Category: hipster bollocks

Hotel Govanhill

A mural of blue faces of two women with red in the middle

Govanhill has so many pockets and compartments of different people and new languages surfing our streets in their idiosyncratic style.

Many Govanhills, one culture, Govanhill culture.

If you’re ever in the area, come on round to our corner, because that’s where it’s happenin.

G Hill boyz and girlz, our songs of transition and displacement. Fringes you’ll see nowhere else in the city.

Niche markets, jasmine and coriander, coughing a lot, maybe drinking too much.

Unexpected music in winter afternoon sunshine in these streets of mystery, the same streets we grew up on.

Oh look, a childhood emptied on to the pavement. A ransacked bedroom, sitting room furniture and black television set, kitchen implements and someone’s dinner.

Fast moving junk buckets, eyeballing jakesters, that’s us.

Broken teeth and bad breath and hard times. Kebab stairwells too.

High flats and dampies and a sociology of emptiness. Low demand, expensive to maintain, high rates of turnover.

Many Govanhills, one culture, Govanhill culture.

Dickster hips with privileged clothes and lack of ideas. Stupid heads are often young, but not always.

Tote bag maniacs, vegan thugs showing too much ankle, sympathy for moustaches. Yeast farmer operatives wearing big dungarees. See?

Polka dot smug, yellow woolly hats, awful little dogs.

The busker who doesn’t look up or say thanks for your coin.

Trying-to-be radicals picking a fight with stricken local authorities broken by austerity.

Spotless vintage shops, no sense of dust or chaos, of second-hand poverty or desperate past lives.

Never places of need, just places for wee posh c*nts behind the counter to live lives of usefulness and time-filling.

Only here because we’re cheap, n’est-ce pas?

The black clouds among the inanity are real, though my dad bought the flat.

Hotel Govanhill, discretion guaranteed, you’ll never leave.

It could be heaven or it could be hell, just like everywhere else.

But it always ends the same way.

Me and the pigeons in an alleyway, partners in purpose. They’re pecking at a stray piece of cardboard, I’m having a pish behind a bin.

Cheese, Govanhill.

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City of splinters

'Way out to Victoria Road' sign at the top of of stairs with a fence on either side and tenements behind

I’m in a really bad place right now.

I don’t mean mentally. I mean Strathbungo.

These might be the worst pavements in Scotland.

Too many runners for a start. All that jogger’s forehead is putting me off sitting on a bench in the park drinking cans.

Too many aching hips, productive starter-uppers brimming with ego and wellbeing. Heavy lesbian day too, autonomous space, new moon yoga for the winter equinox.

All those science-based foundations for a happier bourgeois life.

It’s the blood and soil I miss. And the myce.

Lady Govanhill is not without grit, has both affordable rent and slum landlords, the world’s coolest streets, the greatest local journalism and the best homegrown businesses in the country, perhaps. 

The empty tins of Strongbow on the corner where pavement collides with tenement.

Kurdish beard trim, digestive biscuits, men in wigs or nail varnish.

Back here on Victoria Road we can’t even hear the crows, afternoon crows in winter sky, pale sky with mild sun, weak sun but no rain, at least there’s no rain.

The sound of walls crumbling in the close, bins not emptied since medieval times.

Cropped hair guy with scars on his face kicking in doors along the pavement.

A phone goes, with the same ringtone as your work mobile and immediately you decide you never want to hear that noise again.

Because now it’s early evening and your teeth hurt, your ears are getting cold at children screaming in seven pm street traffic and tenement living rooms with the big light on.

Are they our kids? They must be, they have to be, the children we had back in the day when we walked everywhere and labour was manual and we didn’t love ourselves quite so much. When we had steady jobs and warm homes and food on the table and schools and trains and hospitals that worked.

We didn’t live as long back then, and we won’t now again either, but our sons might, our strapping sons of six foot not gnarled like their old men because of a healthier diet of less Irn Bru, fewer chips and better drugs.

Because today we’re in love with the whole splintering city, its big quick river wintry bridges, its brazen black Victorian heart. Apologies, Liz Lochhead.

