East End Girls: We Can't Stop Talking...

Making this an incredibly long, meandering post. Stick around if you've got the time!

If you cast your mind back, you will recall it was my birthday a week-and-a-half ago, so I have taken one step further into the glorious years of very middle-age. I have noticed several rather scary symptoms of this, to wit;

1. I suspect my favourite radio DJ is Ken Bruce (Pop Master rocks!)

2. I have an almost uncontrollable desire to buy a Will Young album. Such a nice young man.

3. I can listen to Michael Buble, and quite liked his version of Cry Me A River (forgive me, Julie London!).

4. On my big birthday trip to Glasgow, my husband offered to take me to The Cathouse (seedy rock nightclub) after the Alabama 3 gig. I declined, preferring to go back to the hotel to watch Alien Resurrection on the television, in bed. Better film than I thought it would be.

Anyway, to the gig. How was it? Loud, live and dangerous. Pictures in case you have forgotten what this great band look like.

That's right. They're not from Alabama and there isn't three of them.

The Reverend D. Wayne and Larry

And look! If you're in London the band is the subject of a Photography Exhibition by Jan Enkelmann, on at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton Oval, Coldharbour Lane until May 31st.The gig was at the O2 Academy, on Eglinton Street in the Gorbals. Which is in the East End of Glasgow, famous for a lot of things as well as the setting of the novel No Mean City - the story of Johnnie Stark, "Razor King" of the Gorbals.

Your classic Gorbals tenement picture.

DittoDitto

And the slum clearance with the bright new High-Rise future horizon.

I felt remarkably at home, and we strolled the mean streets from the hotel to the gig and back again afterwards. Well, I was hobbling by that stage, my 5 inch heels not being one of my better choices for the mosh pit.

Now, to the Academy. The building on the site was erected as the Eglinton Street United Secession Church in 1825, and was converted to a cinema in 1921. It was burned to the ground in 1932, a replacement was immediately commissioned and opened in the same year. It was sold in 1936 and continued as a cinema until it closed in 1973. It was then converted into one of Glasgow's most successful bingo clubs. In March 2003 the building re-opened after conversion into a live concert and dance venue - Carling Academy Glasgow - and then it became the O2 Academy it is now.

It still looks like this now it's the O2

The O2 is next door to a decaying, derelict Glasgow building, the Coliseum.

Here's the Coliseum.

and here's the O2 Academy right next door to the Coliseum.

Now here's a strange thing. The Coliseum opened in 1905 and was a humungous place - "Its seating capacity was exactly 4,000. This meant that on the two houses a night principle 8,000 would be entertained nightly, 48,000 weekly, and 2,406,000 yearly." It went through the usual conversions - to a cinema (being the first to show the The Jazz Singer in Scotland in 1929) and eventually a bingo hall. It was very badly damaged by fire in 2009, and the facade is really all that now remains.

A reminder of the dates. The New Bedford Theatre, built as church, opened as a cinema in 1921. The Coliseum opened in 1905. Both right next door to each other on Eglinton Street, separated only by Bedford Road.

So can anyone please explain this picture of the New Bedford Theatre, taken in 1924?

It obviously is the New Bedford (you can read the name if the picture is large enough). It obviously is in Glasgow (tenements next door). But where the tenements are is where the Coliseum should be - compare the pictures. What's going on? If you print a negative accidentally backwards can this sort of reversal happen? Spooky.

Right, weird things turned up by the internet aside, what did we do on the Sunday? Well, it was a short drive to Glasgow Green, so we looked at all these things.

The People's Palace on Glasgow Green.

Glasgow Green is the city's oldest park, about 140 acres of land alongside the Clyde and set aside for recreation and leisure and public executions since 1450 (well, it was a common grazing for the first 350 years or so). The People's Palace itself was opened in 1898, when the East End of Glasgow was one of the most unhealthy and overcrowded parts of the city, and was intended to provide a cultural centre for the people.

Lord Rosebery, who opened The People's Palace, stated it was, "A palace of pleasure and imagination around which the people may place their affections and which may give them a home on which their memory may rest". He declared the building "Open to the people for ever and ever".

It now houses a museum dedicated to Glasgow's social history, and the wonderful Winter Gardens are in the large glass house. We saw banana palms coming into fruit, and did that classic parent thing at exactly the same time - "Oh, we must bring the boys up to see them" .

The fan-dabi-dozi (note cultural reference there) Doulton Fountain, now beautifully restored, is right outside of The People's Palace. Originally created for Glasgow's Great Exhibition in 1888, it was later moved to the Green. It is the largest terracotta fountain in the world, surmounted by Queen Victoria and with the symbols and personifications of her dominions below her.

