Glasgow is desperate to be loved but confident Edinburgh doesn’t care

There was a reason for this, I think. We Glaswegians want you to love us and to approve of us: a need perhaps that’s rooted in generational insecurity. Edinburgh doesn’t feel it requires anyone’s approval. All it asks is that you get in step with its rhythms and cadences and don’t make a nuisance of yourself, at least not during business hours.

Occasionally, I would duck into Sammy Dow’s at Queen Street Station before taking the train to Waverley for my shift at The Scotsman Publications. In that half hour you wanted solitude to read the Daily Record’s racing section while considering a modest outlay on a 2.15 somewhere. More often than not though, your research would be ruined by an enthusiastic stranger eager to impart his knowledge of the turf.

Alan Taylor at the University of Edinburgh's Old College (Image: Gordon Terris)“Haw; you waant to be lookin’ at number four in the 2.30 at Kempton. Ahm Jimmy, by the way.”

In Edinburgh, you could pass an entire glorious hour in a new establishment without anyone showing the slightest interest in you. I had a teachable moment early in my Edinburgh sojourn. Seeing a chap watching some rugby on the pub’s television, I felt sure he was eager to hear some of my freshly-minted wisdom about his sport. “That Scotland pack are recycling the ball quite well. Ahm Kevin, by the way,” I ventured.

He turned very slowly to face me, looked me up and down in the manner of a Ritz commissionaire appraising a man with a donkey jacket and then – almost imperceptibly – took two steps to the side away from me. Not one word did he utter. Lesson learned: just, you know, mind how you go and don’t startle the horses.

The author and journalist, Alan Taylor was my early guide in those first faltering months in Scotland’s capital city. He’s one of those few citizens of Edinburgh who harbours a deep affection for Glasgow and an understanding of its ways. This became apparent in 2016 when he edited and curated Glasgow: The Autobiography, a collection of essays and articles about the city spanning more than three centuries.

Last month, he followed this up with its companion, Edinburgh: The Autobiography. Mr Taylor has lived and worked in both of Scotland’s greatest cities and these compendiums uniquely provide an understanding of their unique character, tempo and history.

We meet at Fleshmarket Close, the aptly-named Old Town brae whose steps we once climbed to access the back door of the old Scotsman. There are two taverns on this close: the Jinglin Geordie and the Halfway House. Five other drinking establishments (at least) sit within 500 yards. This represented another Glasgow/Edinburgh anomaly.

My home city likes to think of itself as a voluptuous big place that shimmies and shakes 24/7. But it’s always deployed a rather curious rectitude in its licensing attitudes. In Edinburgh, I was pleased to discover that the pubs and restaurants gathered around the Royal Mile and lurking down these ancient passageways welcomed you in until about three in the morning most weekdays.

“In Edinburgh, you have to love some of the things which most people hate about a place,” says Mr Taylor: “Its class-ridden attitudes; its smugness; its air of superiority. Yet this all sits side-by-side with a much seamier side.

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“People are fond of reaching for the old Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde analogy and it’s with good reason. It captures the two sides of this city. I also like to think of it as where Miss Jean Brodie meets Renton from Trainspotting. I’ve often wondered what it would have been like if Jean Brodie had taught Renton, instead of the crème de la crème young girls of Edinburgh’s leafier neighbourhoods. Wouldn’t that have been fascinating?

“When Miss Brodie takes the creme on a walk through the city they suddenly come upon The Grassmarket. And so, suddenly at the age of 11 these girls are confronted by an Edinburgh they’ve never known. They’ve never seen these places because their parents simply hadn’t taken them very far from their homes.

“So now, for the first time, they’re seeing the Grassmarket where the unemployed sit and drink; the women are fighting each other and people are swearing and shouting. The whole place is raucous. It might as well be a foreign country, but it’s a foreign country on their doorstep.”

To know Edinburgh is to understand that there are many Edinburghs. While I was there I often found myself drawn to Leith Walk, whose denizens don’t consider themselves to be from Edinburgh and whose pubs are of a timbre that seems closer to Glasgow than those beyond Princes Street. Stockbridge, Morningside, Craigmillar, Wester Hailes all have their own distinct characteristics and rhythms; much more so than in Glasgow. These places are little fiefdoms and often separated and defined by class and the pursuit of wealth.