And welcome home, Govanhill.

No hills and not even part of Govan.

But at least it isnae Strathbungo.

Cheers.

Songs of Tongland

Four statues, maybe historical figures, men with beards and women with flowing hair

There’s only one Govanhill, two Govanhills, three Govanhills or more.

All in one place, one time and place, here on these streets in the south of the city.

This Govanhill pavement, flattened canvas coated by centuries of shoes. Scattered history across cracked stone, dead wheels and broken feet.

Listen to that pavement, song of the banging close door, sirens in the night, quiet weeping from a darkened room, a black dog barking.

A toot from the railway line sounds like midnight fog horns from the old river on New Year’s Eve, the ringing of church bells.

Call and response, lonely harmony of distant sounds.

The people on that pavement, you and me, them and us. A painted anarchist in a dress, inverted full-backs, caffeine turn-ups and varnished nails. Doers and makers and tossers and dossers. 

Agile dredgers, community-based mentalists, nimble home-based flip flops.

Or a young teen with blood down his face from a cut on the head, a bottle smashed, glass war.

Valium encounters, chib mark minimalism, nuisance behaviour, stealing your bike.

And on that pavement might be Irish bar, local boozer, big guy with a baldy napper and bad skin who’s drunk but friendly, fat and polite.

Or a problem drug user punting shoplifted perfume, splintered jewellery and bottles of strong drink.

Even a hip joint with craft beer and t-shirt slogans but no one standing at the bar and bored dogs ignored on the floor.

Sometimes that pavement goes backwards not forwards, backwards in time, because history had dreams when it was young too although things never turn out quite the way you’d hoped and now there’s less to look forward to than ever before.

Dead giants roam our streets, heavy ghosts of industry, of furnace and shop floor, of heat and smoke and noise.

Dusty roads and corners of grass where kids kick a ball at dykes in the backcourt or rats in the bin shed.

Sprayed slogans on the decaying bricks of an old city.

Shamrock, Gaucho, Fleeto, Tongland.

Blackhill, Haghill, Lambhill.

And two Govanhills, non-binary, very binary.

We have, you don’t.

We exist, you won’t.

We are, who are you?

Not yet, Govanhill. Not yet.

You are now entering free Govanhill

set of cartoon faces in various colours against a yellow background

So I bumped into Rab fae Torrisdale Street and he asked me where I’d been and I said I died and came back to life, just like a football team we all know.

He said you must be talking pish because that’s all you ever do and I said too right, fanny baws and kept on walking.

But as I left him alone drinking wine on the pavement I started thinking how a neighbourhood can change, even come back to life, and the gentrification of regeneration reinvented in Govanhill.

How Govanhill is part of Glasgow’s imagination. How it’s been the gateway to the city and the country as a whole, an Ellis Island for immigrants, Jewish, Irish, Bangladeshi, Romanian, for a hundred years and more.

And now non-dom fandans, vegan operatives, bakery extremists, coffee space artisan drips, and that well-known middle-class sneer.

How creatives create creative places for creative people to create and how that can only be good for young professionals like Rab.

But Govanhill is still a place of limping bams and coughing neds with everything to say but no one listening, standing in the road shouting at the wind, nothing to lose and even less to gain.

So welcome to Govanhill’s own local hub, our blended model of folk on the broo or delivering pizzas, of home workers and non-workers, outright shakers and total shaggers, dealers, dopers and a complete set of bastards.

Where digital acceleration means Rab stealing your phone and running away.

Where co-creation is mad Tracy knocking your bike, painting it black and selling it on.

Blunt place, blunt people. Funky weegies, unequivocalists, pain in the arsists, yes we are.

Dough that isnae sour, beards that urnae trimmed.

Nae drive-by almond milk either.

But don’t worry, oblivious activists, organic organisers, community shoegrazing unrealists.

We’re not indigenous, none of us are, that’s the joke as well as the punchline.

Because we’re all immigrants here. Even mad Tracy, who was born during a thunderstorm at 6pm on 6/6 in a bin shed on Edinburgh Road.

