Played in Glasgow: a book for both ends of the M8

Mike Stanger reviews Played in Glasgow, a new book about the social history of sport in Scotland's largest city, and urges everyone to get hold of a copy...

Glaswegians reckon they know a thing or two about sport. And they are vaguely aware and proud of the role of their city in developing sporting infrastructure. But I bet they don't know the half of it.

By contrast, Edinburgh citizens, disdainful of Glasgow sport in general, know practically nothing of the debt they owe to Scotland's largest city in the formulation of their favourite physical pastimes.

So the publication of Played in Glasgow, the latest of a series of books that have previously focused on Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Tyne & Wear, is just the book for Scots at both ends of the M8.

The author, curiously, is not a Glaswegian. But I'll wager that Ged O'Brien is the most knowledgeable person about sporting heritage in Glasgow. For a start, he was enticed to the city in 1993, at a time when the Museums and Art Galleries was run by an Englishman, to become project director of what was to become the world's first football museum, now based at Hampden Park.

And when Simon Inglis, the inspirational editor of this enterprising publishing series – who does have strong Scottish credentials – wanted to focus his next book on Glasgow, he turned to Ged O'Brien.

It was a brilliant choice, for Played in Glasgow is a superb addition to the lexicography of sport in Glasgow, and, in my opinion, the most intelligent, informative, well-researched and wonderfully readable of any that I have ever come across.

And not only should it be required reading for everyone in Edinburgh. It is also mercifully free of the fawning attitude to football that most authors of previous publications about Glasgow sport have allowed themselves to adopt.

O'Brien understands that sport in Glasgow did not start with football. And he meticulously gives full credit to those of other sports who – long before football - saw the need to become organised, and for the rules of their games to be properly formulated and set down.

One of the first to show the world how to do it was bowls, whose Scottish aficionados laid down what became the internationally-standardised rules of play as early as 1848.

Golf, of course, had a much older pedigree in other parts of Scotland. But O'Brien tracks the boldness of golfing entrepreneurs in Glasgow, who found the land to accommodate an astonishing number of outstanding courses within easy reach of the citizens.

And, glory be, O'Brien acknowledges fully the formative influence of cricket in the Scottish sporting panoply – not least in Glasgow, where the sport (like practically all games) was first played informally on Glasgow Green as early as 1826.

Then a range of cricket clubs and grounds sprang up in and around the city in the wake of the development of the city and its suburban rail network over the following 60 years.

O'Brien's easy narrative weaves a fascinating social history of Glaswegian sport into a more-or-less chronological tale of sporting development in the city over two centuries.

References to cricket abound throughout, studded into the stories of other sports. Many were new to me. I didn't know, for example, that the first recognisable cricket club and ground in the city was Burnbank CC, located at Woodlands Park, a multi-sports field just to the south of Great Western Road as it heads westwards from St George's Cross.

Played in Glasgow, lavishly illustrated with archive pictures, superbly-presented maps and specially-taken contemporary photographs by Stuart Wallace, has the first known photograph of a cricket match in Glasgow in progress. The sharply-focused sepia image was taken at Woodlands Park during a two-day match against an All-England XI in 1871.

Watched by over 3,000 people, the backdrop to the photograph is the rear elevation of the three-storey curved tenement of Queen's Crescent (which still stands, though the open space has long since been built over).

Apart from the passing references - many concerned with sundry pavilions which were bought secondhand by Queen's Park Football Club and others as the city's building boom overran many of the original cricket grounds – there is a whole section of the book devoted to cricket.

The narrative, of course, takes in the oldest still-surviving cricket club in the city (Clydesdale, formed in 1848 from two earlier clubs that played on Glasgow Green), which gets two pages to itself. And, of course, so does the West of Scotland club, founded in 1862, with the role of Hamilton Crescent as venue for the first-ever international football match in 1872 getting another airing.

There is a splendid 'colourised' photograph of Hamilton Crescent in its pomp in 1904, with a crowd of several thousand watching from outside the perimeter fence as well as inside. I've never seen this image before, and it clearly shows what must have been one of the earliest sightscreens in the sport, along with an impressive small marquee - or perhaps beer tent - at deep mid-on beside the now-familiar pavilion.

And there are excellent up-to-date pictures of the pavilions of the Poloc, Kelburne and Glasgow Accies grounds, along with references to other clubs and cricketing schools.

But it is not just O'Brien's recognition of cricket as deserving of a separate section that commends this book. Played in Glasgow is just such a good read, from start to finish. The pictures get generous space for explanatory captions and, somehow, they skilfully form part of the continuum of his story-telling.

Although his focus is the astonishing array of physical buildings and grounds that Glasgow's sportsmen and women used as the city grew, his observations on the background social scene are spot on, and still relevant today.

You get the feeling that nothing has been left out, nothing ignored and no sporting stone left unturned - whether it is the benificent influence of such as the Stirling Maxwells of Pollok or the cavalier way in which sporting entrepreneurs built facilities for a passing sports fashion, only to see them adapted to another pastime a decade or two later, or demolished to make way for another episode in the city's growth.

The overwhelming questions that persisted after I reached the end of the final chapter were: Do we really value our sporting heritage any longer? And: If more people read this book, would they have more respect for the facilities that their sports clubs struggle to maintain and improve year-on-year, on a relative shoestring?

And here's a suggestion. If, at the forthcoming General Election, you are canvassed for your support by a representative of one party or another, ask them one question: why, when they all acknowledge the importance of sport in the social cohesion of our civilisation, do they rate sports development and provision at such a low priority?

Played in Glasgow should surely convince them that proper investment in sport is long overdue.

Played in Glasgow by Ged O'Brien, is published by Malavan Media at £14.99

ISBN: 978 0 954744 557    Orders can be placed through www.playedinbritain.co.uk