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| Glasgow’s Elegant Ingram Street | Glasgow’s Elegant Ingram Street |
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| Scotland used to seem a long way from the world. We felt we lived secret lives there, informed by ancient sorrows and fresh delights, and the city of Glasgow, where I was born, seemed to us the manifestation of a true identity. I suppose people might say a similar thing about New York or Dublin, but in Glasgow the citizens’ common nature is made of stone. Our mothers would speak of a person being “pure Glasgow,” consisting of material you didn’t get elsewhere, a sort of sandstone or granite embedded in the soul. I grew up believing not only that streets had character but that buildings had voices. My grandmother once took me to buy rosary beads at a tiny shop on the High Street, just off the Trongate, near the Candleriggs. The shop, Carruth’s Grotto, was a place way out of time and its atmosphere could never have existed in Italy or Russia. It was a tiny palace of sweet-faced Marys and red candles, a glinting emporium of Catholic medals, but the building itself seemed to carry an indignant sense of faith, as if a history of survival clung to its plasterboard walls and shone from the old glass counter. | Scotland used to seem a long way from the world. We felt we lived secret lives there, informed by ancient sorrows and fresh delights, and the city of Glasgow, where I was born, seemed to us the manifestation of a true identity. I suppose people might say a similar thing about New York or Dublin, but in Glasgow the citizens’ common nature is made of stone. Our mothers would speak of a person being “pure Glasgow,” consisting of material you didn’t get elsewhere, a sort of sandstone or granite embedded in the soul. I grew up believing not only that streets had character but that buildings had voices. My grandmother once took me to buy rosary beads at a tiny shop on the High Street, just off the Trongate, near the Candleriggs. The shop, Carruth’s Grotto, was a place way out of time and its atmosphere could never have existed in Italy or Russia. It was a tiny palace of sweet-faced Marys and red candles, a glinting emporium of Catholic medals, but the building itself seemed to carry an indignant sense of faith, as if a history of survival clung to its plasterboard walls and shone from the old glass counter. |
| The city has always been a capital of style: The people expect to be looked at, they expect to be seen, and they feel their appearance might convey their essence. Not every city has such an atmosphere: In central London, for example, people expect to be invisible. But Glasgow is a place where style is believed to be an aspect of progress, and the city has long had the knack of bringing the best of new international thinking and melding it with vernacular instinct. That’s how you end up with the renowned local architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, part Viennese Modernism, part Glasgow quirkiness and heavy brickwork. It’s how you end up with a group of painters, the “Glasgow Boys,” who brought Impressionist colors to a Celtic landscape and captured the serene, moneyed interiors of a great industrial city. | The city has always been a capital of style: The people expect to be looked at, they expect to be seen, and they feel their appearance might convey their essence. Not every city has such an atmosphere: In central London, for example, people expect to be invisible. But Glasgow is a place where style is believed to be an aspect of progress, and the city has long had the knack of bringing the best of new international thinking and melding it with vernacular instinct. That’s how you end up with the renowned local architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, part Viennese Modernism, part Glasgow quirkiness and heavy brickwork. It’s how you end up with a group of painters, the “Glasgow Boys,” who brought Impressionist colors to a Celtic landscape and captured the serene, moneyed interiors of a great industrial city. |
| Money poured into Glasgow, yet it has always been a working class city — humane, political, refusenik — and much of the postpunk energy of my teenage years came from the feeling that we lived in a conurbation of natural aesthetes, hospitable to foreign ideas but playing second fiddle to no one. Roganos, which is still considered Glasgow’s most famous restaurant, prides itself on a democratic instinct that is entirely native. When Harold Wilson’s government was in power, it is said, he found himself unexpectedly held over in the city. Unable to return to London that night, one of his aides called Roganos to book a table. | Money poured into Glasgow, yet it has always been a working class city — humane, political, refusenik — and much of the postpunk energy of my teenage years came from the feeling that we lived in a conurbation of natural aesthetes, hospitable to foreign ideas but playing second fiddle to no one. Roganos, which is still considered Glasgow’s most famous restaurant, prides itself on a democratic instinct that is entirely native. When Harold Wilson’s government was in power, it is said, he found himself unexpectedly held over in the city. Unable to return to London that night, one of his aides called Roganos to book a table. |
| “We’re full up,” said the maître d’. | “We’re full up,” said the maître d’. |
| “But I have the prime minister,” said the aide. | “But I have the prime minister,” said the aide. |
| “That’s as may be. But we’re still full up.” | “That’s as may be. But we’re still full up.” |
