A failure of leadership over Glasgow’s “Mack”

France's leaders made restoring Notre Dame a matter of national pride

Glasgow’s School of Art has been wrapped in plastic

Paris welcomed world leaders this weekend to celebrate the magnificent rebuild of Notre Dame, completed on a time scale many thought impossible. I was in Glasgow on Sunday. visiting my uncle, and, sparked by indignation at its very different fate, we took a taxi to look at the burnt-out School of Art.

What a contrast. It is a plastic-wrapped wreck, while the streets around it that were once thronged with artists and tourists are deserted. There seems no clear plan for its restoration.

Poor old Glasgow! It is difficult to imagine that if a building of this national and international significance in London or Edinburgh was damaged by fire, it would be abandoned as this has been.

Glasgow needs its Mack back

The city has never needed a sense of civic pride more - Fraser Nelson in the Herald last week pointed out that its satellite suburbs have the highest rates of drug deaths and people in sickness benefit in the UK. The black economy has taken hold in these places and so has a sense of drift.

The contrast with Edinburgh at this time of year is enormous. Edinburgh is hotching with tourists from all over the world - the centre of Glasgow was mildly busy but there were plenty of seats in the restaurants we passed and just a short queue for its modest, child-friendly winter fair. Personally, I would rather do my Christmas shopping in the latter - I enjoyed having space to move along the pavements at my own pace and there was someone playing what sounded like Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ on the station piano - but I digress.

The Scottish Government has not shown leadership on the Mack and the UK Government has shown complete indifference. If Scotland were an independent country then London could reasonably wash its hands of the situation. But it isn’t. The Mack is still one of Britain's most important buildings. It has international prestige, it is a draw for tourists and artists - the state that it has been allowed to get into is scandalous.

“Rugged and delicate at the same time”

The Mack was really the first and perhaps only building in the UK that responded to and influenced the development of Art Nouveau. It stepped from the stolidity of late Victoriana into the elegance of Modern Style and was influential in Europe and beyond.

Beautiful and beloved, it abounds in elegant design features, in a unique form of Art Deco created by the most important architect that Scotland - and indeed the UK - produced at that time, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

In 2009, it was judged the best British-designed building of the last 175 years. Architectural critic High Pearman wrote:

“Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art is a mysteriously beautiful building that manages to be rugged and delicate at the same time. Solidly built of stone but with enormous windows, enriched with swirling art nouveau motifs, it gradually becomes more refined - almost Japanese - in its later stages, especially its masterly, cliff-like library wing.

“Mackintosh designed everything down to the door handles, furniture and light fittings. It is of its time, it's traditionally built, it even draws on the precedent of Scottish castles, but it mixes in other influences and a sense of fin-de-siècle modernity, to emerge as something wholly original.

This building matters. It is special. Glasgow has built a strong reputation as a centre of art and design and the Mack is its beating heart.

Library of GSA, photo by Jia-yi from Flickr

Playing the blame game will not rebuild the Mack

And yet it lies neglected while indifferent institutions, seemingly more concerned with passing the buck or covering their backs than making progress, squabble amongst themselves.

The first fire was in 2014, caused by flammable art materials and then, during a rebuild, it was gutted by a second fire in 2018. The Scottish Fire Service took three years to conclude that the second fire was so big that there was no evidence of what had caused it. Perhaps they could have reached that conclusion sooner?

Now Glasgow School of Art is stuck in an interminable legal battle with the insurers, a US company called Travelers. The company is seeking to pin the blame for the fire on a long list of contractors and subcontractors who were involved in the rebuild - slowly and one by one. Traveling is clearly what they do best - away from the invoice.

The Mack may never be rebuilt if it has to wait for the insurance payout

In a recent article on the Mack in the digital publication Glasgow Bell, Margaret Taylor concluded that the way this is going, the Mack will never be rebuilt. Waiting for the insurance cheque to start the restoration is going to take decades.

She quoted architect Malcolm Fraser — the inaugural deputy chair of the Scottish Government’s built-environment quango Architecture and Design Scotland — saying that waiting for legal cases to conclude could mean it will be

“100 years before anyone can build anything”.

“It’s a very painful fact that Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burned down a year after Glasgow School of Art, and now it’s completing, and we haven’t even got a tender out to redesign the Mack,” he says. “It’s a fantastic indictment of the Scottish construction system that everyone knows something needs to happen to recover a key part of our heritage, and we just can’t do it. In France, there was a clear political will that it just needed to be built and that issues of blame, recrimination and money could be parked while that was going on. It’s not hard to see a situation where, if the government was willing to underwrite it, the Mack could be constructed and the money could be fought for later on.”

The UK government seems to think it is not their business

But far from providing the smeddum required, the UK’s political class has ignored the situation. The UK government apparently takes no interest. The only thing I can find is that in 2014, Westminster pledged £5 million to the restoration fund - since then zero. It is as if they think Glasgow is not their business.

The Scottish government gets a fixed budget that is often determined on the basis of “Barnett Consequentials” of what England needs. It is not actually an independent country - yet.

If the Labour government were to take on the restoration of the Mack, in collaboration with the Scottish government, that would give them something real to point to when asked what they have done for the people of Glasgow.

The Scottish government doesn’t think it is their problem either

Taylor reports that Scotland’s Culture Secretary Angus Robertson has ruled out a public inquiry - probably a good thing, given that Edinburgh’s tram inquiry took nine years and cost more than the trams. A public inquiry is not going to do anything useful - apart from soak up money that could be better spent on restoration. But then, Taylor adds:

“In any case, he stressed, GSA is a private, not public, institution, so the government would have no right to interfere.”

What a strange position to take! That would be like Macron saying that Notre Dame belonged to the Catholic Church and was nothing to do with the French government - instead he said it represented “the soul of France”.

Where are Scotland and the UK’s political leaders?

The cost of a full restoration of the Mack is calculated to be about £70 million. The rebuild of Notre Dame cost ten times that and was funded largely by donations from 150 countries. Its restoration was a national mission. There was clarity, commitment and backing from the government, most notably from President Emmanuel Macron.

The Scottish Government should be leading on the Mack. They should work with the UK Government, the GSA, Glasgow Council, the people of Scotland, the UK and the wider world to make it happen. The priority should be the rebuild, not getting bogged down in rows about the past.

Complete restoration can be done

The good news is that this is possible technically. Early concerns that it might have to be pulled down because the remaining structure was unsafe have been laid to rest, architect and writer Douglas Murphy, wrote in Apollo magazine in September.

Another silver lining is that detailed recording done after the 2014 fire means that the interiors and design details are incredibly well documented. The public is behind faithful restoration of this treasure.

Murphy wrote: ‘Faithful restoration’ means a recreation of all of the significant spaces of the building – the library, the lecture theatre, director’s office and so on, as well as the studios, while making sure that the building conforms to contemporary regulations. In practice, while this locks in place the shape of the rooms and the materials used, behind the skin there is scope for things to change – the use of steel or concrete within floors for strength and fire resistance, for example, or the removal of the obsolete ventilation ducts that got the building into the mess it’s in now.”

If the leadership is there, the money can be found

A full restoration of the Mack can and must be done - and within years not decades. It will take political will. If leadership is there, the money can be found. Restoring the Mac is a chance to put money and commitment behind a project involving skilled work and training opportunities for the people of greater Glasgow and beyond. It offers hope, purpose and a way to create a sense of personal, civic and national pride.

|