produced by Inner Ear for Glasgow City Heritage Trust. The podcast is kindly sponsored by the National Trust for Scotland, and supported by Tunnock’s.