City of the Dead

Started: 2024-08-28 20:28:58

Submitted: 2024-08-28 22:44:34

Visibility: World-readable

Glasgow Cathedral, and the Necropolis, and an abandoned train platform under Glasgow Central, and modern art, and vegan haggis

After five days at Worldcon in Glasgow, in which I spent most of each day inside the convention centre mainlining on science fiction literature and adjacent topics and only rarely got out into the city (and then only to eat supper) I stuck around for a couple of days to actually see the tourist sights in the city.

The first thing I did on the morning of Tuesday, the 13th of August was to call hotel housekeeping to get them to pick up my laundry. Next was breakfast, and after that I headed across the street to try to catch a bus across town. This proved somewhat harder than I anticipated because it turned out that I was supposed to wave at the bus driver to indicate that I wanted to ride the bus, otherwise it might drive by. (I discovered this when the first bus drove past without stopping.) Then when the next bus arrived I learned that I had to ask the driver for a local ticket then tap my contactless card at the reader. (None of these lessons were forthcoming on the bus company's website, which I checked in advance.) With these important ceremonies completed I boarded the X19 bus and rode vaguely north-east out of the city center, getting off in the vicinity of Glasgow Cathedral and walking a few blocks until I saw the imposing gothic cathedral rising above a square, its tower covered in scaffolding for some renovation.

The cathedral is still maintained by the Church of Scotland and used for weekly church services; but this was a weekday and the interior was filled with tourists quietly observing the majestic building. I live in the twenty-first century and I have seen many amazing things but this was an awe-inspiring experience to look up at the gothic arches lining both sides of the nave.

The cathedral was built on a hill, sloping down from the main entrance on the plaza, an unusual choice for gothic architecture, which meant that the architects needed to build up the space under the choir at the rear of the church. They did this by building a second church on the slope, as an integral part of the structure of the choir on the main floor above. The cathedral was built on the site of the tomb of Saint Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow, and the central feature of the Lower Church was a tomb in his honor.

The Lower Church was a smaller, more intimate human-scale space, unlike the towering arches of the main church above. Here I could look at the gothic arches and vaulting up close. (The interpretive signs pointed out that the architectural style and flourishes of the church are remarkably consistent across the entire structure, which is rare in any large cathedral built over the span of a few centuries.)

I climbed the stairs back into the upper church and stepped behind the screen into the sanctuary, where there were rows of pews facing the altar. The screen divided this space from the rest of the nave, but the ceiling looked like it was about as tall as the sanctuary was long, and much taller than it was wide. The tall and narrow space messed with my sense of proportion, aided by the massive arches lining the sanctuary supporting the roof overhead, and the tall-and-narrow windows on the far wall above the choir.

Behind the altar I found a Reader's Bible originally printed in 1617 for the church, in the King James translation. The sign next to the bible said it had a wooden cover and was chained to the lectern, but it was lost for 100 years before being returned and placed on display when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited in 1849. The bible was open to the last page of II Maccabeus, clearly labeled as part of the Apocrypha; the right page illustrates the beginning of "The Newe Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ". (And, I notice now, the picture captures the reflection of the vaulting above the display, visible in the glass above the 400-year-old bible.)

While walking through the cathedral I wondered how many people around me had gone to Worldcon; and then I looked up and saw someone with a Chicon patch on their jacket.

I departed Glasgow Cathedral and walked around the side of the building towards the Necropolis, the city of the dead, built on a hill overlooking the cathedral (and, by extension, the city of Glasgow). It began to rain, lightly, as I walked past the cathedral, giving me a better view of the hill it was built on and the placement of the lower church below the main sanctuary. From this view the church takes on the appearance of a cruciform plan, but from the inside the footprint of the nave and the aisles form a large rectangle stretching all the way from the front to the back of the church. The apparent transept, visible here below the tower, only exists where it spans the space above the aisles around the screen in the middle of the church.

I walked across the Bridge of Sighs leading from the cathedral to the Necropolis, and I got the distinct impression I was crossing into the underworld; though instead of a the river Styx the bridge crosses a street.

I walked aimlessly through the Victorian graveyard as the rain intensified, eventually reaching the top of the hill where a large monument to someone long dead towered above the other gravestones, growing lichen on the stone and wildflowers around their bases in between neatly-mowed strips of grass.

People walked around the monuments, their enthusiasm for this weird public quasi-park (and city of the dead) tempered by the growing rain.

I walked down a side path to a quieter section of the necropolis, filled with more trees than grave markers, and looped back to the Bridge of Sighs to depart the underworld and return once again to the land of the living.

My next stop was St. Mungo's Museum of Religious Life and Art, a little museum in front of the cathedral with displays of religious life and art. One room talked about events in life, from birth to death, through the lens of the world's significant religious traditions. Another room talked about religion in Scotland, and there were displays of religious art throughout. Overall it was an interesting place to visit, and provided a human counterpart to the overwhelming magnificence of the cathedral next door on the plaza.

