From Reactionary Nostalgia to Communalised Leisure?

Introduction

Communal Leisure is a loose collective of musicians, artists, promoters, and writers who run a website where people can share non-profit and DIY events in Glasgow. In this piece, we make an argument for moving beyond nostalgic and often reactionary narratives of Glasgow’s cultural ‘golden years’, to honestly appraise the material, discursive and cultural shifts of the last few decades. We attempt to pick up on some threads of analysis that have been largely abandoned in wider discourse since the untimely end of Variant in 2012, focusing on the current state of Glasgow music venues, Creative Scotland and Glasgow Life. Ultimately, we argue that rebuilding cultural life in Scotland requires more investment, democratic oversight and collective organising by cultural workers, underpinned by a renewed critical analysis of the situation we face – we see this special Variant edition as offering a welcome push in the right direction.

Reactionary Nostalgia

While it’s easy to get sucked into the soap-operatic appeal of Southside café dramas and online beefs about arts funding (God knows we have ourselves), it’s remarkable how little historical and political analysis goes on when it comes to the dire state of arts and culture in Glasgow. Decades of austerity, competitive scarcity models of funding, the managed decline of critical cultural journalism, and the melting of ‘arts led regeneration’ into a corporate ideology that squashes the possibility of imagining the arts without regeneration, has got us into a situation where it’s tricky to know where to start when imagining how things could be different. The malaise is not just material (venue closures, lack of investment, dwindling funding etc), but discursive: where is the space to critically unpack what’s happening to arts and culture in Glasgow? To imagine alternatives, and engage with historic moments when these felt possible?

Many people, particularly those who benefited economically from the isolated boosts of the post-1990 City of Culture model and/or rose to managerial positions in Glasgow’s hipster ecosystem, are reduced to a nostalgia for ‘the good old days’, that (though they probably did have better drugs and fewer smartphones) were in fact deeply marked by the historic shifts we sketch here. Such tacit defenders of what Rebecca Nesbitt in an infamous 2007 Variant piece called ‘the New Bohemia’ (whereby finance and corporate sponsorship comes to dominate culture, under a veneer of bohemian cool) often lead the reactionary dismissals of artist and worker organising we’ve seen in recent years: bad history, bad politics. No longer ‘new’, the entrenchment of a nostalgia for the ‘Glasgow Miracle’ of the 1990s obscures the ways cultural life was whittled and privatised through this era, whilst allowing those who did cash-in to propagate narratives of individual graft and artistic genius that are then used to diagnose our current malaise (‘these Gen Z artists just don’t work hard enough‘). Luckily, by digging into the online Variant archive, we can chart an alternative history of how arts and culture in Scotland has been steadily eroded, commercialised, removed from democratic accountability, and reconfigured into models focused on profit, tourism, and short-term festival footfall, excluding (and often dispersing) working class communities. We can also find histories of how these processes have been critically documented and resisted.  

Nesbitt’s 2007 piece surveyed the recent “the unprecedented move of Glasgow City Council (GCC) devolving its Cultural and Leisure Services department to a private charitable trust,” Culture and Sport Glasgow, which in 2010 rebranded as Glasgow Life. Prior to this, Glasgow’s museums, libraries, sports facilities, and public parks were publicly funded and operated as part of the local government budget. Though far from perfect, this entailed principles of public accountability, public sector employment, guaranteed free access, and direct public funding. Resistance to the changes often pivoted on these principles being eroded: the trade union Unison mounted an unsuccessful legal challenge to this stealth privatisation-via-private-charitable-trust in March 2007. Leading the changes at the Council level was Bridget McConnell (CEO of Glasgow life from 2007-2022, now CBE and Lady McConnell of Glenscorrodale), who worked closely with the Glasgow City Marketing Bureau to focus cultural policy on tourism, festivals, and events like the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Nesbitt doesn’t mince her words when she comes to conclude her overview of the changes:

More than the sum of its parts, the creation of Culture and Sport Glasgow represents the wholesale takeover of culture by business interests. It posits a strategy for economic regeneration that depends on the whims of elite tourism and its pace of consumption in a period of economic crisis. It demonstrates an ethos that is smothering this city and others like it, regarding culture solely in terms of its use value, stripped of any emancipatory potential. Far from being considered in terms of the universal creativity to which every citizen has a right, culture in Glasgow is framed in terms of passive participation and money-making potential, with the city’s burghers fast accumulating cultural capital in the process. It remains to be seen how this approach will affect the creativity of future generations as Glasgow’s cultural communities are rendered impoverished and complicit in the new Bohemia.

