Hansard

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate and I put on record my thanks to the committee and the clerks for producing the report, which is a substantive piece of work that I found very informative, having come to the issues as a non-committee member.

Before I turn to the substance of the report, I will reflect briefly on a previous jewel in Glasgow’s architectural heritage that was lost to fire. This past Saturday marked 57 years since Glasgow lost the St Andrew’s halls. I do not think that many people in the chamber will be familiar with the halls, but they were a premier music venue not just in Scotland and the United Kingdom but in Europe. The venue had legendary acoustics and was home to the Scottish National Orchestra. It hosted some of the greatest musicians of all time, from Dame Nellie Melba to Sergei Rachmaninoff, and some of the most significant political figures including David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.

The St Andrew’s halls were lost to fire following a boxing match between Scotland and Romania. Smoking was prohibited, but those who were working at the venue were lax in enforcing the rules, and they did not want to tell boxing fans that they could not smoke. As a consequence, a cigarette ignited material that burned the venue down.

Only the facade of the venue remains today, but it stands as part of the Mitchell library complex at Charing Cross. The Mitchell library stands intact today because of the firewall between St Andrew’s halls and the Mitchell library that was put in place during the second world war. That raises two questions—about the application of rules and about appropriate measures of mitigation—which have been raised in the piece of work before us today.

It is tragic that, some 52 years after the event that I have just described, another jewel should be so severely damaged and, following that, almost completely destroyed. The fire at the art school came only 10 years after the Elgin Place congregational church on Pitt Street—known to my generation as the Shack nightclub—was burned to the ground. How have we managed to find ourselves in a situation in which those architectural gems, which are so interwoven into the Glaswegian identity, have been lost? Why have those lessons not been learned over half a century?

The question arises whether there will always be an inevitability that such tragedies can happen, but my reflection from reading the committee’s report is that the events that have befallen the Glasgow School of Art were ultimately preventable, to some extent. When I make my way through what the report says about the conduct of many of those involved in the management and running of the art school, I am filled with a sense of foreboding, because it seems that there was an inevitability in what eventually happened. That is a great tragedy.

As someone who was born 23 years after the St Andrew’s halls burned down, I ask myself what it would have been like to be in that incredible venue. Twenty-three years from now, will people who are born today ask what it was like to visit the Mackintosh building? I appreciate that there are calls to rebuild it. Those calls are valid, and I agree with the committee that that will have to be done in consultation with the local community and wider stakeholders. Patrick Harvie raised a point about the need to build trust before encountering a crisis, and that is a lesson for us all. There is certainly now a job to restore and build trust. A key way of doing that will be to have thorough engagement and not to take any decisions pre-emptively on what the future of the site should be.

I do not endorse the position that Adam Tomkins has taken, but the anger that he expressed is visceral, and it reflects the anger of many of his constituents. I recognise that entirely. It is imperative that there is a substantive process of engagement.

Many of this afternoon’s speeches have focused on the need to ask questions, and much of the debate is contingent on and caveated by the need to wait for the outcome of the SFRS inquiry. While it is frustrating that we do not yet have a report, the most vital thing is that the SFRS and all those involved have the opportunity to conduct the most full and robust inquiry, so that we have a full understanding of the events that took place. I am very sympathetic to the calls for a full public inquiry. However, it would be most beneficial to wait until we have the full results of the inquiry from the SFRS before proceeding.

It is imperative that, by whatever mechanism we achieve it, lessons are learned from the events of 2014 and 2018, and that we ensure that this never happens again. Although there may be some questions around who the future legal owner of the Mackintosh building should be, the reality is that it belongs to all of us and to future generations, and we are duty bound to protect it.