Glasgow psygeo guide
overview
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Glasgow psygeo is the second guidebook in the series, available summer 2011. Like Edinburgh psygeo, it takes six psychegeographic journeys through places and hinterlands parallel to the day-to-day life of the city.
Most people who aren’t aware of the other in Glasgow will associate the city with either rivalry through football, ribaldry through the musichall or mockintosh – the humiliation of sensitivity. None of these are true, each are truisms. What I’ve discovered in my own mind, from a first explore through govan and the cctv-less george V docks in 1983, to walking the city daily at the moment, is a sense of independence, a pioneer spirit, a reaching out by outcasts, a tribe in exile in a western wilderness, somehow overlooked up to and even beyond the mediaeval period by the powers in Edinburgh – ironically founded by the wester-coaster McAlpin clique.
Neal Ascherson’s book Stone Voices is useful if you’re looking for the roots of this “alternative scotland”. If Dunfermline is Edinburgh’s birthplace, Dunadd is Glasgow’s. Wales features very strongly too – naturally, being the opposite of the English influence in the east. Glasgow is clearly a celtic place – Edinburgh is clearly not.
I’ve also come to understand Margaret MacDonald and Charles Mackintosh in an unexpected way only recently. Its mostly about the collective unconscious – something I recognised about Mackintosh many years ago, whilst visiting the Steelcase headquarters in Grand Rapids – but also an expression of the singularity of place/renewal/creation translated through their well-known symbolism of rose and tree. I see Glasgow centred on Sauchiehall street – the willow meadow. When MacDonald says Oh ye, all ye that walk in Willowood, she’s not talking about ladies who lunch.
In the meantime, if you’re a visitor looking for non-touristy info, start here – Hidden Glasgow and here – Glasgow’s Secret Geometry.
update August 2010
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Glasgow psygeo guide will be available to purchase as both 248pp printed book and PDF download at fromztoa.net from Summer 2011 – click to receive a preview invite