The Barras: Glasgow’s famous market is 100 years old, but is there a future for it?

But even if you haven’t been to the famous – and occasionally notorious – Glasgow market or the celebrated ballroom and concert venue, there’s no doubt you will know a bit about its history and its status and the affection in which it’s held. This year is the market’s centenary and there’s a lot of celebration but a bit of concern too.

The Barras has been affected by the same trends that have hit the high street: changing habits, internet shopping, and the pandemic, and there aren’t as many people going to the market as there once were. The centenary is a chance to look back but also look forward and ask: what is the future of the Barras?

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This weekend, though, the focus is on the glorious past as the market’s colourful history is celebrated with an exhibition of photographs at the Arti San Toi gallery on Moncur Street and in the market itself.

It’s been organised by Friends of the Pipe Factory, which provides workspaces for artists at the market, and its director Stephen Sheriff says the centenary is a chance to celebrate an institution that has a place in the affection of many in the city and around the world. "100 years is an incredible milestone,” he says.

It’s even more incredible when you think how it started. The local historian Peter Mortimer tells me the story, which begins in the middle of the 19th century when there was mass immigration to Scotland from Ireland. The immigrants would land at the Broomielaw on the Clyde and the first thing many of them did when they came off the boat was put a blanket on the ground, put a bundle of clothes on the blanket, and start selling. They were pavement sellers and eventually they migrated to what became Paddy’s Market, near the Clutha bar.

After a while though, the city corporation judged that the situation was getting out of hand and decided it would build the city clothes market on Greendyke Street, not far from the site of the current Barras.

For a time, the traders sold their wares there, but by 1920, the market was being used for other purposes and the traders returned to the streets, selling clothes, bric a brac, furniture, and just about everything else. But there were a lot of complaints from local residents, and car drivers, and lorry drivers, that the streets were getting clogged up, which is where a rather extraordinary woman enters the story.

Her name was Maggie MacIver and she was born in 1880 in Galston in Ayrshire. In the late 1890s at some point, the young Maggie and her mother moved up to Glasgow in search of work and settled in the Bridgeton area of the city. Maggie’s mother worked as a French polisher while Maggie herself rented out a barrow and traded at Parkhead Cross. In 1902, when she was 22, she met and married fruit seller James McIver and the couple ran a shop together. During the day Maggie would work in the shop and in the evenings she would go into Glasgow city centre and sell bags of fruit to people queuing at the theatres and music halls. It was a tough, tiring life.

But Maggie and James had an entrepreneurial outlook. When Maggie first started out, she was hiring a barrow and some scales to weigh the fruit, but she and her husband James spotted that it would be better, and more profitable, to hire out barrows themselves and so they bought a little yard and started the business and before long they had a fleet of 300 barrows.

They then spotted a piece of open ground on the Gallowgate in Glasgow, they bought it, and started to rent out pitches too. It was shrewd business sense: they were making money from the barrows and the pitches and a small community emerged. It was 1921 and the beginning of the Barras.

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Historian Peter Mortimer says Maggie McIver was clearly a clever businesswoman and her great skill, he says, was her ability to spot an opportunity and exploit it. In 1926, for example, after six rainy weekends on the trot, she came up with the idea of putting a roof on the market and enclosing it with wooden shutters.

Seven years later, she built the Barrowland Ballroom, by which point she was running the business on her own following the death of her husband as a consequence of malaria he caught during the First World War. It was a difficult time for Maggie, but again she improvised.

“Maggie was burdened with capital gains debts, nine children and a business to run and James dying put additional strain on her,” says Peter. “But she was a resolute woman. She had the market where it used to be said you could get ‘anything from a needle to an anchor’ as well as the ballroom.

In the early 1950s, a Himalayan expedition got kitted out at the Barras. It was diverse in products, it was diverse in customers and it was diverse in traders. It had a reputation that if you wanted something, you could always more or less get it. And then in 1934, she built the ballroom.”

Maggie decided to build the ballroom because of a problem she faced. By the 1930s, she had a family of traders whom she looked on affectionately and a couple of times of year she would treat them to a bash at the St Mungo’s Halls in the Gorbals. The menu was always the same – lentil soup, steak pie, fruit trifle, and plenty of beer and spirits – and Maggie would always foot the bill. The problem, however, was the beer and spirits – things would often get out of hand and eventually St Mungo’s Hall said they wouldn’t take the booking anymore, which is when Maggie said: fine, I’ll open a function room of my own. It later became a ballroom, it opened in 1934 and in 1938 it was extended to double its size.

The ballroom has since become a legendary and much-loved concert venue, but it’s also been subject to the same vicissitudes as the market. After Maggie’s death in 1958, the business was run by her son Sam, who had a car showroom on the ground floor but in August of the same year, the building went up in flames and Sam had to desperately run into the building and drive cars out to save them. The next day, the ballroom was a charred ruin.

With something of the attitude of this mother, Sam began the rebuild straight away and the ballroom reopened in 1960 with a new resident band, Billy McGregor and the Gay Birds. But the 1970s brought more change. Ballroom dancing was on the way out, disco and clubbing was on the way in, and by the early 80s the ballroom was pretty much unused. It was then that Simple Minds got involved.

“Simple Minds asked their manager for a venue so they could do a promotional video for the Waterfront album,” says Peter. “Someone said ‘why don’t we try the Barrowland, that’s pretty much lying empty these days’ so they did their film there and then the penny dropped – this would make a tremendous rock venue so they went about promoting it as such and it gained pace. Noel and Liam Gallagher said when they got a tour to do in the UK, the first thing they did was look down the list to see if they were doing Barrowlands.” To capitalise and promote the ballroom’s new status as a rock venue, the new neon sign was unveiled in 1985 (the lights was switched on by one of the biggest TV stars of the time, Russ Abbot).