“People kind of know about this, or think they know about it,” says Alan Taylor. He relates a tale about the experience of an American friend at a dinner party in the New Town who had been primed to expect the inevitable question. Which school did you go to? In Glasgow this was once to determine your religious persuasion; in Edinburgh it meant something else entirely. “Well, I’m American and so is my wife, so we didn’t go to school here,” the American had replied when first quizzed about his education.

“Oh, right. So, what school do your children go to then?”

“Well, actually, we don’t have any children.”

At this point he thinks he’s off the hook, but no.

“Yes, yes, but if you did have children, what school would they have gone to?”

Alan Taylor is sanguine about this. “Edinburgh’s pre-occupation with school and its eagerness to try to place you somewhere on the social scale is a fantastic obsession and it continues even to this day,” he says.

Alan Taylor believes Edinburgh has a special character (Image: Gordon Terris) “Is that really true,” I ask. “Without a doubt,” he says. “It’s just that no one quite likes to admit it or talk about it much.”

We talk about the impact of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting when it was first published in 1993. Being the only Glaswegian in the Scotland on Sunday newsroom, the excitement of my colleagues about this book was something to behold. Some were simply thrilled at being witness to the birth of a major literary work: how fresh it was; how innovative, how challenging. Others you felt had been absolutely stunned by the world that it portrayed. Like Miss Jean Brodie’s gels they were being introduced to a foreign country on their doorstep.

I loved it for many reasons: not least of which was the dialect, which you rarely heard in our media circles, unless you spent some time in The Scotsman’s old print case-room with Neville the Jambo and his comrades. Or in the Jinglin’ Geordie where Councillor Billy Fitzpatrick would hold court amongst his Labour colleagues and you’d be mesmerised by the Edinburgh working-class delivery which rose and dipped in unexpected places.

“That working-class accent and the neighbourhoods where it could be heard had rarely been heard or represented in literature or art before Trainspotting,” says Mr Taylor. “Nor had Edinburgh’s phenomenal appetite for drink and drinking establishments. Glasgow either glorifies or beats itself up about its booze culture, but in Edinburgh it’s always quietly been there.”

He references an Edwin Muir piece in the book about a visit to Leith Walk with a visitor from Eastern Europe. “We encountered two handsome young women, fashionably dressed, and obviously prostitutes, who were having a hand-to-hand fight and screaming abuse at each other. A ring had formed around them, and presently one was knocked flat on her back, at which a man intervened and stopped the fight.

“Thereupon the two young women dusted their clothes, powdered their faces and made quietly off towards Princes Street, which was within a stone’s throw; heir altered demeanour showing that they were entering their business quarter, where they could not afford to indulge in such a trivial luxury as a private quarrel.; they might almost have been going to an important conference or to church.”

This conveyed another bracing anomaly about this Edinburgh I’d first encountered in my formative years in journalism. This city I’d thought was douce and stiff with moral rectitude indulged, celebrated actually, a swinging sex trade. Everyone in the city knew where it was mainly located and the names of its most prominent madams.

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“There’s a letter to The Scotsman from a Dundas Street resident about the sailors of the USS JFK, berthed at Leith Harbour who were queuing to get into the brothels,” says Mr Taylor. “This little arrondissement was also busy during the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Prostitution was okay as long as they kept the noise down and didn’t cause a public nuisance.”

Having chronicled the folk-history of both Glasgow and Edinburgh he’s expertly-placed to make an inventory of the chief differences between the two. “Edinburgh has always been dominated by a pen-pushing cohort whose wealth accrued generation after generation. If anybody came in from the outside and wanted to change Edinburgh in a way they didn’t like then hell hath no fury like them.

“They stopped the Portrait Gallery going to Glasgow; they killed the crazy inner ring road idea. It’s the main reason why the Tories haven’t been in power in Edinburgh for decades. But it has no manufacturing hinterland. People don’t make things here.

