Critics Say Exhibit Hid Glasgow’s Grimy Past

Perhaps it’s a sign of better times in tough old Glasgow that this year’s biggest uproar was about the past.

Critics attacked an exhibition about the city’s 800 years, which stressed its relations with the world, for “sanitizing history.”

Glasgow’s Glasgow, as it was called, closed last month and was the city’s biggest attraction in 50 years, drawing a half-million visitors. The show may have lost more than $8 million in its 30-week run, which the city will have to cover.

The exhibition was the centerpiece of the yearlong festival celebrating the city’s year as the European Capital of Culture, bestowed by culture ministers of the 12-nation European Community.

Below the central railway station, unused for 60 years, the show assembled 3,200 artifacts of Glasgow history, industry and social life.

They ranged from a model of the yacht Shamrock V, with which Glasgow grocery tycoon Sir Thomas Lipton made five unsuccessful tries for the America’s Cup, to the suitcase of an emigrant who paid 2 pounds (then $10) for passage to Canada in the 1920s.

Documentary films lauded Glasgow’s greatness as the second city of the British Empire, an industrial cornucopia that poured out textiles, locomotives, weapons and, by 1913, about 60% of the world’s ships.

“I think the exhibition was a great success,” said Robert Palmer, director of the cultural year. “A space which was dripping wet, unusable and derelict was renovated, and that space and the new Arches Theater there seem certain to become a permanent part of the city’s life.”

An unusual partnership of business and a socialist council budgeted 50 million pounds ($80 million when the year began) to make Cultural Capital 1990 a success. About $7 million went for Glasgow’s Glasgow.

Sniper fire was aimed at it regularly, however, by the daily Glasgow Herald and Workers’ City, a group of left-wing and anarchist artists and workers. The 60 or so active Workers’ City members champion the class struggle against what they regard as Glasgow’s yuppie ascendancy.

Although unemployment remains above 14%, the cultural capital designation recognized Glasgow’s self-regeneration from industrial blight, slums, ill health and violence to a humming center of commerce, tourism and the arts.

The poor have been moved out of the city center and their tenements demolished, but to Workers’ City they are no better off in the bleak, damp tower blocks erected for them on Glasgow’s periphery.

“In the interests of privatizing Glasgow and presenting it as a place without problems, the Glasgow’s Glasgow exhibition buries our history of industrial struggle,” said Brendan McLaughlin, owner of the Scotia Bar, where Workers’ City meets.