A new beginning for Dundee?

Not so very long ago this was all concrete and tarmac round here. Now everything has changed. And the change is spreading beyond the waterfront too. In the streets around and behind the Malmaison hotel you can find a smattering of new shops, delis and vegan cafes (if you need a recommendation, try Marwick’s in Union Street).

And this in a city that only two years ago was seen as an entrepreneurial black spot. In 2015 the Courier reported that in there had been only 48 applications for grants to StartUp Britain in the previous three years. Now Dundee appears to be open for business.

This is the new face of the city. But it’s down at the waterfront that you will see its most visible manifestation.

The V&A Dundee, which opens today, is the reason that, for the first time in many years you might say, the city is suddenly hip, “Scotland’s coolest city,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Vogue has also been singing the city’s praises.

The changes are being noticed by locals too. “It’s great to see more restaurants, shops, fashion labels launching,” says fashion designer Hayley Scanlan, herself a Dundee native. “There’s so much happening. Young people are doing their own thing. It’s amazing and inspirational. People have had the guts to do stuff because they can see there is an opportunity.”

The prospect of the V&A Dundee, she says, has “brought light to the city.”

And yet there are still shadows. Some of them are the shadows that every modern city contends with. Things like the death of the high street for one. (For all the new shops and cafes opening it’s sobering to take a walk up Reform Street in the city and count the number of To Let signs.)

Other shadows are darker. It was revealed earlier this year that one in four children in the city live in poverty.

This is a city that has suffered as much as any in the post-industrial age with widescale loss of jobs (perhaps most notoriously Timex, which had employed 5,000 people in the city, closed in 1993, after a bitter industrial dispute). And in some families unemployment has become generational.

Suspicions about the hype and hope that surrounds Dundee at the moment is perhaps to some extent understandable After all Dundee has had more than its unfair share of failed regenerations in the past. The new museum sits on one of them. Once the city’s dock, it was torn up in the 1960s – including an arch built to commemorate the visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to the city in the 19th century – to create slip roads off the bridge.

Still, the V&A Dundee is part of the city’s attempt to rewrite a reputation that has for years – maybe even decades - been written off.

The question is how did we get here? What has allowed this to happen and what might it lead to?

Few people are better equipped to answer all of this than Mike Galloway. Galloway grew up in Glasgow and Perth (he’s still a Saint Johnstone fan) and, after a successful career in urban planning in Glasgow where he worked on the regeneration of the Merchant City and the Gorbals, he became Dundee’s Director of City Planning in 1997.

Today, sitting on the top floor of Dundee House looking out over the Tay Estuary, he is remembering the city he found 21 years ago.

“Its image was extremely poor” he recalls. “Really poor. Its self-image was really poor. Dundonians did not regard their city very highly.”

They were not the only ones. When he told colleagues in Glasgow he was moving to Dundee they thought he was crazy. “They thought it was a coffin job,” he admits.

“We were losing population hand over fist and if that continued the whole infrastructure of the city was under threat.”

But when he applied for the job, he says, there were already signs that Dundee wanted things to change.

“What I found was a city that was really determined to reinvent itself. There was a whole campaign to put the heart back into the city, to try to recover Dundee’s reputation, its image, to try and recapture its retail catchment area, for example. It was on the verge.

“There was an effort to restructure the economy away from manufacturing to knowledge-based. Back in the mid-1990s that was very dangerous, very Avant Garde, particularly for a strong Labour council to be proposing that.”

In a way that sense of incipient change was what drew him here. He’d first lived in Dundee was a student in the mid-1970s, and a couple of decades later, he returned for a joint 40th birthday party with his wife. 

Walking around the city that weekend he was impressed by the changes from the city he knew 20 years earlier. A few weeks later he saw the ad in the paper for his job and he applied. “I tell the story that I came to Dundee for a party and I never left,” he says, smiling.

It was a good time to come, he says. Things were changing. Within two years the DCA would open, giving the city’s image a boost. The universities were beginning to help establish the city’s reputation as a centre of design (most notably in the field of videogames). In some areas the city was on an upswing.

That didn’t mean more changes weren’t needed. “The one place that really let the city down was the waterfront, where the Tay Bridge came in and joined in the city centre,” recalls Galloway. It was just a morass of motorways, bridges, brutalist buildings. And yet that was Dundee’s front door. That’s where you arrived, whether by train or by car. That was your first impression and first impressions stick.”

His solution, complete redevelopment of the waterfront. A project with a timeframe that stretched to decades. Urban regeneration is rarely a quick fix. That redevelopment has been a priority for the city ever since.

There were strokes of good fortune along the way. Dundee was able to benefit from the Scottish Government’s Cities Growth Fund. It made the decision to channel all that money into the waterfront. The city also managed to tap funds from Scottish Enterprise and did the same with it.

And all of this, it should be noted, has been done over the last decade in the teeth of recession.

“But in some ways that was an advantage,” suggests Galloway. “Because we got really keen prices. The fact that there wasn’t a buoyant development market out there wasn’t problematic. We got good prices. We got really committed contractors to work with because there was a dearth of business for them elsewhere.”

The idea of a museum on the waterfront wasn’t part of the original masterplan. But, Galloway says, they were looking for a big idea. That big idea arrived over food in 2007.

Early that year Sir Mark Jones, the then director of the V&A museum, was in Dundee to have a look at what was going on at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. The college laid on a lunch for him and invited a selection of guests from the city. Galloway was one of them.

“The ‘Bilbao effect’ was very big at the time,” Galloway recalls, referring to the impact Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum had on the economy of the northern Spanish city. “We were explaining to him what we’re doing on the waterfront here and he was interested, so we said: ‘Look, before you get your flight back can we show you around?’

