This has been an odd year that began with winter prolonged through an extra month, not by frost and snow — for decades snow starts to thaw as soon as it falls in Glasgow — but by occasional sunlit days, each followed by two or three rainy ones. In Hillhead gardens and parks the trees were bare branched far into May, then suddenly in less than a week it seemed that buds unfurled, exploded into dense varieties of lovely green, followed by a warm bright season refreshed by a few cool moist days, a season that has not stopped. Toward the 20th century’s end I noticed a few chairs and tables appearing on the pavement before some Byres Road snack bars. I did not notice the increase of this practice (due to global warming?) until recently, but Hillhead on fine evenings and weekends has an astonishingly Parisian look. I believe a social history of Glasgow — of Britain! — could appear in a short description of how Hillhead shops have changed in the last sixty years, if we count Byres Road and the adjacent part of Great Western Road. Here goes!
In my childhood and student days the main Hillhead streets had all the small useful provision shops found in any British country town or large village. They included a Woolworths, two Post Offices (the biggest with a sorting and telegram office), two bookshops (one of them second-hand), a cobbler or shoe repair shop, and a clock mender. I do not remember who mended defective radios, gramophones (as record players were called), hoovers and other household appliances, but think it was done by taking them to shops where we had bought them. Hillhead had at least three restaurants of a sort called tea-rooms, where genteel women like my aunts took afternoon tea or sometimes a lunch they regarded as dinner. The many university students lodging here ensured customers for many pubs, cafés, fish-and-chip shops. There must have been an estate agent’s office somewhere but I cannot remember it.
A change began in the 1970s when two big, useful, well supplied hardware shops closed, the owner of one telling me he could no longer afford to pay the increased rates. It may not be a coincidence that a mile away in Anniesland a huge B&Q arrived selling every sort of household tool and appliance but mending none. There is still a shop selling clocks and jewellery, and twenty years ago I took in a very pretty little clock presented to me by my staff when I left Molendinar Primary. They had several of the same kind for sale, but explained that mending it would cost me £7.50 but I could buy a new one for £5.50. Then a big supermarket opened at the top of Byres Road and soon the butchers and most small provision shops vanished leaving only one shop I remember from childhood, selling fish and game. The others have been taken by several glossy estate agents’ offices that can easily pay the district councils high rates, and many second-hand or foreign craft shops largely exempt from rates by being registered charities, and which are mostly staffed by voluntary workers. Other shops are chiefly staffed by young folk who know nothing about the manufacture and quality of what they sell, do not even need to know arithmetic because cash machines do their addition, multiplication and subtraction. Universal state education was made the law in 1870 Britain because (as Napoleon said) Britain was a nation of shopkeepers, highly productive ones, who could not have lasted as long as they did without a big workforce able to read, write and count. A Victorian statesman56 who had hitherto opposed state education because it might lead to social revolution of the French sort, now publically announced, “We must now educate our new masters!” and became foremost in committees that ensured state schools taught children:
1) to sit still in rows,
2) to never question a teacher,
3) to only talk when asked by a teacher,
4) to learn, not think.
This system was imperfect because it enlarged the middle class with more teachers than could be drawn from its upper ranks. Many of these liked thinking and encouraged it in some of the state-funded schools, generally called Board Schools because Britain is a Kingdom whose governments don’t want to rule a state. But the increase of literate thinking people in Britain led to the founding of the old Labour Party, though the people who governed Britain still graduated from those ancient privatized English schools misleadingly called Public. These no longer care if or what the state schools now teach, since productive British industries are now reduced to banking and weapons manufacture. The owners of British shops and stores fill them with goods packaged in outsourced factories.57
The genteel Byres Road tea-rooms are long gone, but many more restaurants, cafes and pubs have opened there or in back lanes. The customers are partly the local middle class enriched by the privatisation of public wealth begun in Thatcher’s reign, and partly Glasgow University students who have been more than doubled by a huge intake of students from abroad. They are taken because their fees make up for the lost student grants once paid by the government, so the entrance qualifications have been lowered and in some courses the standard of teaching. Students from poorer families support themselves with bank loans or by working locally as waiters and bar tenders or some other counter job. Their wages are often less than the minimum that European regulations are meant to impose. The two Post Offices are closed but packages can be posted from the back of a Pakistani general dealer.
Will think about other changes I have seen in Hillhead streets.
After Zoe left on her mysterious businesses this morning I stayed in, brooding brooding brooding on which avenue of research to explore in the library, then grew aware of distant crowd susurrations punctuated by erratic music. The West End Festival had started.58 Don’t know who organizes this which has happened for several years, closing upper Byres Road to motor traffic, replacing it with funfair stalls, a bouncy castle, musicians on platforms, and filling the street wall to wall with mobile citizens. Have avoided it hitherto but today was strangely attracted. Wandered there and among the huge undisciplined genial crowd, bathing in it, enjoying I suppose the mild communal ecstasy Walt Whitman enjoyed in 19th century Manhattan. I lunched at a table outside the Antipasti, pondering the great changes in people’s clothing for the Byres Road history.
Before the 1970s I think nearly half of all women over thirty-five in Hillhead wore skirts or dresses. Now only a minority of young women do, mostly girls in the brown or green skirts that are the Notre Dame and Laurelbank school uniforms. I believe women’s trouser suits became fashionable in the 1960s and miniskirts in the 1970s, and when I first saw each I was amused, thinking them not at all sexually attractive, but in a few days they started exciting me as I suppose any eye-catching women’s fashion always will. I was glad when the Turkish bare midriff became fashionable before the 20th century ended. I have always liked women’s stomachs, perhaps because as a child I believed sexual intercourse was through the navel. At the same time young folk, not all of them women, began sporting tattoos, also studs and rings through parts of their faces. Though used to earrings I hate seeing that. I cannot help thinking it painful. Hey ho. But the main fashion change is in pockets.
These were once only seen in army uniforms and workers’ overalls. Professional folk and people at leisure wore trousers, jackets and blazers with pockets sewn within the linings to interrupt, as little as possible, the body’s outline. A single breast pocket in jackets was sometimes made noticeable by a protruding fountain pen or, on formal occasions the triangular corner of a neatly folded white handkerchief. Women’s dresses and skirts had no pockets, so they carried handbags. It is now not fashionable to look suave and neat in modern Britain so every garment I saw from my pavement table had external pockets of the workmen or military kind. On baggy jeans several looked as big as buckets. Some big pockets had small ones on top. There were jeans with four or five pairs of pockets, some at ankle level. Miniskirts also had them. They were fastened by a variety of buttons, buckles, studs and zips. Girls in slim jeans only had them on hip pockets where, seen in motion from behind, they pleasantly emphasized the changing balance of the buttocks, but baggier trousers were more frequent, often made tougher-looking by conspicuous seams. Some women’s jeans have the oblique canvas strip at the side for tradesmen to sling their hammers, and I saw a skirt with that too. Nearly all clothing suggest the wearers are ready for hard work, while some were deliberately torn to suggest they had suffered rough treatment, why? Saw one slim, attractive girl with huge ragged holes through which were visible expensive stockings with a delicate openwork pattern of leaves and fruit. And amidst the brightly coloured stalls, bouncy castle, balloons and candyfloss most clothes were black, khaki or blue-grey.