Town & Country Planning, December 2008
It is now more than a quarter of a century since the Burrell Collection opened in Glasgow and kick-started the whole buzz of renaissance that came to prominence as Glasgow’s ‘Miles Better’ campaign.
In some ways, it was Glasgow which pioneered a culture-led rehabilitation that was later followed by other cities, most recently Liverpool.
In fact, it is hard to grasp quite how miserable, pathetic and passive our once proud British cities had become by the 1980s, constrained by a combination of central government diktat, urban motorways and debt.
The fact that British cities can aspire once again to feel the equal of Lyons or Munich or Genoa is partly at least down to Glasgow’s pioneering path.
But it wasn’t retail or giant regeneration schemes that allowed Glasgow to begin to claw itself back from almost complete collapse. It was the art collection amassed by the Edinburgh shipowner William Burrell.
It was he who left it to Glasgow in revenge for Edinburgh’s removal of the iron railings outside his house in 1940, couched with such strict conditions about air quality that it was four decades before the collection went on public display.
The idea that culture can lead cities out of collapse to compete effectively with their rivals is hardly new. In the USA, it emerged as the new civics movement, led by a range of influential organisations like Partners for Liveable Places and others.
Even then, research showed that the most effective way to attract relocating companies was to be the kind of place that a CEO and his family would like to live. That meant concert halls, parks and galleries, rather than tax breaks or flexible emissions limits.
Why am I bringing up these old issues again now? For two reasons. The first is that, having lived through a decade or more where regeneration was supposed to be about retail developments or large property schemes, it is worth reminding ourselves that culture at the heart of urban economies has rather gone on the back-burner.
And since retail and property development have both come to a shuddering halt with the credit crunch, that is an urgent lesson to learn. Identikit retailing clones places and undermines their long-term ability to compete; culture attracts creative people and guarantees a measure of economic bounce.
The second reason is Southampton.
I visited Southampton on the trail, only five centuries too late, of Christopher Columbus, who went there on his way to Bristol and Iceland as a young man, and found my way to the municipal art gallery.
Now it just so happens that Southampton owns one of the most exciting collections of twentieth century British art anywhere in the country. But unlike the Burrell Collection, it is hidden away, almost invisible next to the shopping centre – the recipient of so much municipal love and attention over the past decade – with its café insanely closed on a Sunday.
It is a prime example of a city wasting their most precious asset. Because Southampton is also an example of a city which has put all its eggs in the identikit retailing basket, just as retailing looks set to plunge into the economic abyss.
There is no view of the waterfront from the city centre. There is an archaeological museum and a maritime museum – though all the internet links to it I tried just now are broken – but no sense in the centre that this is a historic place.
In the cellars below the art gallery, or so I understand, is a whole treasure trove of the city’s history – including a whole tram – which the council has not seen fit to put on public display.
This is all rather sad. Sad because Southampton lost so much history in the Blitz, and sad also because making it just like everywhere else – a convenient concrete clone of every other city in Britain – is actually the quickest way to poverty and dependence, especially in the recession that lies ahead.
On the other hand, the latest Southampton city centre plan (2006) seems thoroughly aware of the problem, and there are plans to open up the waterfront, make more of the medieval city walls, and build on Southampton’s distinctive history.
For that belated understanding, we should all be thankful – though there was no mention of Columbus. Because I believe people are turning against places that have great art collections but keep them hidden away, where their galleries are closed but their shopping centres full.
They are beginning to realise that is a recipe for short-term income and long-term failure. People want to live and invest in places that are real, not places where inverted snobbery has cast one of the greatest art collections in Britain somewhere out beyond the shopping centre car park.
If it is to survive as a political philosophy, localism needs to find an economic driver as well as a democratic one. That means becoming more aware of the assets that cities have, even if they have to be measured by a different yardstick to conventional regeneration.
David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation and the author of Toward the setting Sun. www.david-boyle.co.uk