Portraits and Miniatures (24 page)

Washington is the most intriguing example of a city that stands uneasily on the frontier of being a metropolis. It is also interesting as the oldest and the most important of the politically and artificially created capitals, and hence the one which has had the longest opportunity to grow into a real city. It is now large enough by any standards. With over three million in the metropolitan area it is bigger than any German city, and bigger than any other European one except for London, Paris, Madrid and Moscow. But for the first 130 years it remained a small town built on an often muddy brown marsh with remarkably few amenities. When Theodore Roosevelt, a fashionable New Yorker,
became President in 1901, he regarded Washington as a place of adventurous exile and life in the White House almost like being in an army camp. British diplomats there were paid an unhealthy living allowance until well into this century.

The city grew dramatically only when first Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, then his wartime administration, and then the American captaincy of the West under Truman and Eisenhower led to an explosion in the size of the Federal Government. This growth took an essentially suburban form even quite close to the hub of government. Quintessential mid-twentieth-century Washington is made up of detached houses in dogwood-lined hilly streets. Not only are there virtually no even modestly high buildings, except across the Potomac in Alexandria, but there are hardly any carrefours which count as centres of animation and of which at least a hundred could be found in Paris. Nor is there any view that proclaims ‘you are in the centre of a great city' with anything like the assurance that does, say, the approach to Central Station in Glasgow, either up from Broomielaw or across Gordon Street. The 1890s Central Hotel of uninspiring name but magnificent woodwork forms an important part of either view, and it is a minor tragedy that its decline should have left Glasgow, architecturally the finest Victorian city in the world, without a single good hotel of the epoch, whereas even Edinburgh has two. To have lost the St Enoch Station Hotel and the Grand at Charing Cross was, as Wilde might have made Lady Bracknell say, a misfortune, but effectively to lose the third points to carelessness, or at least to the disadvantages of breaking up and privatizing the old railway hotel chain.

I return for a moment to Washington where the suburban layout and the mono-cultural nature of the lifestyle (politics, politics all the way) make for provincialism, but are outweighed, although not by a wide margin, by the fact that the government of which it is the seat, and whose composition and doings are endlessly discussed, has been for the past fifty years the most powerful in the world. In Georgetown - the Kelvinside of Washington - the talk would be regarded by good West End standards as narrowly and unacceptably political, but it is at least conducted
by the most famous journalists vying with the most favoured ambassadors to produce the most sophisticated witticisms about the most powerful cabinet officers to be found in any capital. And the talk is also perhaps less narrowly internal than political talk mostly is in London. That is one advantage of world leadership. Nevertheless, Washington remains essentially a one-purpose town.

The ‘one-purpose town' aspect is repeated still more strongly in Bonn, which although a much more ancient city (2000 years old in 1989 so it was claimed, re-founded by the Emperor Julian in 359, and the birthplace of Beethoven 1411 years after that) is a much more recent and, it now again appears likely, a much more temporary capital. It has also been much more of a gimcrack capital, with most of the business of government of the world's third most powerful economy being carried on - and very successfully carried on - in a collection of thoroughly second-rate 1950s and 1960s buildings. For forty years there has been a remarkable contrast between the capitals of the two German-speaking countries. In Vienna the affairs of the little Austrian Republic have been conducted from what are by and large the grandest official buildings of any capital city. There is a touch of bathos about the Hofburg without the Habsburgs. In Bonn, on the other hand, the business of the Federal Republic of Germany, long the middle kingdom of the European Community, now the hinge power of the whole continent which recent events again make the pivot of the world, is conducted in the most modest surroundings in Europe. Just as the Federal Republic of Germany has tried to exercise less political power than is commensurate with its economic strength, so on a diplomatic visit to Bonn one may look in vain for marble staircases, plumed guards of honour, screaming police escorts and glittering state banquets. Whether a move to Berlin will bring with it a return to Wilhelmine grandeur and a more assertive style of government is a fascinating and to some a worrying question.