The venue, and the market, has been managed since the 80s by Tom Joyes, who’s aware that he runs a special place that people feel great affection for. But he’s also aware businesses can disappear even when people feel affectionate about them and says the ballroom and the market have to adapt and change to survive.

The trick with the ballroom, he says, is to modernise without losing the qualities that people love (both the bands and the audiences). “The acoustics in the ballroom are extremely good,” he says, “and it has a Glasgow audience and good headline bands – it’s a recipe made in heaven. The thing that’s most commented on is the décor – we spend a lot of money of it but you don’t see it cosmetically because we try to keep it in its original state as much as we can.”

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Tom says the same delicate balance is needed in the market: preserving the best of the past and the history while also modernising. The established traders like Jackie Polson, of the Magpie Café at the Barras, talk about the need to preserve the area. “We see the Barras as a national treasure, a heritage site, and feel very strongly that this area should be treated as such,” is her view. “It’s about keeping the Barras alive.” The question is how?

Tom says the decline in the numbers of people coming to the market is undeniable. “The market was an extremely busy place when I joined and much busier than it is now because we didn’t have the competition from car boot sales or the big shopping centres,” he says. “The market at that time had been in a bit of a decline even then and a trust was set up in 1982 so there was a local body acting as a broker to do upgrades so there was a lot going on. When I joined in 1985, the big plan on the go was the neon sign so it was an extremely busy year.”

Over the years, says Tom, there have been good moments and bad. “I would say the past 10-12 years or so, the market has gone into decline again and it’s because younger people don’t want to follow in the footsteps of their parents who have been running stalls,” he says. “But what has happened is it’s evolving – it’s becoming a bit more regenerated. There’s a lot more arts and crafts appearing on the market and workshop spaces.”

Which brings up the tricky subject of “gentrification”: how do you modernise and attract new people without pushing out the old? Tom says you have to be cautious. “We have to be careful how we treat the market because we don’t want to upset people by, dare I use the word, gentrifying the area, we call it evolving,” he says. “We want to evolve, but still remain true to who we are. We’re not forcing it and young people want to manufacture stuff and they need the workshop spaces so it’s evolving on its own to an extent. It takes care of itself.

“It’s trying to find a balance – you’ve got to keep the market as a destination, a place where people want to go but don’t exactly know what they’re looking for – that’s the magic of the Barras. People will come just for the sheer social experience.” Tom’s idea is an East End Quarter with shops, galleries and restaurants and some of that is already happening. “You’ve always got to be optimistic,” he says.

Andrew Thomson, 37, who runs one of the small businesses at the Barras, agrees with this. He has strong memories of the place when he was growing up in Glasgow. “I used to go as a kid with my parents,” he says, “I remember the butcher doing the auction, and a man who demonstrated car polish. When you’re younger, you’ve never seen anything like that – I have a lot of affection for the place and as I got older, I would go to the ballroom for concerts. Everyone has at least one seminal gig that we went to at the ballroom that we can all remember. The history is special – all the back stairways with the posters... you’re following in the footsteps of everyone else. It’s an institution.”

Andrew now runs Clydebuilt Radio at the Barras and is aware that he’s one of the younger members of the community. “I think there are younger people coming in – I think people go to the Barras at some stage when they’re in Glasgow –students will go at some stage and check it out. People are coming down to us for their own show or they come down and hang out at least once a month if not more than that.” As for the issue of gentrification, Andrew is upbeat. “You can look at it negatively or positively and I choose to do the latter mostly. I’ve lived in London and I’ve seen what gentrification does look like.”

Historian Peter Mortimer feels pretty much the same way about the market and thinks the concerns that the Barras might be “gentrified” are exaggerated. “I think there was a lot of newspaper talk. People say the Barras isn’t what it was but I say go into the city centre and that’s not the same either. If somebody like Debenhams is forced to close, that shows you how much change there has been in people’s purchasing habits. The market is not as busy as it once was, but people’s habits have changed, even in the past five years, or even the last year and the Barras is not immune to that – no one is. But it’s a resolute place and the traders that are there, there’s a great community and people love coming to the Barras. There will always be people who want to go the Barras; it’s great because you can go down to the Barras looking to buy something or you can go down looking to buy nothing and you can have a great day.”

But what about the dodgier side of the Barras? The guys who stand on street corners selling cheap cigarettes? Or designer goods that turn out not to be the designer (the price being the giveaway). “It’s been a stain on the Barras,” says Peter, “but it’s been a stain on lots of other places. But the cheap tobacco and the DVDs, that undoubtedly affected the place but that wasn’t just happening in the Barras. I know for a fact that the managers were actively working with Strathclyde police.”

In the end, Peter, and everyone else who love the places, must know that they have to be realistic about its future. “One thing to bear in mind about why the market has possibly lost footfall,” says Peter, “is it started to get opposition from Ingliston Market. The Ingliston Market is not there any more but the Barras is, and it’s been there for a 100 years. I’m a realist about the future of the Barras. I don’t think we’ll get the heyday back again but we’re not seeing the heyday in the high street either. You’ve got to take a measured view.”

Peter also reminds me how affectionate people feel about the place – affectionate but realistic. He asks me if I’ve ever read the poem about the Barras by the Scottish folk singer Matt McGinn. It goes like this: “For Christmas he bought her a wee golden ring, but later it made him embarrassed. He’d forgot that the first thing to turn green in the spring, is jewellery bought at the Barras.”

Barras100 is at the Arti San Toi gallery and in the Barras today (June 19th) and tomorrow