Stoned...

   

Red sandstone

Glasgow is a beautiful city, and not just in the architecture of its buildings but in the materials used which are generally of red and yellow sandstone. When the light is right the red sandstone takes on a wonderful warmth while the yellow sandstone shines like freshly washed hair which is why, perhaps, people have taken to calling it blonde sandstone. The luminescent quality of the sandstone is due to the fine quartz crystals in its composition. The blonde sandstone is from the carboniferous period, a close cousin of the fossils in the fossil grove at around 320 million years old.

Yellow, or blonde, sandstone

    The builders of Stonehenge might have been jealous of the builders of Glasgow. While the Stonehenge masons had to transport the bluestones from 150 miles away in Wales, the Glasgow masons found theirs on their doorstep. Blonde sandstone quarries were found in Partick, Cowcaddens, Kelvingrove, and on the site of what is now Queen Street Station, which is why the station is located where it is, built in a ready-made and level cavity. The red sandstone is a younger relative to the blonde sandstone originating in the Permian period, around 270 million years ago. In that period a vast desert stretched across Scotland and it is this arid desert sand that gives the stone its wonderfully warm red colour which is a consequence of the iron-rich coating of the sand-grains. The sand of the Sahara desert has the same quality and the dunes of the Sahara change colour throughout the day as the angle of light changes. 

The red sandstone of Glasgow came from further away than the blonde sandstone and was found as far south as Ayrshire and Dumfries. For a long time, the beauty of both the red and blonde sandstone buildings was hidden by decades of smoke and soot-filled rain which had blackened Glasgow. In the 1980s Glasgow decided to clean the stones and restore many of the buildings after years of neglect and destruction when many of them were demolished. The Glasgow comedian Billy Connelly, on returning to the city after the clean-up, said the effect was as if someone had opened the sun-roof and let in the light.

I remember the change. Buildings which had previously appeared gloomy and oppressive suddenly shone with an inner light. It was as if the buildings, those viewing them, and the city itself had experienced a sudden epiphany. The gloom of an industrial revolution was erased and people, residents and visitors, realised that Glasgow was beautiful. The revelation was startling, as though an elderly bag-lady, covered in the grime of the streets, hair and clothes dishevelled, had put on her finery and transformed herself into the elegant being she once was and you wondered why you hadn’t noticed her inner beauty before. The quality of the sandstone can lend a grandeur to even the most ordinary of buildings.

Not all cities are capable of such a transformation. In London, when street after street was cleaned of the surface dirt and accumulated coats of paint of a century or more, all that was revealed was the cheap undecorated brickwork beneath which was not appealing to the eye and for which reason it had probably been painted in the first place. London had no quarries nearby, and any materials of similar quality to red and blonde sandstone were used only for the very grandest of buildings. Also, the Glasgow buildings were built for humans of normal stature whereas row after row of London’s terraced houses are so small as to make a visitor wonder if the city was once populated by pygmies. In New York, a similar clean-up of the tenements in lower Manhattan revealed that much of the stone used was of poor quality and had been thinly applied as cladding to conceal brickwork of an even shoddier construction.

It had taken a long time for Glasgow to appreciate its architectural heritage and Glasgow City Council was in the process of demolishing many of the old buildings when a European visitor to the Council pointed out that Glasgow was one of the richest cities in Europe for 19^th century architecture and was, in fact, an architectural masterpiece. I imagine the situation was something like an elderly and not very imaginative relative being in the process of throwing out the family heirlooms only to be told by an expert their true worth.

Sometimes you become so accustomed to the wealth around you that you take it for granted.