A new cinema advert from Glasgow Life promoting the city as a tourist destination packs a lot into one minute. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, Cafe Gandolfi, the Hydro, the Necropolis, the Barrowland Ballroom, Kelvingrove, Ashton Lane; a Van Gogh portrait of the Scottish art dealer Alexander Reid, a folk music session in a bar and a selection of fancy starters for fancy meals. “Next stop Glasgow” is the slogan that wraps it all up. It is slick, confident and full of energy. A bit like the city itself, some might say.
This kind of promotion is something of a novelty. Glasgow’s efforts to sell itself have in recent times tended to focus on the lucrative conference market. There is nothing wrong with conference business per se. Delegates need beds to sleep in and food to eat. But the numbers of independent tourists coming to Glasgow for its own sake have been relatively small. The city has not really sold itself as a rival to destinations such as Dublin, Barcelona or Milan and there has not been much of a focus on footloose, culturally savvy people in their twenties and thirties with a bit of money.
This is puzzling. Glasgow’s cultural offering is internationally significant. The city is home to an acclaimed opera company and has a celebrated theatre culture. Its contemporary art scene dominates the Turner prize and rivals Berlin. In architecture, the flamboyance of Mackintosh is complemented by the formal classicism of Alexander “Greek” Thomson. The bicentenary of the latter’s birth was marked last year and the 150th anniversary of the former’s is celebrated in June. And yet Glasgow’s high culture is balanced by a popular culture and urban dynamism that is truly world class. Critics say that this aspect in particular has been undersold.
The lack of projection afforded to Glasgow’s designation as a Unesco city of music is particularly baffling. There has, perhaps, been a failure to understand that a twentysomething tourist might see the Sub Club, a renowned venue, as an attraction every bit as powerful as Kelvingrove art gallery. The famous Barrowland Ballroom, with its starred roof and sprung floor, is one of the world’s great music venues, the Hydro one of the world’s most visited. Glasgow’s popular culture — exuberant, vital and lit by neon — is one of its major international draws. For this reason it is heartening to see so much live music, from a variety of locations, in Glasgow Life’s cinema advert, not to mention a soundtrack from the Scottish band Admiral Fallow.
Speak to some people in the tourist industry and they will tell you Glasgow’s civic leaders never quite “got” tourism. In decades past the council had its share of socialist cultural polymaths. Yet leaders tended to be more comfortable with Glasgow’s self-image as a gritty “no mean city” than as a glitzy destination for middle-class professionals looking for a city break.
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The city showed what it is capable of when it hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2014. But it attracts only two million visitors a year — half the number attracted by Edinburgh — and will have to do better if the promise of 7,000 jobs and an £800 million economic boost by 2023 are to be fulfilled.
Judging by the new cinema advert, lessons have been learnt. Glasgow is now being sold in a way its admirers will recognise, as a city that excels in both high and popular culture. The middle-aged lawyer with a fondness for Mahler and the 27-year-old coder who prefers deep house can both find what they are looking for on a night out. What now seems to be understood is that high culture and popular culture add lustre to each other. This is a significant step forward, and is most welcome. With a new confidence, Glasgow can hold its head up internationally and be comfortable ranking itself alongside other great European destinations.