This year’s iteration of the UN Conference on Climate Change (Cop26) is sponsored by the UK and held in Glasgow. Needless to say, plunking a UK-sponsored event in the middle of a Scottish city must cause tension given that there is a concerted separatist movement afoot in Scotland that has only gained momentum since Brexit. It must also cause tension for a more practical reason. Cop26 will see 30,000 delegates and support staff descend upon a relatively small town (as a Torontonian, I compare it to Hamilton) with only 15,000 hotel beds. Maybe visitors can double up.
To mark the occasion, I thought I’d devote the month of November to photos from Glasgow and environs. I love the city. I have friends who live there and so I have visited roughly 10 times. I feel at ease there. If not for the insurmountable paperwork, I can imagine myself making it my home.
I shot this piece of graffiti during my last visit in 2019 a little before the pandemic. It nicely captures the conflict at play in these conferences between economic interests and environmental concerns. Mud and grit have accumulated especially over the lower half of the mural. Grit floats on the air in Glasgow. Every time I get off the plane at the airport in Paisley, I can taste it. It serves as a reminder of Glasgow’s role as a ship-building, coal-burning, chemical manufacturing centre of modern industry. No matter how hard it works to scour the city’s dirty corners, it can never quite get rid of all the accumulated grit.
