Where in Glasgow can you go for your niche shopping interests as well as for a night out? And what crockery pattern is the very epitome of Thatcher-Major era Britain?
Glasgow, city of thundering urban roads, handsome tenement blocks and a world famous art school that keep burning down. And also the Savoy Centre, a brutalist gem in the centre that combines shopping arcade, market stalls, tower block and nightclub. It’s one of novelist Rose Ruane’s favourite places, reminding her both of shopping expeditions with her grandparents in the eighties and art school pranks in the nineties. But what does this mecca for niche interests and working class culture tell us about how shopping and culture has changed since it opened in 1979?
Meanwhile Eternal Beau is one of the most successful ceramic patterns of all time, created in the early eighties and encapsulating a kind of timid romantic boredom that was the very opposite of Blitz-club cool.
Novelist Rose Ruane, author of This is Yesterday and Birding (recently longlisted for the Women’s Prize) adores kitsch, camp and all things vintage, and in this episode of Monstrosities Mon Amour she shares how the Savoy Centre helped form her taste, and how Eternal Beau represented everything she was not.
Theme tune by Lorna Rees and Rufus Rees Coshan. Logo by Richard de Pesando. You can support Monstrosities Mon Amour by subscribing through Substack or through Ko-fi at https://ko-fi.com/grindrod
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