Portraits and Miniatures by Roy Jenkins

Author:Roy Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1993-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

Glasgow’s Place in the Cities of the World

A lecture given in April 1990 to the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow to mark Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture.

The Two cities of which Glasgow never reminds me, whether spontaneously or by design, are London and Edinburgh. With many other great cities of the world it has some affinity, with New York, perhaps with Chicago. I have also found echoes of Glasgow in Barcelona, Boston, Lisbon and Naples. But I never thought it had much to do with Paris (except for the Scottish Colourists, and they, unusually for schools of painting, owe as much to the east as to the west of Scotland) until in one brilliant November sunset last year I stood on the Pont de la Concorde and suddenly thought that the line of the Seine, while utterly dissimilar to that of the Thames, was rather like that of the Clyde. The Pont des Arts aroused a thought of the Suspension Bridge, the Institut de France could be the Custom House, and looking in the other direction the slopes above the Place de Chaillot rose up in a passable imitation of the West End.

What does one mean by saying that one city reminds one of another? Not always a great deal could, I suppose, be a brutal answer. Sometimes there can be a certain logical basis for comparison, as when I suddenly realized that the reason brownstone New York, i.e. New York before skyscrapers or even large apartment blocks, seemed to me to have a considerable affinity with the less grandiose parts of Berlin was that, as great cities, they were contemporary with each other and with nowhere else. Both of them moved into the world league at almost exactly the same time, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Equally one could say that Lisbon is more like San Francisco than it is like Marseille or Genoa because although southern it is not Mediterranean but oceanic. More frequently, however, the thought of comparison comes suddenly and irrationally, although it can none the less be powerful and even productive as with the little dunked madeleine cake that set Proust off on the whole evocation of his childhood and the greatest novel of the twentieth century.

Thus if I take the Glasgow/New York connection, which I find stronger than the link of either with London, it has most vividly come to my mind in largely irrational ways. As each week of the first autumn after I ceased to be Member of Parliament for Hillhead went by, I found that I increasingly missed Glasgow. It is paradoxical that I should have felt more nostalgic as the Glasgow evenings got even darker than the London ones. But I have always found that the special metropolitan quality of the West End best expressed itself at the season of twilights soon after lunch. If I had to choose a single most evocative vignette it would be of an autumn or winter Saturday afternoon in

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