The first question I ask is who their favourite is, and the one who gets the most likes is Robert Burns. “He’s quite good-looking actually,” says Jackie. Melvyn prefers the dude with the wild hair and starey eyes although no one can remember his name. Some of the statues have been given nicknames based on who they look like. Tall lanky one: David Cameron. One in the long coat: Van Morrison. “Once you get it in your head, you can’t get rid of it,” says Melvyn.
The fact that most of the statues aren’t instantly recognisable is a sign of how these things work. All of the men of bronze (and one woman), who usually sit in Glasgow’s George Square, were wildly famous in their day but most of us would struggle these days to know much about James Oswald or Thomas Campbell or John Moore. The A-listers are Burns, and Victoria and Albert on horseback. Melvyn tells me they get a lot of Alberts, more than Victoria actually. “There are Alberts all over the place,” he says. “It’s because she loved him so much.”
Just in front of Albert on his horse, crouched down hard at work, is Lauren, who’s coating the statue of Thomas Graham with a layer of ammonium chloride, which is turning him green from the feet up. After that, she’ll apply ferric nitrate which will make him chocolate brown before a final layer of liver of sulphur turns him all nice and bronzy. The man himself seems unperturbed by the process. Chin resting on his hand, Professor Graham, experimental chemist of note, contemplates the diffusion of gases and such like, as he has done non-stop for 154 years.
The monument of the professor, deep in thought, is one of 11 statues in all that have been transported from their home in Glasgow 400 miles down the road to this secure yard on an industrial estate in Hertfordshire. I’ve followed them down to find out more about what it’s going to take to get them back into shape and what’s going to change when they go back to the square in a few weeks’ time, as well as the difficulties and controversies that surround the statues. I’m also going to climb 80ft above George Square to get up really close to the greatest statue of them all.
But before we get into it, a quick recap of why it’s happening. As part of Glasgow Council’s Avenues programme to improve streets in the city centre, the square is getting a badly needed facelift. Most Glaswegians would probably agree it was never the same after the notorious red tarmageddon of the 1990s but it’s now getting a major renovation which involves more trees, new stone paving, and the clean-up and restoration of the statues. Councillor Angus Millar, who’s overseeing the project, tells me the square is Glasgow’s ‘living room’; the aim the council is to make the living room nice again.
A major part of the work, which is due to finish this summer, is the restoration of the great Doric column in the centre of the square, on top of which sits a stone statue of Sir Walter Scott. The monument was the first to Scott in the world, 10 years ahead of Edinburgh's monument on Princes Street (Edinburgh’s may be bigger and more famous, but Glasgow was first). It’s been in the square, up against the wind and the rain, since 1837 which is an awful lot of wind and rain.
The restoration of the square, the column and the monument is the work of McIntyre Masonry and Rainton Construction and, after a health and safety briefing, they’re taking me to the top to see how it’s going; also coming up with us is Councillor Millar. There’s 12 storeys of scaffolding to climb, but when we get to the top it’s absolutely worth it. Very few people have stood in this place: the view across the square and the city is amazing, but the close-up view of Walter is even better.
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The first thing we see is the base he stands on, which is carved with the most beautiful fleur de lys. This is almost 100ft in the air in a place where no one, or virtually no one, will ever see it, but the Victorian stonemason cut no corners. And it’s the same with the statue: the creases and folds in his trousers, his bow tie, the plaid over his shoulder, even the bags under poor old Walter’s eyes, all of it is recreated in fine detail. I lay my hand on the great man’s head for a second or two because I know it’s unlikely we’ll meet again.
To a layman’s eye like mine, the statue looks to be in good nick close-up considering how long it’s been here but Cllr Millar says the restoration work is overdue. “The monument hasn’t had any conservation work in decades,” he says, “so it’s important we take the opportunity to have the square looking its best and that includes the monument at the heart of it. It’s all part of the wider renovation of the square – we’re investing in transforming it into a new civic space with high quality stone, more greenery, really trying to make it a modern European square people across Glasgow can be proud of.”
We look over the scaffolding at the workmen and the diggers cracking on with the job 80ft below us. Is the project going well? “It’s due to be complete by August and it’s on time and progress is good,” says Cllr Millar. He says one of the big things people asked for was more trees, which they’re delivering. The square will also be covered in high-quality Portuguese granite which leads to an obvious question: why not Scottish granite? “Like any public project,” says Mr Millar, “we have to go through a procurement process and that was the supplier that was identified.” He assures me the transformation will be major. “I think people are going to be surprised at how different it looks and feels.”
And so we head back down and weave our way through the cement mixers and the slightly ghostly empty plinths where the other statues once stood, and a bit later I head down to Hertfordshire to see how it’s all going down there. The statues are being kept in a secure yard, outside, partly because the chemicals and propane torches that are used in the process can be dangerous. The restoration is a collaboration between MTec, who do all the heavy work of removing the statues, getting them down here and getting them back again, and Rupert Harris Conservation, who are in charge of the restoration of the statues themselves.
