East & West

I was in Glasgow twice last week - once to attend a conference at the SECC (right next to the gorgeous armadillo), and the second time to run an adult learners' forum in the Mitchell Theater - another architectural treasure, of an altogether different era. The interior is yet another contradiction - all wood panelling, orange and brown carpet and architectural steel light fittings (originals of course), that wouldn't be out of place in one of the ubiquitous "style bars" that are so popular in these parts. The fourth in this little architectural quartet was the depressing interior of the Western Infirmary's emergency waiting room (one of the learners had had a fall and I was designated taker to hospital) - old and tatty and covered in posters warning of the evils of drugs, drink, sex, and pretty much everything else. As some of you may know, I intensely dislike hospitals, and have discovered that the only way to survive the experience is to treat visits as a cultural experience. I watched family tragedies unfold, and lives teeter on the brink, in that depressing, antiseptic wee room.

I like Glasgow. It's different to Edinburgh in a way that's maybe summed up by my architectural experiences last week - bolder, brasher, tattier, trendier, more diverse, shinier. Not that I dislike Edinburgh - which is perhaps more conventionally appealing, prettier (although not without its rough edges). Maybe it's just that my roots lie in the west.

My Edinburgh architectural experiences this weekend (courtesy of the fantastic Doors Open Days, where you get to go into buildings that aren't normally open to the public or would normally have to pay to see) comprised the South Bridge Vaults - a labyrinth of chambers built beneath one of Edinburgh's oldest bridges, where, up till 1820, people lived and worked. They are reportedly haunted, and are in the Guiness Book of Records as something like "the most systematically investigated supernatural site". We also visited the Royal College of Surgeons, where we wondered at the opulence of the building and the intricacy of the cornicing, learned about the man who was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, and looked at lots of truly repulsive specimen jars (cancerous lungs, tumours, and many other body parts that had seen better days). For one so squeamish, I think I managed rather well.