Glasgow’s palace of dreams

By andrew o’hagan

The Scottish novelist and artist Alasdair Gray once remarked that if the place you live in isn’t painted, if your voices aren’t heard on the radio and your people never appear in novels, then you may live there in real time but you don’t live there imaginatively. I grew up outside Glasgow in a Catholic household full of voices, stories and strong beliefs, but my parents didn’t have books. If you grow up in a house like that, where classical music is never heard and painting is forever a matter of Dulux, you may come to adulthood wondering whether high culture isn’t something that can only describe the lives of others.

One morning in May 1981, when I was 13, I went into the city and found my way to Kelvingrove. It was beautiful red sandstone, and daylight glinted off the arched windows. I was nervous going in: I wasn’t sure if you had to pay, or whether you had to know something already. But when I climbed the stairs and looked over the balcony, I had what I can only describe as my first teenage epiphany: this was ours, all ours, the paintings, the light, the stonework. It belonged to the people of Glasgow, and to me.