| The street that connects Carruth’s Grotto with Roganos is called Ingram Street. It runs the length of an area of central Glasgow called the Merchant City. There are more famous streets in the world, more famous streets in Glasgow even, but Ingram Street marries the old and the new in a way that makes it a glittering example of what a road should look like in the new global village. It’s confidently Glaswegian and instinctually international. In recent years, the street has become a meeting place of ornate style and fashion swagger, lifting itself out of a few decades of dowdiness to become Glasgow’s answer to the Boulevard Raspail. Ingram Street was originally called Back Cow Lane and became known as a place of banks, tearooms and illicit debating houses. The street was named for Archibald Ingram, one of Glasgow’s notorious “tobacco lords,” who had commercial interests in Virginia, Maryland and the West Indies. If you scrape the gilt off a fashionable street, you don’t only see grime, you see origins and arguments, as well as a continuing story. Ingram Street first appears on the 1807 Fleming’s “Map of the City of Glasgow and Suburbs,” and, even in my youth, when the street was down on its luck, you had only to lift up your eyes to see the design, the columns and the rows of windows that shone with light from another time. | The street that connects Carruth’s Grotto with Roganos is called Ingram Street. It runs the length of an area of central Glasgow called the Merchant City. There are more famous streets in the world, more famous streets in Glasgow even, but Ingram Street marries the old and the new in a way that makes it a glittering example of what a road should look like in the new global village. It’s confidently Glaswegian and instinctually international. In recent years, the street has become a meeting place of ornate style and fashion swagger, lifting itself out of a few decades of dowdiness to become Glasgow’s answer to the Boulevard Raspail. Ingram Street was originally called Back Cow Lane and became known as a place of banks, tearooms and illicit debating houses. The street was named for Archibald Ingram, one of Glasgow’s notorious “tobacco lords,” who had commercial interests in Virginia, Maryland and the West Indies. If you scrape the gilt off a fashionable street, you don’t only see grime, you see origins and arguments, as well as a continuing story. Ingram Street first appears on the 1807 Fleming’s “Map of the City of Glasgow and Suburbs,” and, even in my youth, when the street was down on its luck, you had only to lift up your eyes to see the design, the columns and the rows of windows that shone with light from another time. |
| One evening recently, on a return visit to the city, I decided to walk the length of Ingram Street. The boys and girls were out in force, seeking complicated cocktails and the kind of lighting effects you used only to see in Glasgow — in nearby George Square — in the weeks running up to Christmas. Facing onto Ingram Street at its western end is the Gallery of Modern Art, housed in the old Stirling Library. The Gallery opened in 1996, but it is somehow typical of Glasgow in that the wild and wonderful artworks contained inside are forced to compete with an icon of local humor outside: Carlo Marochetti’s 1844 equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, which stands in front of the gallery, the duke’s head famously adorned with a traffic cone. | |
| No boutique in Paris can compete with the best on Ingram Street, not for size, sheer scale or for generously baroque interiors, where stone and light make little cathedral halls, in which the rails of clothes appear almost meditative. I walked into the Jigsaw building and was immediately struck by the lamps — fountains of light — and windows that would not have disgraced a Pugin church. The ironwork alone was worth the visit. As early Glasgow darkness began to encroach on the lighted space, and as “don’t go chasing waterfalls” wafted up to a copper dome, I bought a black T-shirt and felt it must be a classic, to have lived here. It is perhaps difficult, in the post-Lehman Brothers world, to imagine that banks were once palaces of hope, but the Jigsaw building once housed the Glasgow Savings Bank, for 100 years (from 1870) the largest trustee savings bank in Great Britain, regarded as “a vehicle for local endeavor.” | No boutique in Paris can compete with the best on Ingram Street, not for size, sheer scale or for generously baroque interiors, where stone and light make little cathedral halls, in which the rails of clothes appear almost meditative. I walked into the Jigsaw building and was immediately struck by the lamps — fountains of light — and windows that would not have disgraced a Pugin church. The ironwork alone was worth the visit. As early Glasgow darkness began to encroach on the lighted space, and as “don’t go chasing waterfalls” wafted up to a copper dome, I bought a black T-shirt and felt it must be a classic, to have lived here. It is perhaps difficult, in the post-Lehman Brothers world, to imagine that banks were once palaces of hope, but the Jigsaw building once housed the Glasgow Savings Bank, for 100 years (from 1870) the largest trustee savings bank in Great Britain, regarded as “a vehicle for local endeavor.” |
| I walked a few doors up to the Corinthian Club, a giant bar and club housed in the old Paisley Union Bank. Entering this Ingram Street fun house, under crouching statues and classical columns, I found myself in a defiant, Swarovski-crystal universe of Glaswegians dressed to the nines. “Champagne all round,” said a young, slick-haired gentleman. “Only the best for the likes of us.” Standing at the bar, talking to these tarted-up patrons, I wondered how much they would know of the old Glasgow ways of self-making. Perhaps their grandparents’ grandparents would still have talked of the infamous bank robbery that took place in this building in 1811. Like all working-class cities, like Chicago, like Manchester, like Naples or Marseille, Glasgow loves the story of a major heist, and the men who robbed this Ingram Street institution were respectively executed, transported to Australia, with a third dying in prison. As