The team at the yard today are conservators Melvyn Rodda, Jackie Rumsey and Lauren Chiu. I ask them why the statues had to come to Hertfordshire and they tell me it’s a mix of specialism and security. There aren’t a lot of companies that do this kind of work and the yard here is high-security and designed for valuable art. I ask them if it’s likely someone would steal statues. “You’d be surprised,” says Melvyn. “People do.” “They’d scrap them,” says Jackie. “That’s the sad thing. If someone were to steal these statues, they’d cut them up and scrap them.”
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I ask what state the statues were in when they arrived from Glasgow. “Structurally they were quite sound,” says Jackie, “but they were covered in paint and bird poo and underneath that were signs of corrosion where they hadn’t been maintained for years.” Melvyn tells me that when he was up in Glasgow, he took the opportunity to look at the city’s most famous statue of all, the Duke of Wellington avec traffic cone, and was not impressed. “Wellington is not in a great condition,” he says. “He’s covered in horrible black gloopy paint and you lose all the detail.”
The team here in Hertfordshire have been working on the statues for quite a few months now and the interesting thing is that some parts of the process haven’t changed in hundreds, even thousands, of years. “It’s a three-colour process,” says Melvyn. “You start with the undercoat - that’s what Lauren is doing - then we apply a gingery brown called ferric nitrate and finally liver of sulphur which gives it that dark classic brown. The technique we’re using is the one the Romans would’ve used, the same chemicals. It probably goes back to the Greeks and the Phoenicians. Because it works.”
Some things definitely have changed since the Phoenicians though. For a start, the statues were removed from George Square, and will be reinstated to the square, with cranes and cherry pickers, but there’s also the issue of the controversy around statues and the fact there can be objections to the military and personal histories of some of the folk on the plinths. It reached its zenith in 2020, you may remember, when the statue in Bristol of the slave trader Edward Colston was thrown in the river by Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
In the case of the George Square statues, several of them have been identified as having links to the Atlantic slave trade. The statue of Sir John Moore, an army officer and veteran of the Peninsular War brought up in Glasgow, also originally included his sword, but it went missing some time in the 80s and there’s been debate about whether it should be put back. SNP councillor Graham Campbell has said he finds the idea of the sword being reinstated offensive. “I don’t think we should be celebrating the military history of the empire massacring people who were enslaved or oppressed,” he said.
The conservators take a more nuanced approach. “We’re very aware of the controversy,” says Melvyn. “I just did a statue of Sir Thomas Guy at Guy’s Hospital in London. He was a slave owner, although we restored him and they’re putting up new plaques explaining exactly who he is. He did set up Guy’s Hospital so he wasn’t completely bad.” Melvyn’s view is statues should stay and we should explain the context. Jackie, who’s spent her whole career in conservation, is horrified at the idea of pulling statues down. “You need to view them as objects,” she says, “as works of art.”
This appears to be the view Glasgow City Council is taking. I ask Cllr Millar about it and he says this: “There’s been conversation over the years about our heritage and statues and the approach we’re taking, after a lot of consultation with the general public, is to retain statues and put in place interpretation telling the full and unvarnished story of the history of the figures that are represented. It’s about trying to create a modern space but also trying to tell the full story of the history and the square as well. So when the statues come back, and they’ll all be coming back, albeit in different positions as part of the design, they’ll have new interpretations telling the full stories, the good and the bad of the individuals represented.”
And what about Sir John’s sword? The conservators tell me they have created a new one but it would appear the council haven’t made a decision yet about what exactly they’ll do with it. “There have been concerns raised about the symbolism of the sword,” says Cllr Millar. “We’re taking the opportunity to review the position and whether and how it’s presented. Whether it’s part of the statue or whether it’s presented in a different context, the key will be to have interpretation on it that reflects the history.”
Another controversy that’s occasionally raised its head is how much the work on the statues is costing. The price for the restoration of the square itself and the surrounding streets is £20million (paid for by the Scottish and UK governments and the council), with the work on the 11 statues costing £632,000, which the conservators think is money well spent. “People sometimes say you could buy a quarter of a hospital for that or something,” says Melvyn. “But there’s a certain short-termism about that, this is long term and they’re there already and it’s a pittance really.” Jackie feels the same. “You can complain about it,” she says. “but we’re not really doing it for you, we’re doing it for our grandkids because it’s still going to be here.”
The key to the statues still being here for the grandkids, say the conservation team, is to look after them properly once they’re back in the square, and that will be down to the council. The statues will be pretty much the last thing to go in once the renovation of the square is complete.
“We’ll suggest a maintenance programme to the council,” says Melvyn. “These will have three coats of micro-cyrstalline wax which is really quite tough, and for something like this, where access is hard, we’d probably recommend that they be rewaxed once every five years, ideally a couple of years.” Jackie says the big problem is birds that have no notion of the eminence of the people they’re perching on. “The thing the council will really need to protect against is bird poo,” she says. “It’s incredibly corrosive.”
But there’s a distinctly Glaswegian element to all of this as well, which the conservators understand, even revel in. The city’s most famous statue outside the Gallery of Modern Art has been wearing a traffic cone on his head on and off for God knows how long, and the conservators approach the statues in their care with the same mix of respect and good humour. Melvyn tells me that he turned up to the yard one day to do a little bit of work on the Robert Burns statue to discover that someone had slipped an extra object into his hand: a bottle of Irn-Bru. Quite appropriate really.
Read next: Who's who? How many of Glasgow's most famous statues do you know?
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