‘Ah’ll show yoo anuther Glesca,’ announces Owen
Gallagher in ‘Thi Unoffishal Toorist Guide Oootside Glesca Central’, not the
‘bleached version’ of history books and tourist brochures. Clydebuilt is a book about growing up in the Gorbals in the 1950s
and 1960s – poverty, pawnshops and sectarianism, carbolic soap and lice, Saturday
morning at the pictures, violent teachers, razor-gangs and blacklists. It’s a
book about language – Glaswegian dialect, Latin and the Church’s ‘tabernacle of
language’. And it’s a book about Red Clydeside, a city of dreamers, fighters,
singers and rebels.