Well, here we are, scrabbling around in the remains! One clear outcome has been a decimated music venue landscape across Glasgow, with ‘successful’ venues having to adopt the kind of short termist approaches that were baked into McConnell-vision.

Here Forever

In the past five years in this corner of this loosely defined ‘alternative arts and music’ scene alone we’ve seen The 13th Note, Broadcast, The Art School, Bonjour, Ushi’s, the O2 ABC and more recently The Dream Machine (not to mention more commercial stalwarts like The Shed and The Priory) shutter their doors for a myriad of reasons: insurmountable infrastructure problems, funding cuts, self destructive union busting, greedy and disinterested landlords. In some cases, the loss of such important venues has led to a selective re-narrativisation of its closure: take the Art School. At the time of its closure, the venue was haemorrhaging money on externally booked gigs due to historic mismanagement and the effects of two serious fires, whilst the Student’s Association’s staff were constantly dealing with venue-related issues at the expense of the student population. Yet, it was workers themselves who were blamed when the venue shut in 2019 (‘The Art School’ went into liquidation in 2020 but the venue has since been reopened under the direct management of GSA Students Association), for demanding better work conditions, and essentially not showing fealty to a romanticised legacy of Glasgow culture.

Clearly, Glasgow isn’t alone in this trend – between June 2020 and June 2024, a total of 480 nightclubs closed in the UK, with an average of 10 closures per month, or 2 per week. While other cities such as Manchester and London have opted to appoint so-called ‘night tzars’ to try and combat this trend, they’ve done so to mixed success. As Ed Gillett has argued elsewhere, what dance music and club culture need to survive is a collective voice, not more political appointees.

An apparent outlier in the spate of national small venue closures, DIY club space EXIT opened on Maxwell Street in late 2023 and has filled a ‘The Art School/Bonjour’ sized hole, at least in terms of queer and underground oriented club programming. Tellingly, even at its inception the club was given a short life expectancy. Originally offered a 9 month lease before the building was redeveloped (another short-lived Clydeside hotel anyone?) the steady pace of speculation has so far managed to buy the  space a bit more time – a contracted stonemason suggested to the directors that it would take five years for the walls to adequately dry out for the proposed development to go ahead, but for the moment its artist owners are committed to staying open for as long as feasible. As this goes to print, property developers Regent Property will be submitting their application to the council to redevelop the building and surrounding area. EXIT have encoded this instability as a marketing tool; the club’s tagline is “Not Here Forever”.  Is part of the club’s success due to this framing of it being temporary – fitting into a funding landscape that rewards pop-ups and festivalification? How would club goers react to a tagline that reads “Here Forever”? 

Creative Scotland

If scarcity and austerity take a temporal and spatial form in Glasgow’s dwindling venue landscape, they also underpin the gossipy infighting that characterises debates on arts funding. Creative Scotland – whose creation and lack of democratic oversight was so rigorously analysed by Variant over the years – is often the target and motor of such discourse. However, the quango also benefit from the shallowness of the debates – ‘why them and not me?‘, ‘how are the crumbs divided?‘ – rather than deeper critical analysis of what better investment in cultural life could mean. Perennial media furores about how Creative Scotland allocates public funding (increasingly driven by right-wing culture wars media) target individual artists and projects, rather than the structural conditions underlying this. In 2024, it was the turn of Rein, an experimental theatre production initially funded to the tune of 84k until it transpired the show featured unsimulated sex, prompting a transphobe-led moral panic, Creative Scotland freaking out, and the project’s funding being withdrawn (leaving the group of artists involved without income). How should we build an argument about the real limits and issues of Creative Scotland, whilst also not feeding reactionary attacks?

Ultimately, we have to understand that – after another lost decade and in the midst of deepening funding scarcity – people are sick of being skint, and some will jump at the chance to shit on expensive sounding art projects. The working class tradition of a soft-boycott against Creative Scotland, from James Kelman to Darren McGarvey, points to the need for a wholesale overhaul of the funding models and ideas of ‘creativity’ being deployed, but one that requires a renewed form of left-wing structural critique.

