Early accounts of George Square are not good. Descriptions tell of a hollow filled with green water, used as a site for drowning puppies and slaughtering horses. It is tempting to suggest that things haven't improved much since those days. While that would be manifestly unfair, the ongoing fiasco that is Glasgow's main civic space says a lot about the failings of our urban environment, attitude to design and indeed public life.
Even beyond its sorry beginnings, George Square has never really been the grand civic place of the public imagination. Starting out as private gardens more in the style of Blythswood Square, it was residential in use and lacking in grandeur for much its existence. The development of the the surroundings was piecemeal at best with previous recessions limiting the speed and scale of building around it. It says something of the muscularity of William Young's City Chambers that it takes this ragtag collection of the mediocre, the mismatched and the misplaced and almost turns it into a true civic space. Almost. One has always needed some degree of tunnel vision to be truly impressed by George Square. Not for Glasgow the vision of an Adam applied in a complete and harmonious manner. Glasgow is pragmatic and proud. Not short of ambition but rarely matching that ambition with real vision. Glasgow knows what it wants and isn't afraid to bulldoze anything in its way to get to it but from slum clearance to slum clearance and from GoMA to Glasgow Harbour there is rarely sufficient clarity or sophistication of thought to make anything of true worth.
Thus it is no real surprise that grand plans to resolve some of the issues of the square turned quickly to farce and ended with the sort of parochial philistinism that pervades so much of Scottish public life. I will declare an interest here in that i am of the view that this small-mindedness is largely, if not exclusively, propagated by the Labour Party establishment who still have a stranglehold of many town halls across the nation. As Scots we take great pride in having driven the Conservatives out. The Labour Party however remains resolutely conservative and the difference in case is becoming less and less relevant over time. Far from just being resistant to change there is increasingly a need to justify everything in purely monetary values. This is still jarring when it comes from former socialists but from social care to education they talk more of costs that values. Anything which might be deemed frivolous like improving our shared public spaces is always costed out in units of schools or nurses.
So, if you could choose where you start from, it wouldnt be here but its only the problems which are actually problematic that need solutions. The stuff that isnt broken can happily stay as it is. We have a broken thing here, but what to do?
Redesign it clearly. That much is pretty obvious you would think. Except it turns out it isn't. Not when you have been through the farrago of a competition that GCC have run. Not when you have bodged consultation and communication with the public. When you go through all this you end up with not doing that much really. Tidying the place up a bit is an answer but whats it an answer to?
Well, not that much but the real issue behind all this is the failure of anyone involved in it to really define what the objectives of the project are and to get people on board. If you are going to change something it isn't unreasonable to ask why you are changing it. Perhaps the competition brief did this. Not being party to that document it is hard to tell but from the outside the objectives dint seem clear. There certainly seems to be a mismatch between what Jimmy Public wants out of the square and what GCC want.
If we are to take the comments sections of various websites at face value, the man on the Govan omnibus wants somewhere nice to sit. Somewhere with trees and grass. According to at least one facebook page, they want a public park.
GCC on the other hand want somewhere to stage events, mostly for financial gain. They see lots of people attending events and concerts in the square and think that means they are probably a good idea.
I can sympathise with the council on this one. George Square is an appropriate venue for various events in the calendar from the Art Fair to the Great Scottish Run to the Olympic Torch Relay. While Glasgow has plenty of parks and green space it is hard to find another decent hard paved open area to accommodate mass events. Suggestions that these things should be banished from the city centre to the SECC should be treated with contempt. These are events which enrich the life of a city and help bring us all together. A central space for civic events has value.
This is something that the rest of the world doesn't struggle so much with. There are not many places in the world that fill up their main civic space with nicely tended lawns and ornamental borders. The very best spaces in the world are simply designed but provide the backdrop to the life of the city whether that is Piazza San Marco in Venice, Piazza Navona in Rome or the Grand Place in Brussels. No grass to be found but still plenty of opportunities to sit and linger.
This is where i think the real mistake has been made. Getting architects involved in something like this is dangerous. Architects like to build things. That is fine if you want a building but when you are dealing with the space between buildings it can be terribly dangerous. Where you thought you would get a nice piazza to sit in, you might have ended up with a great big clumsy blob squatting in it like Seville did.
So, less should have been more but that would only have gone part of the way. It would still fail to deal with the real issues of George Square which remain regardless of what is ultimately done with it. We cant do much about the scale of the space or what surrounds it in built form but if we look at successful civic spaces elsewhere we find that they are either entirely or partially pedestrianised. A civic space is a space for people, not a space for cars. For a city that has had itself so heavily engineered to accommodate cars over the years it seems absurd that just about every single street remains a key traffic route from one place to another.
All of this is, i am sure, the result of sound engineering and analysis but here is a thought: if you cant divert the traffic elsewhere to make the city centre a better place for people, how about doing something to reduce the level of traffic until you can? We need bigger thinking than just repaving George Square, we need to rethink how people move around the city on a larger scale. If we don't there are whole swathes of the city which will remain forever blighted and impossibly to properly regenerate.
