This edition of my weekly newsletter is, beyond this paragraph, a UK election-free zone. Not that the election is completely boring. If the opinion polls are right and the Tories have a lead of around 20 points, then that will result in a very interesting outcome indeed on June 8th when Britain votes. When an established  party such as Labour starts to slide, as was seen in the case of Scottish Labour, there is no knowing where it will end. The more the electorate sees of Jeremy Corbyn, the hapless Labour leader, the worse it may get. The Tories are recovering in Scotland and storming the north of England. They are seemingly ahead in Wales. This is not boring, it is a massive shift with consequences. It is the day to day election campaign as conducted so far that is on the boring side.
There, that’s enough general election for this week. Instead, I want to write a rather optimistic essay about my home town in Scotland and the broader question of what can be done to improve the fortunes of places hollowed out by deindustrialisation, globalisation and social change. In the US election last year this was a dominant theme, for everyone apart from Hillary Clinton’s incompetent and inept campaign, which only realised with 48 hours to go that something really was up in disaffected states such as Michigan. In the Brexit vote it was obviously a factor outside London. And in France it helps explain why more than 40% of the electorate voted for rebellious anti-EU candidates in the first round of the presidential election.
We hear a lot of gloomy stuff about places that have been left behind. Is hope pointless or possible? What can be done in practical terms?
My home town is Paisley, a place that has had a pretty rough old half century since its extraordinary wealth as a textile powerhouse began to fade and the mills closed.
Contrary to my neutral, bland accent, I do hail from the west of Scotland. A more or less English accent stuck after a long spell away during childhood, and when I returned to Paisley aged 14 this was me. Later, after Glasgow University and five years editing newspapers in Edinburgh I moved to London (where I live now) to make a living and to avoid a show-trial at the hands of the SNP administration at Holyrood.
There is then an obvious familial bias when I say that Paisley deserves to succeed in the bid it submitted earlier this week to become UK City of Culture 2021. It is up against Perth, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Coventry, Hereford, Warrington, Portsmouth, Wells, Swansea and Britain’s smallest city, St Davids. They are all vying to follow Hull, this year’s City of Culture, in putting on a year of events, concerts and exhibitions. It is claimed that £1bn of private sector investment has followed in Hull, and even if such numbers tend to be inflated and rounded up in the rush to talk up success, the effect has been undeniably positive.
The notion of arts or garden festivals or years of culture providing a route to recovery is long-established. The concept had a galvanising in Liverpool, twice, and was followed by a regeneration to which the private sector rallied in a way that will knock your socks off when you go, which you should ASAP.
For all Glasgow’s continuing problems the Year of Culture 1990 helped reposition that struggling city as a retail and service sector dynamo. Dundee’s recovery is at root about medicine and higher education. Now, the arts, in the shape of a new V&A museum, are taking the reinvention to new heights.
What is the precise nature of the problem that needs fixing in the case of Paisley? Put simply, the town centre became over several decades a husk.
The story is more complicated, and interesting, than a narrow party political telling allows, however. While it is true that parts of the town’s suburbs are pock-marked with poverty and deprivation, featuring large batches of less than ideal local authority housing, there has long been a thriving commuter population in private housing that has grown dramatically in the last two decades. Paisley suffers from the “US donut” problem. That is not a reference to sugary snacks. Like many post-industrial American cities, Paisley is a virtual doughnut with a hole in the centre where fifty years ago there was life, money, aspiration, religion, politics and civic-engagement.
The long, grim decline of the centre in Paisley as in other similar towns in the north of England is partly down to the retail revolution and changing patterns of consumer behaviour that are not much understood in liberal elite centres such as London or Manhattan. In towns such as Paisley, tens of thousands of residents in nice cars drive round the one way system and shop at those out of town centres where everything is under one roof. This is handy when it rains, which it tends to quite a bit in Scotland. These affluent people work elsewhere. They eat out, a lot, in Glasgow. They go to concerts or the cinema and amble around in Glasgow, then drive back home round Paisley’s one way system.
What they are missing is potentially one of the best town centres on the grand Victorian scale, built in the 19th century with capitalist money. The mill-owning families the Coats and Clarks (the latter Kenneth and Alan’s forbears) endowed an extraordinary array of buildings and institutions. Others less fabled played their part and the result is a collection of 111 listed buildings. There is the Observatory. The Museum houses a textile collection and much else besides. The Russell Institute is an art deco masterpiece restored and about to be re-opened. The town hall sits opposite the mediaeval Abbey. They are surrounded by less famous buildings that made perfectly proportioned offices and large stores for what used to be one of Britain’s wealthiest towns.
The problem on the high street since the decline has been what to put in these run-down buildings when the large chains and small stores vanished and went to out of town malls, that are now getting hammered in turn by history and the unstoppable shift to online.
Intervention by successive governments and the local authority was not much use in the face of epic global shifts in manufacturing and logistics. Indeed, as elsewhere state intervention and socialism often made the problem worse by putting off the reckoning. The failure of the car plant at nearby Linwood in the late 1970s, after various government bailouts, made the area’s unemployment problems worse. Drugs and crime spread. The only real answer, of course, is innovation, money, better education and the power of private enterprise coupled with civic pride and politics that works.
If it was that simple though the centre of Paisley would not have been for so long falling to pieces. It is now, hopefully, being transformed by a dedicated group of local authority officials and local businesses. More of that in a moment.