No wonder she torched her flat that time.

Cheerio.

Massive onions

collage of loaves of bread

I like bread, we go back a long way, bread is my friend.

Bap, wrap, bloomer and bun.

Farmhouse, shithouse and downright granary.

Plain, pan and rustic cob.

Bread is the best thing since sliced mushrooms.

It works as a doorstopper, helps plug a gap in a leaky window, and is great for soaking up the alcohol when you come home from the pub pished but have a job interview the next morning. You know what it’s like, we’ve all been there.

A founding principle of Govanhill, of course, is that everything except soup and beer is better wrapped between two pieces of bread. (Others include: eating the crust gives you curly hair, swallowing an apple seed means a tree will grow inside you, and masturbation improves your hearing).

Another basic truth is that hot buttered toast before the mid-morning cocktail helps settle the stomach.

And if you like a longer sandwich – maybe grilled giraffe neck, fried elephant tongue, whale liver and massive onions – there’s a baguette for that.

Me and bread go back a long way.

I remember the old bakery on the main road next to the cobbler’s, beside the butcher shop with carcasses hanging on hooks in the back and sawdust on the floor. Chugging motor cars and buses outside, belching exhausts all soot-blackened black, pedestrians in overcoats and headscarves.

The soft smell from that bakery, warm dough rising, sweet and nutty and pastry. Loaves nesting on shelves cooling, stacked in flour, cakes settling, oozing warmth and comfort.

Rolls, flat rolls, therteen of them, when your baker’s dozen was a real thing.

So aye, me and bread are good pals.

Honestly but. Nine quid for a loaf? Nah, mate. Ah cannae, ah wullnae, and am urnae gonnae, okay?  

If only I’d gone to art school to study baking.

Cubist brioche, sliced impressionism, abstract expressionist panini.

Maybe that’s why Glasgow School of Art burned down. Twice. In four years. With the same people in charge.

Maybe they’ll spend £100m on an exact replica of my arse instead.

Anyway, don’t worry, I’m only joking, I’m not a philistine. I like art, we go back a long way, art is my friend.

Surrealist cereal, dadaist croutons, renaissance ravioli.

Whatever you feel, Govanhill.

Cheese.

Ten club king size mate

close up of a mural, two men smiling, one with a beard

People sometimes ask me who the hell I think I am and what the hell I’ve ever done for Govanhill and I’m like ffs, calm doon, I only came in to buy fags.

But let me think about it.

I don’t sit on any committees, it’s true, nor any board, working group, task force, or forum. I was on the panel for a while, but that’s a different story.

I’m not an entrepreneur or a social enterpriser either.

Landlord, stakeholder, partner, investor? Aye, right.

I don’t even like hanging out with my dog, listening to true crime podcasts or baking.

I am nobody, unknown nobody no one knows.  

The only places I’m a regular are the pavement, Celtic Park and my living room.

But I’ve walked the streets of Govanhill more than ever before. I’ve appreciated it, written about it, painted its pictures, sang its songs. Endured it, stood up for it, taken the piss a little.

Also howled at it in the middle of the night, slapping my forehead, gnashing my teeth.

I’ve never shut up about Govanhill, to be honest.

You were always on my mind.

Because I’ve always been here and always will be, for ever and ever, amen.

There was never a different time or a better time, only this time.

I was there back in the day, the old day, in black and white photos of old Govanhill, how clean it looked before car ownership and home ownership, fast food and disposable culture, austerity politics, social media, gig economy.

Remember the wee guy picking his nose and staring at the camera?

I haven’t changed a bit.

I wish my fishmonger were still alive and that mass unemployment had never been invented.

If only the dry cleaners hadn’t closed down and people worked reasonable hours and had nice homes and a pension.

Where is the haberdasher and how come my phone knows everything about me?

I just want to go home.

But you are home.

I know.

In Govanhill.

Yes. I want to go home but I don’t know what that means, where it is, or if it even exists. It must be a place in your head you can always come back to, like a dream or a never-ending story.

Sorry, what are you talking about?

Ten club king size mate.

Cheers.