As a collective operating independently of Creative Scotland funding, it is easy for us to be dismissive of the significance of these events in the context of DIY, underground or simply underfunded creative work. But the reverberations of Creative Scotland’s shuddering  collapse would surely be felt in every corner of cultural life. “Authentocratic” visions of a counterculture sustained by DJ fees, meal deals and bar tips have less practical credibility than they do dubious romantic appeal. Recent debacles over the Creative Scotland its Open Fund (a decision to axe this was reversed after appeals to the Scottish Government), and multi-year funding (also overhauled in a way that seemed to be geared at coaxing government intervention, at the expense of the stability and sanity of the organisations who rely on this), could be points of intervention to put forward longer-term visions for a different kind of model. Instead, a recent ‘independent review’ into the ‘troubled arts quango’ looks primed to push for further cuts, and ever-narrowing ideas of arts and culture. It is also undoubtedly true that Creative Scotland’s funding is unequally distributed, solutions lying beyond our scope here. Nonetheless, we are cautious not to underestimate the cost of its loss in the current climate.

The Slow Death of Glasgow Life

Simultaneously, Glasgow Life is in dire straits. During the pandemic lockdowns of 2021/21, the ‘Arms Length External Body’ / charity, which runs libraries, community centres and sports facilities on behalf of Glasgow City Council (GCC), closed down a majority of its venues, citing health & safety reasons. As of July 2021, Glasgow Life had lost £38m due to venue closures. Despite the lockdown ending, Glasgow Life made clear that in 2021/22 62 of its venues would remain closed – not because of health and safety concerns, but because the “global pandemic of Covid-19 has forced significant changes to how Glasgow Life operates”. 

While some of these have since reopened, many haven’t, including notable tourist attractions like Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s The Lighthouse and the People’s Palace and Winter Gardens. But it’s the venues in the further reaches of the city that have been most affected; those less likely to be described as key ‘cultural institutions’, yet just as vital (if not more so)  to Glasgow’s culture and its people. Most of the closed venues are in the most deprived areas of the city: places like Castlemilk, Royston and Springburn, Ruchazie, Possilpark and Ruchill. All over the North and East of the city, community centres have been left abandoned, with many libraries closed or ‘shuttered by stealth’ (closed for full-days due to staff shortages). As a report from the SANE (Solidarity Against Neoliberal Extremism) collective details, the council’s own equality impact assessment of the closures found that there is potential for “displacement” of vulnerable service users, and questioned whether the closures fell afoul of the council’s human rights obligations.

Faced with a significant funding shortfall, the council is looking to offload many of these venues permanently via the People Make Glasgow Communities Scheme. The Council describes the scheme as ‘offering the opportunity for interested organisations, groups, and individuals to become involved in the delivery of local services and projects by operating and occupying venues in their communities’, touting ‘a number of successful such operations at community facilities’ including Molendinar Community Centre, Nethercraigs Sports Complex and Castlemilk’s Barlia Football Centre. The Glasgow Against Closures campaign, formed in 2021, has been key to organising around this. Their three linked demands call for an end to closures, a halt on ‘Big Society’ asset transfers (keeping venues in public ownership), and to ‘End Glasgow Life’ by bringing staff and assets back under direct council control. The campaign is savvy in articulating a longer history of public ownership and working class involvement in cultural life, one that is not about nostalgic myths or ‘Glasgow Miracles’, but material conditions and collective organising.

Conclusion

In this piece, we’ve done a brief sketch of changes in Glasgow venues, Creative Scotland and Glasgow Life in the years since Variant’s reporting on these topics. We’ve argued that a renewed engagement with critical analysis and cultural history can help us escape the kinds of reactionary 1990s nostalgia that has dominated cultural discourse in Scotland over the last decade. Rather than understanding those who benefited personally and financially through that time as products of a cultural moment defined by commercialisation and privatisation (along with the material conditions underlying this), we’ve been left with self-mythologies of magical blooming creativity, individual artistic genius, and ‘hard graft’. Critiquing such impulses is key, but there are also many practical steps we can take: making links between the DIY underground and wider campaigns around venues, supporting worker organising across venues and hospitality, building better infrastructures to support cooperative and worker-owned creative ventures, creating non-corporate outlets for discussion and organising. We should combine such moves with building a political project that can push for more investment in culture (whilst debating the limited ways this idea is deployed), better democratic oversight, and renewed public ownership. Perhaps we could think of this as a shift towards ‘communalised leisure’; perhaps you’ve got a better way of phrasing things. Either way, the nostalgia encapsulated by the (now) old bohemia gets us nowhere: we need new critique, new organising, new history.