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Sunflowers.... For Vincent. This is a post from the end of autumn. October time 2023 a few months ago now.
Met up with Alan at the Barras Market, had a wander round there then headed up through Glasgow Cross and the Merchant City District.
Glasgow Cross district.
Period buildings around Glasgow Cross.
Found a few murals in a back lane I'd seen online but not visited in person.
Goose.
Another Lion.
Merchant City District.
In the city centre, restaurants and bars change all the time. Last time I walked past here it was called something else from a different culture. Scottish Tennent's Lager I think.
Glasgow's Red Tourist bus. Departs from Ingram Street on a run around the city while you have afternoon tea on board or you can hire it out for a group booking. Not being a tea or coffee person I've seen it around but never been on it. Popular though. Other tourist buses run around the city but you don't get served with anything on board.
We made our way up through the university and college lands still walking slightly uphill. Livingstone Tower above. An early 1960s construction addition to the University of Strathclyde it was named after African explorer and missionary David Livingstone.
A side view. Always liked this building and the colourful frontage helps to soften the brutalist nature of grey concrete on the lower sections. Note the steep drumlin it's built on. Glasgow's main city centre shopping streets usually run west to east in the flat sections between these cucumber shaped hills with minor streets like this one running south to north up and over them.
Quite a few murals around this district and several items of modern sculpture within the campus grounds. As non students you can walk around the area freely as the University of Strathclyde, Caledonian University, and The City of Glasgow College are very close to each other, built over several of Glasgow's notorious drumlins ( small hills) which makes walking energetic but gives fantastic views over this bumpy green metropolis. 'The leafy city of one hundred hills.'
Student mural and false door.
The big surprise on this walk was an open day for the High Street allotments which I'd never been to before. During Covid lockdowns people in the suburbs had it relatively easy with sizable gardens and green spaces to escape into but the area around the High Street and Drygate districts has very few gardens... mostly tenements, tarmac, concrete, and high rise flats.
So these allotments are even more precious I'd Imagine. Cabbage white butterfly here.
A few of the Drygate high rise flats and tenements. Many more exist out of view. While Number Ten Downing Street had numerous drunken parties all the way through the various covid lockdowns without the slightest threat of a £10,000 fine... spare a thought for folk in inner city high rise flats or tenements, without gardens, stuck indoors for months on end. Mind you for ordinary folk like myself in the outlying suburban districts Covid did not make much difference at all as I still went on local solo countryside walks... as usual... with no police ever in sight to enforce anything. And my life barely changed at all. It was just what I normally do. It was mainly middle and upper class folk that were deprived of holidays abroad, second home visits, frequent nights out or visits to the theatre or other public entertainments but on the plus side many did save/make a shed load of money during covid restrictions... in one way or another....
Maybe that's why this small set of allotments were so treasured and special to the surrounding residents as I've never seen so many delights packed into such a small space.
Not only dozens of sunflowers but each bed held marrows, peas, other vegetables and a cute collection of surprises.
Free to get in as well on the open day. The highlight of the walk as it was so unexpected.
Hedgehog togetherness.
After that splurge of radiant colour we climbed still higher to Glasgow's City of the dead. The Necropolis.
Church detail on the way up.
When I first visited the Necropolis, back in the 1970s and 1980s I was usually alone apart from a few down and outs who would sleep in the open crypts for shelter from the rain. Not many tourists visited back then. It's very popular today however with tourists up here most days from around the world. The steeple of Glasgow Cathedral getting a makeover, above.
I mainly came up here for the excellent views. Barrowland Ballroom and the Gorbals District from the Necropolis. What I didn't realise then however was that it's only people that could afford a stone monument that get remembered up here and Glasgow, like any other old city has had numerous plagues, disasters, mass calamities etc over its long history where hundreds or even thousands died at one time. So unless they are all buried in mass graves somewhere else this entire hillside must be comprised of long dead corpses, piled one on top of each other. Probably why it's a sizable hill in the first place. A hill of dead people as for everyone one that could afford a stone monument about one thousand citizens could not. Something to think about when you are up here. Be careful where you step.
On the very top of the hill factory owner Charles Tennant sits. A wealthy industrialist who built one of the world's largest chemical factories at Glasgow's Sighthill. Died early to mid 1800s. So this summit was here then.
Some of the other large stone monuments.
Celtic Park Football Ground.
John Knox protestant firebrand also commands a summit view from the highest mound of unknown, unremarkable, unremembered bodies beneath. He who made Mary Queen of Scots short life all the harder, being a Catholic Queen in a largely Protestant court/country. Or it was back then among the elite of the Scottish lowlands where the main base of castles, power and influence existed.
Life everlasting...?
I like this one the best though. As the truly innocent.... 'they sleep, play, fly, dance and sing with angels.' This I've always known.... from my own birth to death.