Govanhill doesn’t really exist

Tenements reflected on a car window, with other tenements in the background

Govanhill doesn’t really exist.

I invented these streets, built these tenements, paved these roads. I serve in the shops, pour the pints, empty the bins.

It’s me who keeps the lights on in MyGovanhill.

Invisible me walking the streets of my imaginary city.

I walk these streets but I don’t really know where I’m going.

Bouncing from sky to pavement and back before standing, standing looking out to the horizon or the end of the road at least.

There may be other places but I haven’t been and I can’t think what goes on there.

Clockwork through these streets instead, catching only my own reflection everywherever I go.

Businesses on this main road, some local, some global, pop-up, closed down. More empty shops than you might think.

Hip wee dogs with English accents, owners’ white skin prickling outside a bakery.

Forget the bakery. The bread tastes like tarmac. Govanhill doesn’t really exist. Leave your tote bag at home, check out these streets I invented instead.

Where nobody knows your name.

And they’re never glad you came.

Forget the bakery. Try queuing outside the pawn shop, the bookies, the chippy. Or the pub, repository of ancient knowledge passed down through the generations by word of mouth.

Bevvy, warmth, companionship, sometimes a guy who’ll throw up on your shoes.

Hings happenin in the streets I paved. Magic.

Tap dancers and pure rockets are singing my songs. Utter bampots and total madmen painting my pictures.

Because I’ve always been here, lived and died round here many times over.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t here.

Might try writing a sitcom about it.

Set in a bar in Govanhill where a group of locals meet to drink, relax, and socialise which runs for 275 half-hour episodes across eleven seasons.

Cheers.

Govanhill is the human condition

A doll sitting on top of a litter bin in the street

Finnieston, birthplace of the Glasgow hipster, according to scientists.

Food wanker, coffee cock, beard fanny.

I lived there before it was cool, before the BBC moved in across the river, before seafood gin and gourmet lampposts and Michelin stars, aye, aye, aye.

Back when it was a strangely empty stretch of dusty tenements from Yorkhill up to what’s left of Anderston (not much), with good curry houses the Ashoka, the Spice of Life, and Gaelic pubs the Ben Nevis, the Park Bar.

And a demolished concert hall where Gil Scott-Heron once played, the same Gil Scott-Heron whose dad played for Celtic in the fifties.

But don’t worry, Gil. Govanhill will not be Finnieston-ised.

We’re far too weird for that.

We have our pleasant bandstand, uplifting festival, various foods and ubiquitous yoga (nae offence, yogis). But also rockets and muppets and midgie-rakers keeping it real.

Because we live in a weird city.

Weird and a half, odds-on.

A guy having a wash in the street with a bottle of water. Tap aff, splish splash, job done. Wtf, mate.

Transylvania deli with a hearse parked outside, a cup of coffin from Dracucab.

A man on a bike, like lots of men on bikes, but this rude boy has a wagon at the back with a mobile sound system playing reggae tunes, Prince Buster, Desmond Dekker, Burning Spear. Hear me now, Vicky Road.

Shop keepers on chairs outside glass-fronted emporiums selling shiny baubles and fancy goods like a middle Eastern bazaar or an Indian market stall. The long flowing clothes, henna beards, a guy in a Bayern Munich top.

Misspelled shop sines and men-yous.

A hum sandwitch please.

Any screambled eggs?

That lentil soap looks nice.

Because you and I are weird and so is everyone and we all lived here before it was cool.

Spoon benders, spout merchants, ear poppers. My mate Tommy Two Noses (don’t ask).

So nae luck, Finnieston, with your cornucopia of curated utopia.

Govanhill is the human condition.

Always there, just out of reach.

Cheers.

Govanhill stories: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

two stickers with cartoon heads on the side of a wall

Govanhill is a good place to find yourself. I found people who look just like me. And a guy who punched a car.

Matthew moved up to Glasgow to study at the art school and heard about this great neighbourhood with proper tenements, really cheap, really diverse. Now he shares a flat with a photographer and a web designer, a furniture maker lives upstairs and a chef on the top floor.

