It was the festival which saw Glasgow’s riverbank burst into full bloom, seeding thousands of days out and planting a million memories.
Now a team of archaeologists are on a mission to find the remnants of the Glasgow Garden Festival of 1988.
Archaeologist Dr Kenny Brophy of the University of Glasgow is leading a new dig on the past, on the only remaining site of the botanical jamboree which ran for 152 days 36 years ago.
An estimated 4.3 million people visited the festival, which spanned 120 acres from the Kingston Bridge to the Govan docks on a footprint which is now home to the city’s Quay leisure complex BBC Scotland, STV, the Glasgow Science Centre and Glasgow Tower.
Now Dr Brophy and his team of students, volunteers and school pupils are digging up the past in Festival Park in Govan.
“We did a test dig in 2022 at the site, and we found lots of coins which predated 1988, which allows us to speculate that they might have been thrown into the lochan which was in this part of the site.
“What we found on that test dig made us want to come back to do more.The main focus of the excavation now is to look at the route of the festival railway line which ran over sections of what is now festival park.
“We have dug a trench across where we think the railway line was, looking for material residue related to its construction.
“We’ve just found some plastic plant labels, which have the names of plants like red campion written on them and it’s reasonable to assume they are fragments from the festival.
“We’ve found decorative stonework that was at the lochan edge, we’ve found the geotextile layer which was at the button of the lochan and have been able to establish that dispute everything being cleared off the site, some of the bigger landscape features have left a significant footprint.
“That’s a huge opportunity for us to celebrate the heritage of the park and the Glasgow Garden Festival by explaining to people about what is under their feet.”
The dig is part funded by Glasgow City Heritage Trust and Glasgow University, and led by After The Garden Festival, an initiative set up by designer and social history enthusiast Lex Lamb to create a digital archive of the festival.
Lamb’s research has so far drawn a cache of 4,000 crowd-sourced photos, as well as locating memorable festival features such as the Coca Cola Rollercoaster, now in a theme park in Lowestoft, and the miniature steam train, now in Rusutsu Resort, Hokkaido, Japan.The flower-filled fiesta also featured over 270 artworks, sculptures from internationally renowned artists like George Wyllie and Stan Bonnar, many of which have ben charted and located in new locations
He said: “The dig is one of many strands of what we’re doing to record and celebrate the legacy of the Glasgow Garden Festival.
“The excavation is bringing up tangible evidence, not just documents and interviews. These are the physical remains.”
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The current excavation is also exploring an area of the park which was the location of the festival’s Antonine Gardens, a recreated Roman bathhouse in Bearsden on the northern outskirts of Glasgow.
Dr Brophy said: “It was removed after the festival and taken to a roundabout in Milngavie. We have now started to find tangible evidence of the demolition process of the festival site,, evidence of things being thrown into hollows to level out what would become Festival Park.
“The archaeology is starting to shed light into some of the physical and forgotten elements of the festival which are still in situ 30-odd years later. That’s the joy of archaeology - finding objects from the past and telling stories from the things we find.”
The ruined remains of a waterfall, still visible in the park, are also of interest to the team.
Lamb said: “It’s a dynamic feature and very well remembered. Some features were hardly photographed at all but in the 4,000 photos that we currently have acquired of the festival, the waterfall is really well-represented.”
The dig has also uncovered older indicators of Glasgow’s lost ceramics industry, with fragments of clay pipes and ceramic tiles making appearing in the dig, evidence of how the festival site was in-filled after the gates closed for the last time in September 1988.
Lamb said: “The park is built on material ploughed up from what is now Glasgow Harbour, which was piled into lorries and taken through the Clyde Tunnel to this site. But there are also fragments of decorative blue tile in the area where the Bowmore Distillery and restaurant was, which is where Charles and Diana had lunch when they opened the site.”
The Garden Festival, the third of five UK-wide garden festivals, was followed by major international events in Glasgow including 1990s European City of Culture and 1999’s European City of Architecture. Lamb believes the significance of the five month event needs to be marked.
He said: “If you look at the ten year period between 1983-1993 there were significant changes in Glasgow with places like The Concert Hall, Princess Square, St Mungo Museum opening - all this happened in a really concentrated point in terms of how the city reinvented itself and how it wanted to be seen in the world.
“It’s a pivotal part in the cultural reinvention here, and there’s really nothing to commemorate the garden festival at all, which seems remarkable given its importance.
‘We are looking to put in some sort of proper interpretation on the site to make sure people who might now know that this amazing thing happened here, know about it and its importance to Glasgow.
“If somebody had spoken to people in the 1970s who put together the Empire Exhibition in 1938 then we would have a better understanding of that now.
“But I would say the Glasgow Garden Festival, in terms of the culture and economy of Glasgow was considerably more important. We really want to marl it and acquire as much information about it before the opportunity is lost.”
A podcast about the work of After The Garden Festival project will be available from Glasgow City Heritage Trust on 27 June.
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