Glasgow was becoming Glasgow, the trial of these men became a cautionary tale on the wiles of capitalism. “We may say with great truth,” wrote an anonymous pamphleteer in 1822, “that no civil trial, by jury, in Scotland, ever excited so much interest, nor was there ever a decision given which afforded more general satisfaction.” | I walked a few doors up to the Corinthian Club, a giant bar and club housed in the old Paisley Union Bank. Entering this Ingram Street fun house, under crouching statues and classical columns, I found myself in a defiant, Swarovski-crystal universe of Glaswegians dressed to the nines. “Champagne all round,” said a young, slick-haired gentleman. “Only the best for the likes of us.” Standing at the bar, talking to these tarted-up patrons, I wondered how much they would know of the old Glasgow ways of self-making. Perhaps their grandparents’ grandparents would still have talked of the infamous bank robbery that took place in this building in 1811. Like all working-class cities, like Chicago, like Manchester, like Naples or Marseille, Glasgow loves the story of a major heist, and the men who robbed this Ingram Street institution were respectively executed, transported to Australia, with a third dying in prison. As Glasgow was becoming Glasgow, the trial of these men became a cautionary tale on the wiles of capitalism. “We may say with great truth,” wrote an anonymous pamphleteer in 1822, “that no civil trial, by jury, in Scotland, ever excited so much interest, nor was there ever a decision given which afforded more general satisfaction.” |
| Ingram Street is all about the ironies of self-improvement. For anyone interested in elegance and its discontents, it is a place to be. On your average evening, the street swarms with the beautiful and the damned, the boutiques lit with industrial lighting; the bars offer cocktails that use kumquat and Turkish bitters; the restaurants hide under beautiful sandstone tenements. On that recent evening walk, after a few drinks, I stopped at 213 Ingram Street, looking into a fiery run of shops, including Agent Provocateur. Stores tell their own stories, about desire and denial and everything in between. But once upon a time, this was the exact spot of the Ingram Street Tearooms, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1900. With its high-backed chairs and white wooden panels, its Art Nouveau ironwork and stained glass, the tearoom became famous, as the street itself now is, exemplifying the art of making everyday life more interesting than it might be. The secret of the tearoom was the secret of Glasgow — that ordinary people have a right to elegance — and the secret of every place where life can thrive on transformation. When the original tearooms closed in 1954, city officials preserved the interior in a dark store. | Ingram Street is all about the ironies of self-improvement. For anyone interested in elegance and its discontents, it is a place to be. On your average evening, the street swarms with the beautiful and the damned, the boutiques lit with industrial lighting; the bars offer cocktails that use kumquat and Turkish bitters; the restaurants hide under beautiful sandstone tenements. On that recent evening walk, after a few drinks, I stopped at 213 Ingram Street, looking into a fiery run of shops, including Agent Provocateur. Stores tell their own stories, about desire and denial and everything in between. But once upon a time, this was the exact spot of the Ingram Street Tearooms, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1900. With its high-backed chairs and white wooden panels, its Art Nouveau ironwork and stained glass, the tearoom became famous, as the street itself now is, exemplifying the art of making everyday life more interesting than it might be. The secret of the tearoom was the secret of Glasgow — that ordinary people have a right to elegance — and the secret of every place where life can thrive on transformation. When the original tearooms closed in 1954, city officials preserved the interior in a dark store. |
| I remember being a child, with my mother, climbing those buildings in the cage of a lift. On some of the floors, they had warehouses where you could buy clothes, paying for them with a special credit note that was then paid back in weekly installments. One day, we went to the top of a beautiful Victorian brownstone on Ingram Street. The lift was broken that day, so we climbed the stairs and stopped on a landing — the stairs were marble and the walls were covered in green Art Deco tiles — and I recall my mother and me looking through a large window over the rooftops of the city. “I think I can see all the way to Paris and New York,” I said. | I remember being a child, with my mother, climbing those buildings in the cage of a lift. On some of the floors, they had warehouses where you could buy clothes, paying for them with a special credit note that was then paid back in weekly installments. One day, we went to the top of a beautiful Victorian brownstone on Ingram Street. The lift was broken that day, so we climbed the stairs and stopped on a landing — the stairs were marble and the walls were covered in green Art Deco tiles — and I recall my mother and me looking through a large window over the rooftops of the city. “I think I can see all the way to Paris and New York,” I said. |
| “You can see George Square,” she said. “And that’s just as good.” | “You can see George Square,” she said. “And that’s just as good.” |
| “Can I have some shoes?” I asked. | “Can I have some shoes?” I asked. |
| “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go in. You can be proud walking anywhere in the world wearing the shoes they sell up here.” | “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go in. You can be proud walking anywhere in the world wearing the shoes they sell up here.” |
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