Glasgow Goes Back to the Future New Museum Will Show City’s Proud Heritage to Coming Generations, Writes Phil Miller

By Phil Miller

When he was a boy, Robert Smith would jump on a tram that ran through the streets of his Glasgow neighbourhood, Maryhill, and ride all the way out to Milngavie.

He would buy a penny ha’penny ticket, and watch young couples romancing on the top floor, and adults smoking, as the tram wound its way through the suburbs to the fields and countryside.

Such transport was a welcome but unquestioned part of his life as he grew from a boy to a man, just like the thriving shipbuilding, engineering and locomotive industry which thundered at the heart of a great industrial city.

Now, a captain of industry himself, and known more grandly as Sir Robert Smith, he realises that for perhaps more than a generation of Glaswegians and other Scots the city is not known primarily as a manufacturing base. The quaysides of the city’s centre do not hold shipyards or thousands-strong work forces. Trams no longer shuttle up and down Sauchiehall Street.

Which is why, in his new role as the chair of an appeal to raise money for the city’s new GBP74m riverside transport museum, he feels that the public will flock to the Zaha Hadid-designed building to catch a glimpse of the way the city used to be, as their fathers and grandfathers remember it. When it opens in 2010, it will be a source of education, as well as entertainment and inspiration.

“There’s a generation of people who do not know the shipbuilding history of the city, ” he said, when we met in his office on the outskirts of Edinburgh yesterday.

“Glasgow was, of course, absolutely famous for it. It’s amazing how things change . . . it was not just shipbuilding, but heavy engineering: we built trains, which were exported all over the world, some are still in use today.

“The museum is much more than transport, it is also the social fabric of the city – shipbuiding and engineering as well as the trams and the underground.”

He adds: “In two generations, people will need reminded there used to be mining towns in some areas, mill towns in others. The changes have been astonishing, especially the move from manufacturing to service industries.

“People will see big trams and buses, but do they realise they used to be made here, in Glasgow? That we had the third underground train ever in the world? In terms of shipbuilding, the tonnage produced at one point made us the shipbuilders of the world.

“I think for youngsters coming to the museum, they may not believe we went about in these funny trams. We can say: ‘yes we did, and these are the costumes they wore, these were the fares, this is what old cars looked like. But more importantly: do you know they were manufactured here, on our doorstep? And exported all over the world’.”

The chairman admits GBP74m – a price tag which has risen substantially from the original GBP50m – is “a lot of money”, but added: “Don’t forget this is not a refurbishment, this is a brand new building.

“It is a bigger area, and a much more efficient area than we have right now at the Kelvin Hall. It’s also at the corner of the Kelvin and the Clyde, with the tall ship Glenlee moored outside, and part of the regeneration of the Glasgow Harbour area. It’s really going to give the area a boost.

“At the moment, the Kelvin Hall transport museum gets 500,000 visitors a year, and I can well imagine something terrific happening here with those figures. It has a world-class collection.”

There will, of course, be transport in the museum – trains, trams, a “car wall” of automobiles, boats, and models – but also three mocked-up Glasgow streets, each of a different era, to remind and inform visitors of the history of their surroundings.

Sir Robert is not charged with raising all the funding for the museum. The city council and the Heritage Lottery Fund will provide GBP69m, and he and his notable list of appeal trustees, including Robbie Coltrane (an “engine nut”), Carol Smillie, Sir Tom Farmer, and Sir Tom Hunter, among others, have three years to find the final GBP5m.

He believes the nature of the museum will also attract cheques from businesses and corporations who would not normally think of sponsoring art or traditional galleries.

He has, after all, experience of raising such funds – he was deputy to Lord Macfarlane in his appeal to raise a similar amount for the refurbishment of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

“Kelvingrove has a special place in the hearts of anyone in Glasgow – growing up we were all packed off there every Sunday – so it was extremely successful, ” he acknowledged.

“We looked for GBP5m and it ended up raising well into the teens of millions eventually. I am now chairman of this new appeal, which is to be formally launched on August 24. We are looking to the private sector, to trusts, to big individuals and small individuals to raise money.

“We have three years to raise it, we already have a lot of interest, and a significant sum of money from a major firm, which we will shortly announce.”

Sir Robert is confident the appeal of the new museum will also attract private donors, and most importantly, the support of the public. He has already received messages of support, and cheques. Every single person who contributes a penny to the appeal will be acknowledged on its walls, Sir Robert said.

“I can already show you letters of support that we have, we have had shoals of letters in, and some are fantastically emotional, ” he said. “They are personal: ‘My father worked in the railways, my uncle worked on the ships, I remember my first car, ‘ and so on . . . so this museum is important to people.

“So I am very confident: it will capture the popular imagination because it is the history of Glasgow. We made these machines here, we used them here, we used to have trams in the streets, it’s woven into the social history as much as the Kelvingrove was.”

Sir Robert, like many others, had his young eyes and mind enriched by the collections of the Kelvingrove, but its greatest treasures are from foreign fields: the costumes from around the world, the art of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Dali, the artifacts from exotic cultures. The transport museum is something else.

“Salvador Dali, after all, was not born in Maryhill, ” he notes. “Museums such as Kelvingrove widen your eyes as a child to the world, to different cultures. But this is doing something different, this is about what Scotland gave to the world, to it’s own people, and to Glasgow in particular.”

Sir Robert Smith

Born in Glasgow on August 8, 1944 and educated at Allan Glen’s School.

Knighted in 1999 after a long and distinguished career in finance, and as chair of the National Museums of Scotland from 1993 to 2001.

From 1999 to 2004, he was governor of the BBC in Scotland.

From 2002, he has been chairman of the Weir Group, and is also chairman of Scottish and Southern Energy.

* He owns the isle of Inchmarnock, two kilometres west of Bute.

He is also Prince Charles’s ambassador for corporate social responsibility.

(c) 2007 Herald, The; Glasgow (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.