On the whole I think not, although I do believe that the style of capital cities affects the style of the governments that operate within them. Thus I think it no accident that the three most centralized countries in Europe - Britain, France and Spain - are
the three in which the governments operate from ‘hub of the country' capitals - London, Paris and Madrid - which are the dominant cities, politically, socially, culturally, commercially. (It should be noted, however, that France and Spain are currently making strenuous efforts to decentralize themselves, whereas no such effort is visible in the British Government.) It is also noticeable that post-war Germany, when Berlin was split, operated with no city showing even a ‘conurbation' population of two million, no city in other words amongst the first sixty or seventy in the world. The Federal Republic has been the most important and richest country but the one with the least big single city of the five big states of the European Community.

This fits in appropriately with the recent revaluation of fashion against excessive size in cities. And with the prestige of size so has its precision disappeared. An encyclopaedia published in the early 1920s, to the study of which I devoted many childhood hours, gave with complete confidence the exact population of every major city down to the last digit. I can still remember many of them. Glasgow then scored 1,111,428, as opposed, say, to 648,000 for Madrid, which now rates four and a half million, or 412,000 for São Paolo, Brazil, which now rates twelve and a half million. Modern editions of encyclopaedias are much more uncertain. They give alternatives - within the city limits and within the conurbations, and conurbations are rather vague concepts. But what is more significant is that nobody is now proud of being big. London and New York used to compete with each other for first place like two Atlantic liners passing and re-passing each other in bids for the blue riband of the fastest crossing. Now both competitions are as out of date as are the liners. New York and London have dropped far behind, being overtaken by Tokyo and Shanghai, and Calcutta and Bombay, and Seoul and Cairo, and Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo, and maybe Teheran, and above all Mexico City. But Mexico City, far from being proud of its pre-eminence, keeps its monstrous size and rate of growth as quiet as any ageing beauty used to do with her age, and hopes that it can escape too much obloquy for further engulfing the country and polluting the sky.

Glasgow has therefore chosen its time to shrink with great
skill. The days when the claim to be ‘the second city of the Empire' was a proud boast are as far past as is the Empire itself. And although the claim had a certain essential truth, as was symbolized by those great exhibitions of 1888, 1901, 1911 and 1938 in the parks of first Kelvingrove and then Bellahouston, I wonder how statistically accurate it was unless the population of Calcutta was calculated on the basis that you needed several Bengalis to count as the equivalent of one Scotsman.

In those days, however, it would have been a tragedy to have gone down in population from 1,100,000 to the present 750,000 (although of course the Clydeside conurbation remains much more like two and a half million). Now it does not matter in the least from a prestige point of view. Indeed, it is if anything an advantage, and excites the greater admiration that Glasgow's cultural impact, which I regard as comparable with that of Chicago, has been achieved on a population, city for city, of a fifth the size, and conurbation for conurbation, of a third the size.

There is only one word of warning that I must give to Glasgow. Glasgow has ridden high on a mounting wave of fashion in the 1980s. It amuses me to look back over the change in the outside perception of Glasgow during the period that I have been closely associated with the city. When I became Member of Parliament for Hillhead in 1982 I derived a lot of pleasure from surprising people all over the world with the wholly accurate information that my Glasgow constituency was, according to the census, the most highly educated in the whole of the United Kingdom. And I added for good measure that, while it was geographically only one-eleventh of the City of Glasgow, it contained at least fifteen institutions or monuments of major cultural, intellectual or architectural fame. That was all in the days before the Burrell Collection was open. The Burrell (not in Hillhead but three miles away on the South Side), while it is a fine heterogeneous collection, housed in perhaps the best building for a gallery created anywhere in the past quarter century, adds to what was previously in the Kelvinside Gallery and other Glasgow collections before but does not qualitatively change it. 1982 was also at the beginning of the ‘Glasgow's miles better' slogan, and
before there was much thought of Glasgow being either an important centre of aesthetic tourism or the European City of Culture.