We used to have barbecues together in the backcourt. Now we do it online, which is better. Now I don’t have to eat that sourdough bread which tastes like dust.

The close is full of signs reminding residents to keep quiet, close the door, don’t buzz in strangers, separate the recycling, and more.

But Matthew doesn’t mind being told what to do. It helps him make the right choices. And if the people on the ground floor are a bit rowdy, that’s just what happens when you choose to live somewhere cheap.

I knew about Glasgow’s hard reputation but it’s so not true. It’s such a vibrant place. I did see a guy punch a car last week, but he said the car was asking for it.

I don’t know any actual Glasweegies but they seem friendly, talking away, thinking you understand what they’re saying. If they start injecting heroin into their eyeballs, I just keep walking.

I knew about Govanhill’s reputation too, but I haven’t seen kids being sold on street corners or anything.

Matthew’s friend Mark is a music critic, Luke writes a food blog and John is a film maker, although they’re also unemployed. They have a lot in common, such as queuing for coffee on a deserted pavement.

Everyone wants to be with their community, don’t they? Otherwise, you wouldn’t get out of the house. We’re here to support each other, Govanhill or not.

Most of us have side hustles too. Staring at the floor, not washing our hair, crying uncontrollably for no reason.

Matthew loves the diversity in Govanhill. All the different languages you hear on the streets, food you don’t recognise, specialist shops, start-ups. Vintage stores really improve a place too. Without them it’s just charity shops. And the choice of bread is much better than it was.

I love how there are so many communities in Govanhill, and how everyone’s so supportive. Trans activists and radical feminists, socialistas and nationalistics, even the Third Lanarks and Partick Thistles gambolling down Victoria Road arm in arm. It’s such a vibrant place.

My home is still my parents’ house in Brighton. If it doesn’t work out here, I can always go back there. But I chose Govanhill because it’s cheap and it has an edge and it makes me feel alive.

Money’s not an issue. I don’t judge people because they’re poor. Some of my best friends are poor. Rab fae Torrisdale Street, mad Tracy who torched her flat that time.

You just can’t avoid these characters in Govanhill.

Cheers.

Tongues, you bass

Photo of flower sand plants outside a row of nice terraced homes

So the Strathbungo young team turned up outside my flat, started throwing toilet rolls at the window and shouting at me.

Here Cheers, you rotter. Stop pushing Strathbungo around. It’s so unfair.

Tongues, you bass.

(Wee Glaswegian in-joke there, tongs ya bass being a popular pre-ned rallying cry. Nae offence, neds.)

Anyway. Crikey. These bungo bawbags mean business.

I know Strathbungo sounds like some Highland spa town, and it’s really just five streets with large terraced homes the other side of Pollokshaws Road, but don’t be misled.

The very name strikes terror into our God-fearing Govanhill hearts.

These bungo blawhards flooded the streets with sourdough, ran the sweet potato protection rackets and other avocado-related activity.

The shit they used to pull. Baggy trouser displays, ankle of the year awards, most insufferable vegan championships. Nae offence, vegans.

All those organic carrot incidents, the pumpkin seed riots, so many innocent people going to bed at a reasonable hour. Tragic.

Their last spoon carving workshop got out of hand when the Battlefield binliners stormed in on tricycles and shot up the place with water pistols. Three fringes ruined and a beard needing towel dried. Madness.

And remember the notorious southside turf wars with the Crosshill Puzzlers, Polmadie Dobbers, Pollok Park Peculiars?

It got so bad even the Partick Monkeys had to play a benefit gig to try to calm things doon.

Anyway, we should feel sorry for these bungo bawheids. They just don’t enjoy the advantages we take for granted.

Decent boozers, love of football, an eclectic mix of streetwise bampots and clatty bastards.

So I thought I’d better get the old crew back together, the ones who were outta the joint anyways.

Rab fae Torrisdale Street, mad Tracey who torched her flat that time, the bloke with the big knuckles from the Queens Park Café.

But then I thought nah, canny be arsed, and I drank ten cans and fell asleep on the couch instead.

Nae luck, bungo boabies.