Jones said yes. A few days later he called Galloway and said he’d like to continue the conversation. The idea of V&A Dundee was in utero.

The story of the building of Kengo Kuma’s design is a saga in itself, a story of reigning in the original ambition and an inflationary budget (even rowing back from building on the River Tay itself didn’t stop costs mounting from the original estimate of £45m to more than £80m.)

This week another argument emerged when Chrissie Hynde, of all people, moaned about the office block being built just across the road from the museum, calling it a “monstrosity” which should be torn down.

Galloway argues that it is part of the change that Dundee needs. The V&A Dundee is an anchor building in the waterfront development that will encourage tourists and business tourists (business tourists spend more money, he points out). But it can’t stand alone.

Right now, though, the museum itself is an opportunity to change the city’s image. Philip Long, the V&A Dundee director, suggests that, in fact, it’s already happening. “The city is reclaiming its waterfront and it has had the ambition to go out and award the most amazing building project to Kengo Kuma which is now not just being used to portray Dundee but is being used in the Scotland Now campaign. So, the city is being understood in different ways.”

The interest from Vogue and the Wall Street Journal would suggest as much.

But just how far does that understanding go in the city itself?

On Dundee’s Whitfield estate in the north of the city, tucked in behind a low-rise office block there is a garden of remembrance. At the entrance of this “Garden of Hope” row upon row of brass tags hang on the fence. On each is inscribed a message of love and loss.

Barrie, 51, is a service manager with Addaction, a national charity set up to help those suffering from dependency issues. Every day he meets with drug addicts and their families in the area and offers support and comfort.

“What we are trying to do is create a place where people can come together and support one another and also try and heal a little bit,” he explains

There is a lot of healing to be done. Last year Dundee took over from Glasgow as the city with the highest number of drug deaths per resident in the country (which makes it the worst in Europe).

Barrie is all too aware of the impact those deaths can have on family members and friends. “I’m supporting one family that has lost three sons to overdoses,” he says.” We’re hearing about eight-year-old girls who are self-harming after losing their mums to drugs.

“There was a guy in this morning who has lost about a dozen close people to drug death. If you’re coping with that level of loss on top of your own issues it’s hard and drugs and alcohol, as we know, are a way of coping for a lot of people. It’s not a good way. It’s a very dangerous way.

Drug deaths, Barrie suggests, is harder to talk about than cancer. There is a huge stigma involved.

But over and above everything else, he says, poverty is the major contributory factory. Last year it was revealed that in the previous five years Dundee had more benefit sanctions applied than anywhere else in the country.

“So, masses of this will be to do with poverty and lack of aspiration or lack of choices,” Barrie suggests. “You put it all together we’re at the head of a storm.”

It only takes a few minutes to drive from the waterfront to Whitfield but at times the distance must seem huge.

Barrie himself is excited about the museum opening and about taking some of his clients to see it. “It’s a fantastic opportunity for Dundee. I get goose bumps even thinking about it.”

But he also worries that it might have an alienating effect on those he works with. “I’m wondering if the V&A is almost reinforcing the hopelessness in a weird way. It’s so beautiful, so perfect … If your life is the opposite of that … “

It’s something that concerns Hayley Scanlan too. “I just think all this hope is being put into this one thing and are people going to be disappointed? What is the backlash going to be?”

“It’s the old analogy that when the tide comes in all the boats rise,” says Galloway. “The problem in cities like Dundee is that some of the boats are chained to the bottom and they’re not going to benefit unless we do something specifically to make it happen.

“One of the key challenges I’ve been given by the council and politicians is to ensure the waterfront has meaning in terms of jobs and income for everybody in the city. So, the fact that we’ve committed to the living wage in the waterfront is not the usual sticker badge in it. It’s genuine.”

When Sleeperz came to Dundee wanting to operate the hotel at the waterfront, Galloway explains, the city told the hoteliers they would have to pay the living wage. They were initially reticent because of the cost and the precedent. But in tandem with the council they found a workaround and now the company is going to introduce the living wage in all its hotels.

“It’s through that kind of activity that we are much more likely to have a waterfront and things in that waterfront that really mean something to people in Whitfield and all of the communities across the city.”

Philip Long believes it would be wrong to suggest that the V&A Dundee is some kind of panacea for all of the city’s issues. It can help with economic investment, he says, “but we’re only part of everything else that is going on.”

What it does offer, he adds, is a facility that can help make a difference to people’s lives in the city, whether that is through employment or even just inspiration.

And people are being inspired. Dundee is changing. Hayley Scanlan is a walking example of that. There would have been a time, she admits, when she would have had to move away to be able to establish her fashion label. But the internet has changed all that and Scanlan, 35, has been able to build her business and raise twin boys in the city of her birth.

“It’s a supportive place. I have a huge support network in Dundee. I opened the shop a year and a half ago and it’s just been unbelievable. Seeing strangers walking down the street wearing my clothes … I can’t even put it into words.”

Today the V&A Dundee opens. Next month, Mike Galloway retires. It’s time to hand on the reins to someone else, he says. Walking me back to the elevator, he points down the estuary where three oil rigs can be seen. “We started looking at decommissioning a couple of years ago and we got laughed at. Now we’ve got some major companies looking to base themselves in Dundee for this emerging new industry.”

For Galloway this is a new beginning for Dundee. This is a city with problems, some of them huge and grievous, but progress is being made. In the future the city will look different, will be more confident, diverse and complex, he hopes.

If so, that will bring its own problems of course, Galloway admits.

“It will be interesting 20 years from now to see if people are moaning about the number of tourists.”