Politicians don’t get much praise, but here they deserve it. A group – including Labour’s Douglas Alexander MP, who lost his seat in the SNP carnage of 2015, and Mark Macmillan, the council leader since 2012  – realised that much more than complaining was required. Macmillan is standing down in next week’s local elections, which are expected to see the SNP win big in Paisley and elsewhere. If so, let’s hope they can continue the work others started.
The central insight in the case of Paisley, and some of the other bidders for the City of Culture prize too I see, is that retail in its old terms is never coming back. The centre of Paisley is only ten minutes from Glasgow by train and it is being returned, in part, to nice residential accommodation. Those new residents want cafes and small shops. Fresh places are sprouting. This will hopefully create employment and encourage those on the periphery to give it another chance. The centre in this way becomes the place you stroll or drive to in order to have a coffee, collect an Amazon order, or have a meal and a gossip.
Already, existing independent shop and new outlets are swapping shopfronts in Day-Glo signs for proper signage that restores street numbers and tasteful individuality. The project has been overseen by the regeneration manager Susan Jones, and the good is gradually driving out the bad. In time that process and rising prospects may encourage landlords – remote pension funds holding portfolios of thousands of buildings around the world, purchasers at auction holding derelict property – to sell on or invest in for a return.
The local Cardosi family – which arrived from Italy in the 1920s – is putting its money where its mouth is, with a bold new project in a converted department store building with flats above looking across to the Abbey. Over a plate of pasta, as good if not better than anything I’ve tasted in London, I heard recently in the family’s existing and smaller restaurant about the plans for a new 124 covers restaurant called Pendulum opening soon, with a cocktail bar and a private dining room. Those in big cities peppered with endless chains and hundreds of restaurants take this stuff for granted. In a town centre such as Paisley it is a pioneering and brave enterprise that could create as many as 40 jobs. Their project is the first up-scale restaurant ever on that scale within many miles.
Food and drink is not incidental. It is absolutely central to a sense of place, and will only get more so as technology rips through retail. My parents (who love good food and wine) have lived in a nice part of Paisley for 32 years and I don’t know anyone – ever – who has strolled into Paisley on a nice summer’s evening (they exist) for a meal or a drink. The last time I made any such a walk was with my mate Michael decades ago when we went in search of reliable female company and a pub in which we could avoid getting stabbed.
I exaggerate on that score for comic effect, but only a little.
Almost three decades on from my generation’s chequered experiences, Paisley’s bid for UK City of Culture grew out of a bigger, ambitious effort to rethink the old, blighted centre, to improve and reclaim it as a space for people to spend time. The town has fast-growing Glasgow Airport on its doorstep, although incredibly no direct link, a failing soon to be remedied by train hopefully. Alongside all that, Paisley’s imposing Museum has Scottish government support and a bid in for Heritage Lottery funding that should unlock a ÂŁ49m redevelopment and attract visitors. And just off the high street is the campus of the University of West of Scotland with thousands of students. Sell coffee, meals, beer, bread, books and tickets to concerts and arts events to such a combination, and you’ve started something that attracts money and hopefully more investment.
As a journalist you tend to become immune to the enthusiasm of those telling you that something is terrific. For once, despite steeling myself, I found the enthusiasm infectious. “This town was built on creative industry. We are sitting on all this culture. The time is right,” says project director Jean Cameron.
Alan McNiven, director of Engage Renfrewshire, founded a volunteer project called Street Stuff, aimed at providing activities such as football and then dance on the ground in troubled areas. He thinks part of the problem in the town was an endemic lack of confidence in a once confident town after decades of decline. The first task was to convince Paisley people today that the year of culture business was worth trying at all: “It quickly went from why would Paisley bid to why the hell shouldn’t it?”
Why the hell not, indeed. Paisley produced a poet as good as Robert Tannahill (1774-1810). It is home to the world’s oldest Burns’ Club. John Byrne, one of the best painters and writers (The Slab Boys and Tutti Frutti) is a Paisley boy. (Idea: create a permanent Byrne exhibition in the regenerated museum.) Sandy Stoddart, the great neo-classical sculptor and anti-modernist, lives and works in Paisley.
The situation on the ground is not perfect. In the town centre some developers have committed sins of taste in the newer apartment buildings, and the whole enterprise is at a sensitive stage that could be knocked by a reverse in the economy. The school system, as in the rest of Scotland, needs urgent reform. The centre of town will have to continue to be robustly policed, on the zero-tolerance principle pioneered and stupidly since abandoned in New York. Drive out petty crime and you drive out drugs and violence. It also needs some bigger employers to realise that office space is cheap there, compared to “maxed out” nearby central Glasgow.
But what is truly remarkable to see, as a sceptic who long ago gave up on a once great town ever being fixed, is the energy being generated. Even if the bid fails, and it deserves to win, something positive is being unleashed in Paisley that can continue regardless. It is not big government at the centre that is doing it. It is energised local government trying to create the conditions for private enterprise to come back and communities to regenerate. Give them more power,  across the UK. Devolve, devolve, devolve.
The Paisley experience tells us a lot about how we should think about our towns and about civic space, and the opportunities that open up if we shop largely online and use the resulting time saved to talk to each other over a coffee or a plate of good food in nice buildings rather than wander around identikit shopping malls. It can be turned around.
Now. About the general election…
