It’s quiet on the broad Calton Entry road to The Barras. On weekday mornings there’s none of the lively hustle you associate with the markets. The urban enclave lies dormant. It’s a chance to look around at what else lies within. We’ve mentioned before how the invisible barrier between the Merchant City and the Calton is being eroded. There’s the stirring of new commercial activity sweeping up towards Dennistoun’s Duke Street with the promise of opening out the East End to the rest of the city centre.
More creative people are being drawn in this direction and that brings dividends. Of course, the area has seen a succession of false dawns and endless hand-wringing from authorities about what regeneration here means. There remains unfulfilled potential.
We take a walk inside what was the Barras Centre, now the focus for a lot of this new creative energy. It’s not particularly distinctive from the outside but inside sits the handsome arched glass roof and courtyard that’s become the principle venue of Barras Art and Design.
A space that’s welcomed artists and social enterprises has broadened its horizons in recent months. A’Challtainn @ BAaD is a multi-purpose venue that accommodates a restaurant, event space, coffee shop, cocktail bar and beer gardens. There will be space for food vendors and concerts, film screenings and community meetings.
The concept is to build a food quarter, linking in with the new culinary focus in the area brought by venues like St Luke’s. More on this another time.
We’re here to meet Norrie Innes who is the owner of BAaD,Rock DCM and a man who has left his mark on the city, most notably through his work on Homes for the Future for Glasgow 1999 UK City of Architecture & Design.
We are pointed towards a remarkable structure out the back. Constructed from shipping containers it is both utilitarian and graceful in equal measure. Norrie strides across to greet us with a firm handshake. He’s built like a footballer – we later find out he played for Hibs for two years with brief spells at a few other Scottish clubs.
The offices within the shipping container structure are as well appointed as you’ll find in the city with a surprising amount of space. We sit down for a cup of tea and a chat.
Norrie is originally from Baillieston and a graduate of Glasgow College of Technology, where he met his wife and studied Civil Engineering. He has a connection to the area but wouldn’t pretend he was raised through the markets. His first tangible presence here was when he was appointed to find a site to build Homes for the Futures.
“I looked at five, maybe six different sites and eventually, I suppose I wanted to prioritise regenerating this area because I had an affection for the area, and we came up with Homes for the Future at Greendyke Street. Then with five different developers, seven architects, we managed to get ten different buildings planning in six weeks.
Everyone thought I was insane, getting five developers to work together and even seven architects, which is probably even more challenging. Then I described our plans and David Page of Page and Park just nailed it when he started saying “it’ll just be like jazz”. I was trying to aggressively persuade them “aye, this will work. It will work because I know it will work.” The personalities round the table needed a bit of convincing. David amplified the argument to get down that route and it worked.”
He explains that it was something of a miraculous effort with workers working round-the-clock and skilled workers from all over the UK, joined by Italians from Naples laying the granite. “Donald Dewar came down to open it on the 23rd June and we still had to complete it, we were watching the Italians frantically laying those granite cubes” he remembers.
Then came Barras Art and Design which is his enduring base in the East End. “It was originally called the Barras Centre and it was a very dysfunctional building. It was a three-step sunken courtyard so, in terms of the access and mobility, it was dysfunctional. The units were all badly designed and badly built, in terms of access. There was no insulation, there was no proper hot water systems. Then, the big critical thing was the roof. There was no roof on the central courtyard. When we had fixed that, we pioneered working with the first farmer’s market in Glasgow. Simon Howie, who’s now got sausages in every supermarket in the country, he kind of started at these food markets. There’s people who came and committed to it and had success stories out of it”.
So BAad and BAad2, as the new building has been christened, now drive food commerce and offer a home or encouragement to social enterprise. There’s also the very basic task of driving new footfall to the area. Simply drawing new people to these streets has its own way of adding new aspects to the area.
“Social enterprise is at the core of what we’re trying to do. We have created Rock Regen CIC, a community interest company. Some of the impetus for that has come about because organisations that were set up prior to the Commonwealth Games, like ABC, Action Barras Calton, no longer exists”.
It’s bad timing for ABC to leave something of a vacuum, with others now trying to maintain the momentum. The Glasgow Council Calton Barras Action Plan remains a driver of improvement to public spaces and job creation, but then there is a tangible pressure on resources and other areas of the city are competing for funds.
Apart from St Luke’s, and the new building we are sitting in, there isn’t a great deal in the Barras area that could be held up as markers of change and regeneration.
Norrie is of the opinion that it’s the people within some of the buildings, rather than the buildings themselves that are the change. “Creative people, just by their very description, should be creative in their thinking and creative in their function so they can adjust to things. They can acclimatise into an environment in a way that other people might struggle. So the creative industries is something that has to be nourished here.”
“It’s got a rich history, way back to Peter Howson and guys before that. That’s something that you need to respect and don’t sterilise in any way. That’s the biggest challenge I think we’ve got and I hate using the term gentrification. Gentrification is a term that people use to describe improvement progress, betterment and it’s a risk of undermining the gritty currency that exists here.”
