The Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988 remembered in 16 amazing nostalgic pictures

The Glasgow Garden Festival was when the city stepped confidently out of the sepia tones of post-industrial Scotland into a new technicolour landscape of music, culture and opportunity. It changed the way Glasgow looked at itself and also entertained a generation of local school children.

It was held between 28 April and 26 September 1988, the first event of its type to be held in the city in 50 years. It attracted 4.3 million visitors over 152 days, by far the most successful of the five National Garden Festivals.

Its significance in the rebirth of the city was underlined by the 1990 European City of Culture title bestowed on Glasgow. I interviewed Michael Dale in 2017, at the time leading the West End Festival, and asked him about his time creating the Glasgow Garden Festival and a change of attitude in the city that started then: “I think there was a Dark Ages for Glasgow which was the 1970s and then the Garden Festival was created. It was literally a creation in order to have an economic driver for part of Glasgow that was derelict.

“It happened to coincide with a letter that arrived from Westminster to say there’s this idea going around about a European City of Culture. Who wants to join in?

That letter nearly didn’t get found on the Chief Executive’s desk in Glasgow but, by chance, it got found and a man called Eddie Friel who was very keen in using culture as a way of reviving Glasgow, he said, “We’ve gotta go for this” and then I just arrived to run the Garden Festival so I spoke with him and put that together. It was a coming together of two things and what I think I realised once we were awarded the City of Culture which was at the end of 1986 but it happened in 1990 … what I realised was that Glasgow was already a city of culture and the people just didn’t know it.

“People who lived here knew it but even people living in Edinburgh, let alone London and Birmingham and Europe, they didn’t know Glasgow had an orchestra, a dance company, an opera company, fantastic galleries, fantastic parks.

“Because when I was putting together all the people that we already could count on for the Year of Culture, it was a very impressive list which included the RSAMD and Scottish Television and the BBC. It wasn’t that we had to create lots of culture just to say that we were a city of culture. It was already here and then you add to that galleries, individual artists, the New Glasgow Boys, as well, all the bands, Postcard Records, the up and coming groups, The Blue Nile. There’s so much of it.

The writers, Alisdair Gray, Liz Lochead. It was just so obvious and I think the triumph for Glasgow was the fact that they managed to package that up and sell it to the rest of the world. And we’re still benefiting from that. A kind of tourism was invented on the back of these two events. Tourism for Glasgow was invented.”