They lie forgotten in an ancient corner of the city, in the shadows of memorials to the wealthy and celebrated.
Now the thousands of souls whose final resting places have gone unseen for generations are to be remembered in a memorial event in Glasgow’s Necropolis combining art, horticulture and music.
On Sunday, the first stage of a new three year arts project named Glasgow Requiem will be launched, celebrating an overlooked part of the city. Its first event will see thousands of spring bulbs planted in an open area of the Necropolis which contains the remains of thousands of long-dead cityfolk, whose families could not afford to mark their graves.
Planting of the floral memorial, organised by Glasgow arts charity Aproxima in conjunction with volunteers from the Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, will include a performance from folk singer Karine Polwart in memory of a long-lost singer who lies among the forgotten dead.
For Angus Farquhar, Creative Director of Aproxima Arts, Glasgow Requiem is a bid to reframe the city’s storied legacy beyond that of the Clyde and shipbuilding, as well as honouring those who’ve long lain six feet under.
He said: “We decided to look at the whole history of Glasgow before the Clyde and shipbuilding, which is a very well-told piece of history. It feels like the history and the story of the whole area around the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow Cathedral, Ladywell, and the burial grounds and Necropolis has got a bit lost. A lot of people don’t have a very strong relationship with that part of Glasgow because it was cut off by the M8 which really heavily decimated the area.”
The cemetery was established in 1832, and is home to the remains of prominent artists, scientists, businessman, shipbuilders and publishers. A statue to John Knox was erected prior to the cemetery opening, during its time as an arboretum.
In recent years the graveyard has grown in international profile, featuring in film and TV such as 2022’s flick The Batman starring Robert Pattinson.
Farquhar said: “Some of the public attention has been on the likes of John Knox, and the great and good who had cenotaphs and memorials built to keep their names out there for perpetuity. That doesn’t really sit that well now, because when we look at the super rich today we don’t really envy them. They’re a pretty weird class of people.”
The Necropolis’ areas are categorised by letters of the Greek alphabet. Members of the public are being invited to meet at 12pm at the Bridge of Sighs and head to an area known as Eta, in the south east corner of the graveyard, where 8,000 of the 20,000 unmarked graves lie.
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Farquhar worked closely with the Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, a team of nine volunteers dedicated to the preservation and heritage of the 37-acre site in the east of the city in conceiving the memorial. Ruth Johnston, of Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, hopes the project will help unassuming members of the public understand the significance of the open spaces.
She said: “People see the areas as empty green spaces but there are actually thousands of people buried in those spaces.
“People use these green spaces to have picnics or play football. We see this as a way of saying that this is a space to be respected, because there are thousands of people underneath this green space. You can’t blame them for doing it because they didn’t know, so our idea was to make sure that people did know.”
For Morag Fyfe, who has been painstakingly documenting the graves in the Necropolis for 40 years, and researching the lives of those in them, the event is something of a milestone.
“I’ve been campaigning for the forgotten 20,000,” she said. “Other members of the Friends are interested in the architecture and the sculpture but I’m more interested in the people, and I’ve become more and more interested in the ones who are buried in the common graves.”
Farquhar shares her interest, especially so in the light of the city’s slick marketing campaign slogan.
He said: “It really struck me that these lives are the real story of Glasgow. Every one of them has a story. You just can’t imagine the poverty of someone living their life, and then their remaining family members only having a few shillings to put them into a common grave and having no right to memorial and no right to a headstone, no way of remembering that person apart from the living memory.
“So I thought we should focus on that and have a beautiful memorial in flowers, flowers bringing everyone to mind, and not just to take for granted that cliche that ‘People Make Glasgow.’
“It has become a marketing tool but the truth is that Glasgow also destroyed people, as well as making some of them. Glasgow, in a sense, was made by such sheer effort and people gave their lives to make the city what it became. And some of those people ended up in these graves.”
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Farquhar and Aproxima say this is the first part of their commemoration, with other arts-based interventions planned for coming months, including plans to mark the city’s legendary lost Molendinar Burn, coalescing with plans for Glasgow’s 850th anniversary in 2025.
Sunday’s event will see Karine Polwart perform an al-fresco remembrance of one of the forgotten buried.
Farquhar said: “Morag Fyfe has been doing this for many years, and has done a remarkable job of finding out about people and how they died. Between speaking to her and my own research there were a number of stories that will come out on Sunday.
“One was about a poet and songwriter called Alex Hume. He had several children, but his wife died early and when he died (who died in 1859) his family didn’t have enough money for a headstone, so he went into the common grave. He had written a new version of Afton Water, Robert Burns’ poem, and his song became a very popular version.”
Folk singer Polwart will sing a version of the song at the inaugural Glasgow Requiem gathering, an idea which took root after Farquhar discovered a version by veteran Scottish folk musician Dick Gaughan.
He said: “Dick did a lovely version, but he became ill in 2016 and hasn’t played publicly since. He’s too ill to come. I wanted him to know that we were honouring his song, and Alex Hume, as a way of somehow speaking to all these souls and dignifying the indignity of what they went through. I wanted to bring this song back to where Alex is and honour everyone through this song. Karine is the perfect choice to sing it.”
For Polwart, from Stirlingshire, Glasgow Requiem has been an education. She said: “I was genuinely shocked at the number of people who were buried without a name or memorial. It really says something about inequality and the different values attached to peoples’ lives. The Necropolis is magnificent but the story not told is that only those and such as those are remembered.
“It’s such a labour of love that the Friends of the Necropolis have been involved in to match the death records to the common mass burial grounds. There’s something beautiful about the quiet ritual of all that.”
She added: “When Angus got in touch I thought it was a really beautiful idea. It’s a beautiful device not just for remembering him, but remembering all of them. As a singer and writer a lot of what I do is remember the dead. Loads of my songs are about remembering people who weren’t celebrated in their lifetime, it’s a big part of what folk song culture is, memorialising and remembering.
“But it’s not just a retrospective thing. It’s a statement of values for what’s important now. The same stuff exists in this age in terms of who is remembered and who isn’t.”
The event will be attended by celebrants Gerrie and Susan Douglas-Scott of Celebrate People, and is open to the public, with 15,000 bulbs provided by Liverpool-based Scouse Flowerhouse, whose other memorial work include displays for the victims of Hillsborough.
For Farquhar, who ran Glasgow arts charity NVA before it folded in 2018, and also helmed the Dandelion food growing project, Glasgow Requiem is a return to participatory public art events the likes of which NVA won acclaim for with outdoor events around the country including a sound and light installation at St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross.
NVA’s bid to take on the modernist ruin on the north bank of the firth of Clyde foundered in 2018, something Farquhar sees as a silver lining with hindsight.
Farquhar said: “We gave back £6million pounds of public funding and the shock of that took the charity down. But if we had carried on into Brexit and the pandemic and the climate crisis then it would have been a very difficult project, so I think we were lucky.
“NVA was a juggernaut. Aproxima is about doing things on a smaller scale that can still touch people and help connect the city.”
• Glasgow Requiem, Bridge of Sighs Glasgow Necropolis, Sunday 12pm To donate click here
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