I walked back to Glasgow Central (convincing myself that the bus times and routes didn't really line up with where I wanted to go) and met on the station concourse in time for the station tour I booked at 12:30. I checked in, along with the rest of the tour group, and our guide gave us high-visibility vests and caps, then led us behind one of the buildings standing on the station concourse, which turned out to have a stair leading into the vaults below the station.

Our guide talked about the history of the station, built and then expanded at the end of the nineteenth century, then unlocked a door and led us below the platform level. Here the surroundings changed from the wide open station concourse with people rushing in every direction to utility and storage spaces without anyone in sight. We were standing in vaulted arches built out of brick when the station was originally built, with the train platforms above us, now illuminated by fluorescent tubes and used mostly for storage. We saw meal service trolleys used by the Caledonian Sleeper overnight service to London, and palettes of food and drink waiting to be unpacked and loaded on the train.

Our guide led us around the vaults, stopping at various points illustrated by murals on the walls to talk more about the history of the station and some of the people who built and operated it. We spent at least an hour walking around the vaults before we descended another level and stepped into a room that had been converted into a tiny museum, with a random assortment of artifacts from Glasgow Central and rail transportation in Scotland, many of them collected by people who worked on and near the railroad when the old equipment went out of service.

After a few minutes to look around the museum, our guide took us deeper into the station, past the line that separated Network Rail's management to ScotRail's management. (Network Rail is responsible for the tracks, and for biggest rail stations, but ScotRail runs the smaller stations throughout Scotland. The ScotRail corridor was painted a bright shade of green that toed the line between cheery and cloying.) After several twists and turns we walked through a door and we were suddenly in a place that I recognized: the corridor leading to the lower-level platforms on the suburban Argyle Line, past the fare gates, where I caught the train to the SEC every day to attend Worldcon.

We walked down the corridor and around the corner, but before we would have turned down the next corner to descend the narrow stairs to the platform, we stopped at another non-descript door in the wall that I had walked by a half-dozen times but never really noticed. Our guide unlocked the door and gave vague instructions to watch our heads on the hole in the wall then go down the stairs and turn left. On the other side of the door it looked like a hole had been quickly cut through a concrete block wall, and then there was a new stair descending into a void. I was near the front of the group, and as we descended I could see that we were on the end of a dirty dark train platform, disappearing around a gentle curve into the distance, terminating in a brick wall in the opposite direction.

This platform turned out to be the original low-level station at Glasgow Central, which was dark and dirty even when it was in operation, until it was closed in the middle of the twentieth century as road travel overtook rail travel and the Argyle Line closed to passenger service. When the line was reopened in 1979 the platforms were relocated and these platforms remained abandoned.

Our guide took us across the abandoned rail bed and into an adjacent vaulted tunnel, where there were posters set up describing the permanent museum that the tour department (working as part of Network Rail) wants to set up in the abandoned train platform. This will mean closing the abandoned platforms for tours; but when they finish the museum and tour facilities should be better than what I saw (but maybe the dark dirty abandoned tunnels will lose some of their charm if they're clean and well-lit and no longer abandoned).

We headed back up the stairs that had been dropped into the middle of the abandoned platform, walked out through the station's fare gates, and took the escalator up to the station concourse. Seeing the abandoned suburban platforms deep under the station had been well worth the price of admission.

By the time the tour wrapped up it was 14:30 and I had not yet eaten lunch. I got a sandwich and coffee at the station, then headed out to see the Gallery of Modern Art. One of the pieces of modern art is on display out in front of the museum: an equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington with a traffic cone now permanently (and officially) mounted to his head.

The Gallery of Modern Art was just what I expected: a selection of modern art, not all of which made sense, but all of which was weird and interesting. One of the pieces was titled "Instrument for the People of Glasgow" by Scott Myles, which was made up of a series of microphones feeding into a synthesizer making some sort of music, or at least ambient-adjacent sound from the ambient noise in the museum galleries.

After I finished the Gallery of Modern Art it was a bit after 16:00, which gave me an awkward amount of time: not enough to actually see any museums that closed at 17:00, but I still felt like I should go see something. So I caught the Glasgow Metro anti-clockwise to Kelvinbridge, then walked along the River Kelvin into Kelvingrove Park, and then to Kelvinhall to ride the rest of the way back to the station nearest to Glasgow Central.

For supper I went to Stereo, a vegan restaurant around the corner from my hotel at the train station, and ate deep-fried vegan haggis served with mashed potatoes. It was deep-fried, and therefore it was hard to distinguish from any other deep-fried food; but it was satisfyingly crunchy and paired well with the creamy mashed potatoes.

After supper I headed back to my hotel to pack and plan for the next day's adventures.

I took even more pictures than I could fit above; they're all at Photos on 2024-08-13.