The Other Rutherglen

There is a wonderful exchange between Bob Ferris and Terry Collier in ‘The Likely Lads’ film, spun off from the classic UK TV series, in which Bob goads Terry for his lack of romantic flair.

“You’re hardly Omar Sharif, are you?” he notes.

“If Omar Sharif lived in Gateshead, I doubt that he’d be Omar Sharif” Terry spits right back.  The point is well made. You are a product of your environment. And perhaps always will be.

I grew up in a wet old town even further north than Gateshead, in an old, old country. Rutherglen, on the southeast fringe of Glasgow, never produced Omar Sharif. Nor anyone quite like him.

The town is centred around an ancient Main Street, wide, spacious and unaltered since the dawn of photography and cartography. It gained its Royal Charter in 1126 on the strength of its trading and status as a market town, a strength which persisted into my lifetime and still exists in my memory. It had a department store, ‘Graftons’- the local equivalent of Grace Bros from ‘Are You Being Served’, complete with haberdashery and wandering tailors. There were local bakers and butchers, an independent Bottle-O run by Tam Brown. Mr Gilchrist ran the pet store where I once bought a goldfish. At the other end of the street, near the local newspaper office, there was a sports shop where I bought my first pool cue and tennis racquet, and where you could even buy an air pistol and lead pellets before the folly of such nonsense was realised. In the shopping arcade, constructed out of tasteless concrete in the optimism of the late 1960s, Mr Cumming ran the record store. Every town had a Main Street that was similarly populated.

Much of this is echoed where I live now in Semaphore. Mr V runs the record store there. Semaphore Main Street has an independent butcher, fruitseller and a raft of joyous locally owned businesses, including (to my delight) a family owned cinema. Most towns in our state are similarly blessed. Pitifully and dangerously, almost no one seems to appreciate that fact. 

In the space of one generation it has all gone from Rutherglen. And from nearby Cambuslang. And Airdrie, Coatbridge, Hamilton, Motherwell, and beyond. Ghost towns, whose souls have been taken and replaced with the cadaverous replica frontages of national and international chain stores. It was all taken away by the direct and deliberate actions of thoughtless, shortsighted and occasionally nefarious people. And it all could have been avoided.

I haven’t visited the other Rutherglen, named after the one I was raised in, just over the border in Victoria. But by all accounts it is glorious; famed for its winemaking, it is quite the tourist spot, retaining its arcade high street so characteristic of our nations’ towns. A random review on Tripadvisor describes it as a country town showing how its done. “Rutherglen is leading the way in how small towns can survive and survive well,” it says,  It is hard to believe that such a status quo could ever change, and I probably would doubt it myself if I hadn’t lived through it.

"The individuality of high street shops has been replaced by a monochrome strip of global and national chains", the New Economics forum said in a survey published in 2005 called “Clone Town Britain”, adding that traditional high street towns had become "somewhere that could easily be mistaken for dozens of bland town centres across the country."

The systematic killing of Main Streets across the nation was deliberately wrought; manufactured by the combined efforts of economic and social policy arising from the will and whims of Governments from Thatcher to Blair and beyond, and it was not in any sense arrested by any of the various Scottish Governments since they came into existence in 1999. The problems transcend party political blame or any single economic condition. But conditions were wilfully and deliberately manipulated, and the damage is permanent and real.

I have nothing against chain stores. I use them and there is room for competition. (although I recommend reading John Lanchester’s brilliant review of ‘The Walmart Effect’ for a chilling summary of how chains can go too far) But something greater than commerce dies when a town’s local trade is killed and replaced with homogenised, generic, international blandness. Cheaper, maybe. But at what cost?

Strolling down Semaphore Road, I am greeted by name by shopkeepers to whom I have given trade perhaps only half a dozen times, like the locksmith & cobbler. I know the stories of the cashiers at the IGA and am always greeted with a smile at Farmer Joes in Port Adelaide. Political and economic conditions are not the same in our state or our nation as those in the UK that destroyed the town I lived in and hundreds like it, but the simple joyous Main Street culture that still exists here, and in North Adelaide, Victor Harbor, St Kilda, Coogee and the other Rutherglen, could just as easily be snuffed out.

“Use them, or lose them”, the New Economics forum urged the UK.

“Residents should put their money where their mouth is and seek out independents and locally sourced products,” it added.

In an article from November 2012 (after the triumphant Olympics, no less) on the ‘death of the high street”, the Guardian warned that “faceless online stores drive down price and margins, destroying the concept of service and turning shopping from a social activity to a mechanical transaction.”

Writing in a local blog, Robert Gardner, a retired Rutherglen churchman wrote; “It would take some length of time if I related all the changes in the Main Street shops, for in each shop, I would have a story to tell. Lots of the old Shopkeepers were characters and legends in their own time. Shopkeepers knew their customers, and customers knew their shopkeepers. There was a friendliness and mutual trust between all.

“I am sad to say that the Rutherglen of today is not the same. We once had a Main Street of which we were all justly proud. The trees which lined the Main Street all had an iron fence around them; there were flower beds between some of the trees. We had hanging flower baskets from the posts. The Main Street and surrounding areas were kept clean and tidy. We had a shopping centre with a wide variety of shops.

“When I sometimes gaze on the sad state of our town today, I am glad that I grew up in, and have fond and happy memories of, an altogether different environment.”

Our current shopping culture may seem as much a part of our environment as the endless coal probably did to the prosperity of Gateshead and Tyneside. Things can change. Few towns are as reliant as somewhere like Whyalla on a single economic factor, but we all do our own bit to destroy our towns when we shop at Amazon, or buy our lunch at the branded fast food chain. The policies of the left, right, centre and nationalist fringe all contributed to the economic death of the UK High Street, so pointing a party political finger one way for blame and the other for the solution simply distracts from the issue. We retain something precious and fragile here in Australia. Governments federal, state and local, and all of us living here can decide to sustain it, if we wish. Please, nourish it, or else it will be gone forever.