“Edinburgh has always been unhealthily interested in money and class. There are good things and bad things associated with this: you look after things better if you have money. At the same time though, there’s something not quite right about it.

“What I’ve always loved about Glaswegians is they seem to have a freer spirit and a more spontaneous attitude to life. It gives them a sort of joie do vivre, which isn’t really justified given the hand many of them have been dealt with. Glaswegians are insanely optimistic.

“Edinburgh has this incredibly cautious attitude to life. Always trying to future proof themselves against life. No matter what you throw at us we’ll always be prepared. Whereas Glaswegians rejoice in not being prepared. They think: ‘who cares what tomorrow might throw at me: whatever it is, I’ll enjoy it and meet it head on’.”

He’s distressed at how the centre of Glasgow has fallen into decrepitude in recent years. “It really, really distresses me. I really thought that with the resurgence of the Merchant City and the Commonwealth Games and the fact that you had various dynamic individuals who were capable of actually pushing through things, that Glasgow was the coming place. It really did feel like that through the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century.

“When I lived in the Merchant City for a few years I thought ‘wow, this is top notch. This is the big, confident European city I always hoped it would be.’ And then suddenly it lost it. Edinburgh has endured its own various troughs but seems to have emerged stronger from them.

“Edinburgh has one of the most glorious city situations you could possibly imagine. Part of this is natural and part constructed, but it’s sensational. I’ve visited many of the world’s great cities and I’d love to live and die in Florence, for instance. But I think Edinburgh competes with Florence in its sheer natural and built beauty. It’s why the Festival is here. It’s compact and yet you can get a lot of people into it. They look around them and they can see the hills and the sea and the Castle, it’s hard to replicate that.”

I tell him that while I’ve witnessed a renaissance in Edinburgh in the last 10 years, built on the UK’s most booming city economy, that there’s a different narrative hiding in plain sight. Certainly, no one talks now about the eye-watering overspend and under-delivery of the trams and the malpractices in their construction. They’ve settled into the fabric of the city and meanwhile you can’t get a table here or a decent room for less than a few hundred quid. The tourists no longer leave at the end of August: they’re here all year round.

There are those like Bonnie Prince Bob, Leith’s underground political savant who rails against Edinburgh’s slow garrotting by gentrification that’s come in the wake of a Festival which now dominates every facet of life around the city centre.

The massive price hikes might point to a vibrant economy but with this comes a sense that Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting communities are more marginalised now than they were in the 1990s. Mr Taylor has a sense of this too, but feels that Edinburgh is little different from many of the world’s other majestic places.

Alan Taylor says Edinburgh has a strong sense of itself (Image: Gordon Terris)

“If you asked these cities if they’d like to have a festival like ours, they’d bite your hand off. It’s a natural amphitheatre and many other places have tried to replicate it. Manchester’s is a fine city, but you’ll never make it look pretty.”

He says that even the affluent middle classes can’t afford to live anywhere near the city centre. So they push out further and further, a process which is supposed to improve some of Edinburgh’s more forlorn neighbourhoods. I’m doubtful about this, though. And besides, what happens if the tourists stop coming because the endless international air travel which underpins Edinburgh’s most successful sector must surely become unsustainable if the world finally acts rather than merely emote about global warming?

My favourite entry from Edinburgh’s autobiography is provided by the great Neal Ascherson and concerns the staff of The Scotsman Features department following the result of the 1979 devolution referendum. Rather than drown their sorrows in the Jinglin Geordie or the Doric they decided to overcome their trauma with a mass parachute jump during they would all shout “For You, For Scotland,” as they leapt from the plane.

“The casualties were proportionately worse than Arnhem,” wrote Mr Ascherson. “Fred and Henry broke their legs. The Features sub-editor fell through a roof, nearly tearing his foot off. Julie landed in a pig-pen; Harry made a crater in a cornfield. David twisted his knee sinew. They were all rounded up by ambulances and came to rest in a row of hospital beds at Bridge of Allan.”

Edinburgh The Autobiography, by Alan Taylor, is published by Birlinn