The Glasgow Effect by Ellie Harrison

16 the glasgow effect
1996, The Lighthouse in 1999 when Glasgow was named uk City
of Architecture, and the newly refurbished cca: Centre for Contemporary
Arts in 2001.
The city had many high-profile artists nominated for Britain’s
Turner Prize, which led the international star curator Hans-
Ulrich Obrist to ‘parachute in’ one day in 1996 and proclaim
all this ‘the Glasgow miracle’. 4 What I only came to realise
after five years of living in the city myself, in 2013, was that
this ‘miracle’ was much more about how the city appeared to
people living elsewhere – to potential tourists, students or other
transient residents – than it was about the quality of life for the
majority of Glasgow’s citizens.
‘Glasgow is kind. Glasgow is cruel’, wrote Scottish novelist
William McIlvanney in 1987. 5 And so this book is about my
love-hate relationship with this city, where I have now lived for
well over a decade. It is my story. It is about how I ended up
here, by following the absurd and lonely career trajectory of the
‘conceptual artist’. It aims to do what much of my art work has
done before – that is to use my own personal history and lived
experience to illustrate the impact that social, economic and
political systems at local, national and global scales have on our
individual day-to-day lives. Specifically it’s about the forces of
globalisation, unleashed by Thatcher and her fellow free-market
ideologues in the ’80s, which decimated industrial cities across
Britain and sent millions of ‘economic migrants’ like me on the
move. It could be about any post-industrial city attempting to
fill the vast voids and regenerate its economy with ‘culture’, but
it’s not. It’s about Glasgow and Glasgow, as we know, is special.
The phrase ‘the Glasgow effect’ began to emerge in the field
of public health around the time I moved to the city in 2008.
It was used to describe a then unsolved mystery. Why did people
die younger in Glasgow than in similar post-industrial cities in
England, such as Liverpool and Manchester? Why did Glasgow
and West Central Scotland have the lowest life expectancy in
Western Europe? In 2011, Glasgow Centre for Population Health
(gcph) published a report exploring 17 different hypotheses for
why this could be, including: diet, other ‘health behaviours’ (such
as alcohol and smoking) and ‘individual values’, ‘boundlessness