“There’s talent, a history, Irish immigration, the market, the immigration in general now, the more contemporary sense of music, fashion, creative industry and art, football… You know, there’s a mad cocktail of things here.”
“If you are talking in terms of progress and change, this is the only new building in the heart of the Barras to go up in the last 40 years and [BAaD] is the only building built in the last 90 years, which is remarkable, with the growth of development, not just in Glasgow but globally.”
As something of an agent for change, how does Norrie get on with his neighbours, the weekend market traders? “Oh aye. To be honest, my relationship with them has always been good because they see through you very quickly if you’re not authentic. They suss you out very quickly and if you’ve got any spin or any kind of deception or any part of your nature, it gets destroyed straight away. So, you don’t survive in here unless you’re genuine.”
“Now, there’s traders hopefully will benefit in terms of this incoming of people. We’re going to have, I call it a positive people presence as we bring events in. So the market is going to co-exist with events and that’s why the relationship is an important one.”
Norrie explains that he understands there is a commercial aspect of organising events at BAaD – the restaurant has been warmly received, there are concerts coming up and the venue will be used during the Glasgow Film Festival.
He has a habit of making up wee words to connect some of his thoughts – “I’m a reg-entrepeneur, a hybrid of regeneration and entrepeneur”. He also gets quite animated when talking about the traditional Barras, even its reputation as the place where you find knock-off goods or second-hand materials. “It’s Scotland’s historic recycling zone. Recycling is trendy, it’s an essential need now, but this was the birth of it.”
Norrie uses the Catalan term poc a poc – he spent a number of years in Barcelona – which means little by little. Change should be incremental and not drastic. The desire is to make a virtue of the distinctive character of The Barras, The Gallowgate and all it brings with it. “It’s different from the West End, very different from the South Side. It’s got really something to hold on to. In terms of has it improved? It has improved, aye. Has it improved enough? No, there’s still things that we’re working on progressively that we can start to close a few gaps and that wee kind of link from Glasgow Cross.”
We chat around this and Norrie volunteers that there is a perception that “some people who support a certain team are not made welcome.” Most of the pubs around here are noticeably of a particular hue – green. There are exceptions of course, the Hielan Jessie for instance is a grand old traditional bar.
This leads us on to the news that Norrie and his team are working on a new project. What was Bairds bar is set to reopen. “Rather than being a Celtic street we can become a celtic street and there are things we can do to change the mindset. That’s something that I’m going to personally commit some time to.”
With the place that was formerly Bairds Bar, we’re working on it and the idea is, not to turn it into a football aligned pub, but somewhere that respects the history of it in a holistic sense.
So it’s down to one of those wee cultural shifts that if you can just do intelligently and respectfully, it can change mindsets.
Bairds Bar had a long history as a meeting place for Celtic fans but was also a place for a pint before a gig at the Barrowland Ballroom next door, for those brave enough. It was an unreconstructed East End boozer. Bairds closed under the recommendation of the police after a series of violent incidents. If it can return and successfully evolve into a different type of bar for the area then that really would be a tangible sign of change.
Bairds bar for craft beer and tapas with the Caledonian hipster cognoscenti?
There’s a careful balancing act here. When new settlers arrive, there’s often clashes with the natives, or displacement. This can be seen with the hipster influx to Leith Walk, the gentrification of Shoreditch, or the newer flash bars of Manchester’s Northern Quarter. It’s what happens in cities. The question remains how can new businesses coexist against the backdrop of the Barras and everything it brings with it. Can an area have a bit of an edge while being brought back into the retail and entertainment mainstream?
As we finish up our chat Norrie is quite direct about this. “The one thing I have kind of grew up not being able to understand is how Del Boy is applauded as being just a bit of a rogue trader and there’s a charm there and there’s a cheeky side and there’s an acceptance of it. But around here they are thought of as dodgy. At any market there’s a front door and a back door trade and what you need to focus on is bringing positive activity and accepting as sure as you breath in and breath out, there’s going to be criminal activity, a presence in the area. Now that’s down to the police and trading standards to deal with that.”
“What we need to focus on, everybody collectively, is just to bring more people here. You go to New York on the bus, they tell you “This is where you get off for your fake Gucci bags.” They tell you and it’s just an acceptance and I’ve actually given the police and trading standards scientific analysis that basically counterfeit goods are good for the brands. There’s proof there.”
“I’m not expecting them to change their policy overnight to allow criminals to do what they want to do but it’s just the idea that the negativity on this is maybe not amplified as you think it is.”
“So, when we’ve got an event here, make sure people come safe and it’s clean and it’s orderly. That’s what I want to happen, focus on support of positive activity. Don’t just give us the crime stats and focus on just chasing the baddies around the area.”
“If you get people from the West End with wee butterflies in their bellies coming in here to a food or a gin festival, great.”
BAaD
54 Calton Entry
Glasgow
G40 2SB
Glasgow G40 2SB, UK
Pictures at BAaD2 by Paul Gallagher
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