Here's Canada.

Behind the Fountain you can glimpse the office block of the Templeton Carpet Factory, built to mimic The Doge's Palace in Venice in order to get planning permission.

Glasgow Green was also the site of the traditional "Scotch Washing", where dirty linens were tramped in large tubs, later replaced by a wash-house ("steamie"), but the common drying was still in use well into the twentieth century.

It was also a popular site for political meetings and rallies.

We then strolled on to the Barras, a once legendary Glasgow street and covered market, but which is now just full of what this East Ender calls "toot" (rhymes with "put").

The Barras in slightly better times when the police still used to raid it.
And more recently.And we checked the front of this shop but didn't find any.

We walked on to Glasgow Cross (a bit like New York's Five Points, but older), where the major thoroughfares of the High Street, Gallowgate, London Road, the Saltmarket and Trongate all meet. After a stroll through the Merchant City to try and find a good fry-up cafe (no chance) we returned to Glasgow Cross and found a decent caff there, looking straight out onto the Tolbooth Steeple, one of Glasgow's few surviving medieval buildings.

"The seven-storey Tolbooth Steeple is the Cross's most important feature and it is topped by a clock and a stone crown. This was once part of a much larger building, the Tolbooth, which provided accommodation for the Town Clerk's office, the council hall and the city prison.

The debtors' prison had a steady stream of inmates who elected their own provost and generally ran the place like an exclusive club. They produced their own regulations, including one from 1789 which stated: It is firmly and irrevocably agreed upon that the members of these rooms shall not permit the jailor or turnkeys to force any person or persons into their apartments, who are thought unworthy of being admitted. There was even a rule about celebrating freedom: Every member, when liberated, shall treat his fellow-prisoners with one shilling's worth of what liquor they think proper.

The Tolbooth provided the backdrop to many of the city's dramas and it was here that witches, thieves and murderers were summarily dealt with, by hanging if necessary. It also had a special platform from which proclamations were read, important in the days before general literacy. The paved area in front of the Tolbooth was the in place to be seen and here the rich paraded in their finery, particularly the Tobacco Lords, attired in red cloaks and sporting gold-topped canes. The cross developed as a communications hub, with stagecoaches from Edinburgh and London bringing visitors and news, and a reading room in the Tolbooth providing newspapers. However, as the city expanded and moved westwards, the Tolbooth was abandoned and eventually demolished, leaving the steeple as an isolated reminder of bygone days. This tragic loss of an important building was the result of the work of the City Improvement Trust which had the unenviable task of ridding the city of its slums. "

And of the Steeple itself;

"The Tolbooth Steeple played an important part in the jurisprudence of the period. Its High Street face was cheerfully garnished with spikes for the heads of traitors and other first-class misdemeanants. Commoner criminals were hung against its Trongate face. A scaffold was raised for them to the height of the first floor, facing appropriately down the Gallowgate, and the prisoner was brought out from the Tolbooth by a little window door, which, in these good old times, was as constantly open as the Temple of Janus. Below this, on the level of the street, a low half door led direct to the prison, by a turnpike stair in the steeple. "

And finally to branks and stocks.

"These branks and the stocks are examples of implements of corporal punishment used in early modern Glasgow. Branks (top) were first mentioned in the city's records in 1574. They were sometimes known as "scolding bridles" or "gossip's bridles" and were used to punish scolding, nagging or gossiping women. The device consisted of an iron frame which fitted on the head, with a triangular metal gag which was inserted over the tongue to "silence" the offender for the duration of her sentence. The one seen here is fairly tame compared to others that have been preserved, featuring a sharp iron mouthpiece that could pierce the unfortunate woman's tongue. The stocks were used to secure the legs or arms of prisoners convicted of any of a variety of crimes. A convicted man or woman was locked into the stocks at the Tolbooth Steeple, where members of the public were free to deliver verbal or physical abuse to the hapless and helpless offender. "

Meanwhile, we were gaily consuming our 5,000 calorie breakfasts when we heard the sounds of drums and marching. Lo and behold, a Glasgow Special - an Orange Parade coming through the Cross and heading off up London Road.

I can still remember the first time I saw an Orange Parade in Glasgow - it was in Paisley Road West - and thought I was seeing things, never having associated them with Scotland. But Sectarianism is still quietly continuing on this city's glorious, historical and often surprising streets. Plus ca change.

So we finished our breakfasts, went back to The Barras, and I bought some toot. A good birthday, all in all, and what's more, Elaine Paige was on the radio on the way home. And I knew all the songs from the shows. Hello, middle-middle age.