What has changed since then has been that for three or four years everybody has come to accept these earlier facts without the previous surprise, while for me the sad fact amongst them is that Hillhead has ceased to be my constituency. (But if it no longer enables me to sit in the House of Commons it is at least now part of the name under which I sit in the House of Lords.) My warning is that fashion is a fickle jade. Glasgow has been tremendously
à la mode
for the past five years. But
la mode,
by its very nature, cannot remain constant. Last week, for the first time in my experience, someone said to me that he thought Glasgow had recently achieved an exaggerated reputation, and went on to add that he thought Edinburgh - admittedly he lived there - was the cultural as well as the political capital of Scotland. I rocked on my heels in amazement. No one had said such a thing to me for years.

I do not happen to believe that it is true. Edinburgh has of course great cultural assets, the Festival, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Portrait Gallery, and the copyright library, but they are none of them strictly indigenous. They come from outside or by virtue of capital city status rather than arise out of the life and work of the inhabitants of the city itself as is the case here. None the less, I think Glasgow must be prepared for the going to be a little harder in future. Having caught and mounted the horse of fashion in the early eighties and dashingly ridden it for seven years or so, Glasgow must be ready for its vagaries soon to take the horse veering off in another direction.

Glasgow can, I think, sustain this. It has almost indestructible advantages that should be immune to gusts of fashion. First the site, which is God-given in both the literal and the figurative senses of the phrase, and which helps to make Glasgow an exceptionally vivid city visually, and one to which a strong painting tradition is peculiarly appropriate. The city itself is finely placed with the hills rising on either side of the river in just the right places. Beyond that the estuary of the Clyde, with its associated
inlets, islands and mountains, constitutes the most dramatic piece of seascape at the gates of a major city to be found anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of Vancouver Sounds and the Bosphorus. There are I believe equally memorable natural formations amongst the fjords of Norway, or on the western coast of Greenland or on the shores of Antarctica, but they are all wastelands so far as human population is concerned.

Glasgow's industry also had a peculiar vividness, which is retained by such of it as remains. The cranes of Govan, seen on the drive in from the airport, proclaim that this is Glasgow as emphatically as, and more authentically than, the Eiffel Tower identifies Paris, or the bridge and the opera house do Sydney.

Second, there is the solid base of Glasgow's educational strength. It is a remarkable double that a century after the narrow strips of flat land along the banks of the Clyde became the greatest industrial focus of the world, the hills behind the riverside on the north side should now have become, with the exception almost only of the banks of the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the most concentrated educational areas: two universities, the 439-year-old eagle of Glasgow perched on its Gilmorehill eyrie and the enthusiastic young pouter pigeon of Strathclyde a couple of miles to the east and hatched only a quarter of a century ago out of a College of Technology; Jordanhill College of Education; four teaching hospitals; three units of the Medical Research Council; a number of specialized institutions of which the Glasgow School of Art is the most famous; all this, plus a clutch of four or five high schools or academies of note, is by any standards an extraordinary cluster and one which, as I believe the Massachusetts experience has shown, is of great economic value in the modern world.

Third, there is the quality of the human resources. Glasgow has its well-known warmth, but that is something on which in my view it is possible to talk a good deal of sententious nonsense. Glasgow people are capable of being very friendly, and they are almost invariably polite, but they are also capable, as are all people of discrimination, of being appropriately chilling when they think it is deserved. When in 1982 I first came to know Glasgow well,
and in particular its West End, what most struck me was not so much the warmth as the quiet self-confidence. It was not a complacent or narrow or inward-looking self-confidence. It was not based on a desire to keep strangers out, or I would not have been made nearly so welcome. What it was based on was a consciousness of the contribution which this strip of river and hills had made to the advancement of civilization throughout and beyond Britain, and on a feeling that while it was desirable to go outside the West End from time to time it was as good a place to live as anywhere in the world. It was based neither on complacency nor on any sense of compensating for inferiority, but, as true self-confidence always is, on a desire to learn of outside things accompanied by a contentment within one's own skin. That is the dominant impression that I retain of Hillhead and of Glasgow as a whole.