Is Glasgow losing the spaces that made it an arts powerhouse?

The closing of a cluster of leading creative venues has led to dismay and intensified fears the hubs that fostered Glasgow’s celebrated arts scene are disappearing

By the time Daisy Mulholland arrived, the locks had already been changed. The Glaswegian artist, had been organising the launch event for her new art shop at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) when she got an email telling her the Sauchiehall Street venue – and cornerstone of the city’s art scene since it was founded as the Third Eye Centre in 1974 – was closing with immediate effect.

“The event was the following day: we had 250 tickets sold, we’d done so many rehearsals, and inside there were lighting rigs, performers’ equipment, shop stock. It was truly heartbreaking,” she says.

Since that initial email from the CCA board on 30 January, which said the “organisation has been unable to achieve a sustainable financial position”, it has taken a month for Mulholland – who works under the name Nänni-pää – to reclaim her property, with offers of redress.

She is not alone. “So many businesses lost so much money and time, and now the loss of the space itself is having a huge impact on the wider community,” she adds.

As the reverberations of the CCA’s closure persist, last week came a further shock wave: tenants at another arts hub, Trongate 103, were reportedly being threatened with eviction by their landlords. The news was met with dismay by supporters of the cultural heavyweights renting there, which include the Glasgow Media Access Centre (GMAC), Street Level Photoworks and the Glasgow Print Studio.

Mark Langdon, the chair of the GMAC board, says the centre received a notice to quit on 27 February. City Property, the city council’s arm’s length body, insists this is standard process in lease renewal, but Langdon says GMAC has already said it cannot afford a rent hike of four times the current rate plus additional service charges.

A week later, City Property put out an additional statement denying it was evicting people and stating it was their “intention to support organisations to remain in the building wherever possible”, but the rent increases stand.

Langdon was part of the original discussions prior to 2009, when £8m of public investment was patched together to renovate the Trongate building to create a sustainable grassroots arts community for decades to come.

But he says the transfer of tenancies to City Property means “we’re now seen essentially as commercial tenants rather than a partnership relationship with the council”.

For the city’s Scottish Labour MSP, Paul Sweeney, this is further evidence of a “lack of strategic leadership across Glasgow’s art scene”. He lays the blame squarely with the city’s SNP council.

“It’s the essence of what gives the city its soul and was the driver of its renaissance in the 1990s and early 2000s,” he says. “Venues like Trongate 103 were set up as a way to anchor city regeneration and it is deeply depressing to see it unravelled for commercial profit.”

Sweeney is one of many who highlight the incremental diminution of Glasgow’s cultural infrastructure – the Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building remains a burnt-out shell, a decade on from when it was first damaged by fire; the Lighthouse, previously Scotland’s centre for architecture and design, is now in private hands; the McLellan Galleries is now redeveloped as office space.

It is a diminution made all the more stark by the city’s cultural successes. A scrappy, DIY contender to the monolithic privilege of Edinburgh or London and Glasgow, accelerated by its tenure as European Capital of Culture in 1990, has melded visual arts, music and club culture anchored around an art school that has graduated multiple Turner Prize winners.

Indeed, with hindsight, some have suggested that Glasgow’s capacity to punch above its weight on the international arts stage resulted in a perception that all was well when development funding and coherent strategy were desperately needed.

The circumstances of Trongate 103 and CCA are very different. As the online newspaper the Bell has reported assiduously, the CCA’s closure came after a turbulent few years that saw a bitter staffing dispute, serious concerns over financial management and the board’s refusal to support a cultural boycott of Israel, resulting in its inflammatory handling of a pro-Palestinian protest.

While the liquidation of the CCA is continuing, Creative Scotland still owns the building and says it will “continue to explore future options for the building with the aim of it re-opening as a cultural resource as soon as is realistically possible”.

Janos Lang is the founder of the Roma-led cultural organisation Ando Glaso and was based there for almost 10 years. “The CCA was one of the few places where ethnic minority organisations like ours were able to develop work, collaborate with others and present new cultural voices to wider audiences,” he says, suggesting the building could become Scotland’s first multicultural arts centre.

On the edge of the city centre near the River Clyde sits SWG3, a former warehouse complex and galvanisers’ yard that is now a blisteringly successful multidisciplinary arts venue, hosting leading club nights and the annual Yardworks street art festival.

Alison Fullerton, the executive director of the Clydeside Initiative for Arts, SWG3’s founding charity, says this entrepreneurial model of commercial activity funding programmes and supporting artists is “a mindset that has definitely grown over the years” across the city.

“The challenge now is that costs like rent, energy and staffing are all going up, while artists aren’t earning more and audiences have less to spend, so there’s a gap there that’s getting harder for cultural organisations to fill,” she adds.

There’s also a concern that the squeeze on arts space will affect the wider city community.

“What’s amazing about Glasgow is the range of artists, from those who are self-taught to graduates from the art school, all of whom have a real connection to the city,” says Veronique AA Lapeyre, the director of the Scottish Contemporary Art Network. “We know that art is positive for mental wellbeing, community expression and social inclusion, and it’s a concern that this inter-connectedness could be eroded.”

“Glasgow has an amazing visual arts sector, but still comparatively low funding compared with other European cities” she adds, while welcoming the Scottish government’s recent commitment to increase annual funding for culture and the arts by £100m by 2028-29.

Back at GMAC, the programme director, Louise Oliver, warns: “Glasgow is slowly becoming a hollow shadow of the thriving, radical and creatively edgy place it once was. At a certain point you have to ask what kind of city we are choosing to become. If you’re a young creative person studying in Glasgow today, why would you stay here after graduation if the spaces that nurture culture and experimentation are continually pushed out?

“Glasgow was once the UK’s first European City of Culture. That legacy should mean something. There’s a lot of lip service paid to the importance of the arts, but that has to be matched with meaningful support and real investment.

“If we truly believe culture matters, it needs to be reflected in the decisions we make, the spaces we protect and the budgets we commit.”