Glasgow Garden Festival brought back to life in new walking tour

Crowds flocked to the festival – which had four million visitors during its 152-day run – including Charles and Diana, who took a tram ride on opening day.

I’m standing in a park in Govan talking to a stranger about 1988.

“It was brilliant,” says the man in his 70s, looking around for signs of a past hidden in the bushes, and the years.

“I remember taking the weans here. We went on the trams and went up the tower. You could see right down the river. It’s a shame they knocked it all down, it was great for the place.”

His nostalgia is for one of the most significant moments in the modern history of Glasgow, an event which lasted just 152 days but drew four million people and has endured in the memory of every one of them.

And now, thanks to a new self-guided tour, they can bring some of those memories back to life, by retracing their footsteps along the south bank of the Clyde, and all the way down memory lane to the Glasgow Garden Festival of 1988.

Paul and Lex Lamb gaze up towards where the rollercoaster might have been. — Paul English and After The Garden Festival co-founder Lex Lamb gaze up towards where the rollercoaster might have been.

The botanical jamboree, which transformed the former graving docks in Govan into a colourful cosmopolitan fiesta, is considered by many to be the starting point in a cultural renaissance for post-industrial Glasgow after the demise of the heavy industry on the Clyde.

For one summer, Govan housed rollercoasters, art installations, fountains, exotic plants and internationally-themed gardens. Although it barely exists now, some touchstones lurk on the riverbank.

I joined Lex Lamb, co-founder of the After The Garden Festival heritage project, to find them on a trip back through the years.

Lex has produced a walking tour, available to download online, detailing the remaining focal points from Glasgow’s summer of ‘88. We meet off the back of Govan Road, under a towering brick-rendered version of the iconic bouquet logo, designed by Glasgow artist Shona Maciver, and head towards the east entrance, now the site of a multiplex cinema.

The festival introduced many people to public art.

“The designers based elements of the site on the Disneyland models,” Lex tells me. “Funnelling people along a stem into a central flower rendezvous.”

We head west on the manicured Mavisbank Gardens where riverside flats now occupy the site that Charles and Diana once trundled through in a vintage tram on the festival’s opening day, and where I convince myself the screams from the Coca-Cola rollercoaster – the best remembered of all the attractions – can almost still be heard.

“It’s maybe hard to locate the exact site of the rollercoaster now,” says Lex, as we look up at the flats towering to the coaster’s height. “But for anyone who wants to come to the exact spot, it’s all there in the tour.”

My memories of the festival are vivid. Celtic were celebrating their centenary, and as the only fan of the club in Kilmacolm Primary School in those days, it was a major victory to get my P7 mates to pose with me in front of the giant floral logo of the club’s new crest on our school trip.

Paul with his school chums in front of the floral Celtic logo.

There were later trips up the Clydesdale Bank tower with my folks, a run on the rollercoaster with my cousin, rides on the trams and a front page of a newspaper designed with the splash: Paul English signs for Celtic! I even saw Andy Walker, the team’s star striker at the time, crossing the specially-designed Bell’s Bridge. If this was the Scottish Office’s idea of a marketing job on the city, then I was sold.

As well as these heady thrills, I also remember the first stirrings of a burgeoning interest in public art. Why was there a giant floating head in the river? Are people allowed to make sculptures of a giant naked lady? Why are those old dock bollards painted in black and white stripes like St Mirren strips?

I waited 36 years to find out on my walk with Lex.

“These are my favourite relics,” he says. “The garden festival had a cutting edge contemporary art programme. These were by French artist Daniel Buren who has gone on to tremendous success with stuff outside the Louvre and French parliament. It was a comment on the garden festival taking on an industrial important site and tarting it up.”

We continue along past STV and BBC as the Finnieston Cran and north and south Rotunda buildings stand guard silently holding their stories from the decades when this river had so many craft on it, it might just have been possible to walk from one side to the other.

Lex’s trip – stirring memories of fountains, art installations and boat trips on the river that summer – only serves to highlight the paucity of creative engagement with this city centre waterway. The upper Clyde is silent, the city chiefs seemingly clueless as to how to utilise it.

Diana showing no signs of her reported sickness.

Our tour continues past the Science Centre and Glasgow Tower, both of which had nominal predecessors on the same site. A few weeks ago, I visited the remains of the Clydesdale Bank Tower, (where local lore holds that Princess Diana experienced a bout of sickness), now a crumbling beacon on the seafront at Rhyl, Wales.

Lex’s fascination with the Glasgow Garden Festival has led to the curation of a substantial inventory of items and their whereabouts. From the mini steam train in Japan to fibreglass statues in Kaye Adams’ living room, he has pieced together the festival bit by bit, following the site’s dismantling in 1989.

But not all of the items are being well cared for. By sheer coincidence, days after joining Lex on his trail, I stumble across the festival’s giant Royal Bank of Scotland Children of Glasgow Fountain, now dumped under rubble in a Council yard.

Lex’s tour concludes in Festival Park, the part of the GGF which bears the closest resemblance to its original incarnation. This is the site of two contemporary archaeological digs, peeling back the years to reveal elements of infrastructure around the festival’s railway line, planting patterns and coins flipped into the lochan for good luck by passengers on the train.

The trees here, now mature, are living relics of the festival, presumably too the iris growing out of what is now a dry recreation of a rocky highland burn. At the top of the burn’s bed are the steps of a waterfall, now almost completely overgrown. Lex’s group has just installed information boards, offering a then-and-now perspective to passers by.

As we pause at the foot of the waterfall, two men stop to read the board. I ask them if they remember the festival. “I was born that year, mate,” one says with a smile. “Don’t remember too much about it.”

I tell them how this place was once where people came for rollercoaster thrills and skybound towers, to ride old trams and be surrounded by art and music in what felt like an endlessly sunny summer.“I hope this gives people who remember visiting this park, and the festival, the chance to refresh those memories,” says Lex.

“But just as importantly, people who didn’t know it even happened at all will have it pointed out to them. That’s part of our mission, to bring to light the detail of this event. It changed the way Glasgow sees itself, and the way Glasgow is seen by the rest of the world.”

To take the tour visit: glasgowgardenfestival.org