Dundee by Vitali Vitaliev
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I could hardly keep up with Professor McKean. His eyes gleaming excitedly from under the glasses, his coat tails flapping in the wind that he himself was creating (or so it seemed), he dragged me from one stinky gateway to another to show me what remained of medieval Dundee. We climbed some dirty winding stairs to be confronted with a miraculously preserved early 17th century fire-place inside the semi-ruined former dwelling of a certain "MacLeod, the bag-pipe maker", as it was written on a faded door-plate. We explored the vaulted Estonian-timber attics of merchants' houses in Gray Close. We treaded on litter and broken glass in the well-shaped 15th century courtyards, to which the Professor respectfully referred as "typical European spaces". In one of them - propped against a mouldering wall - stood an original medieval wooden hatch, with the trademark of an unknown stonemason. "Look, this is Paris!" exclaimed the Professor as we rushed along Whitehall Crescent - a brilliant example of the late 19th century "environmental Gothic".
Scotland's leading expert in history of architecture, Professor McKean had a theory, according to which, medieval Dundee was built along the same lines as Hanseatic League towns (Lubbock, Gdansk, Copenhagen, etc), where curved, crescent-like streets ran parallel to each other, with open public spaces in-between. This strict pattern was largely destroyed by the construction of the giant Overgate shopping centre in 1963. "They didn't understand cities and ruined Dundee's medieval pattern," he sighed, squinting at the ugly dome-shaped behemoth of a building. "And look - as a result the whole area is still derelict."
Someone said that a true historian is a prophet, predicting backwards, although I was tempted to call Professor McKean a clairvoyant in reverse: he had an amazing ability to see the beauty of by-gone Dundee through its unappealing modern facades. His architectural tour made me think that, alongside trials for crimes against humanity, it would be good to set up an international tribunal for crimes against towns and cities to punish those responsible for destroying their faces and souls. Dundee could be both a victim and a witness for the prosecution at such a trial.
A flock of sad stone penguins greeted me at the entrance to Dundee's troubled top attraction - "Discovery Point" - on the bank of the River Tay. They stood there, their heads down, as if refusing to absorb Dundee's mutilated city-scape - "the facade of unparalleled charmlessness, an absence of grace so total that it was almost the thing of wonder", as it was put by James Cameron in 1967.
With regret, I had to admit that, 35 years on, the view from the waterfront remained largely the same. The city's uncomplaining skyline was pierced with a couple of church spires, rivalled by high-rise Stalinist boxes of Mecca Bingo Hall, the warehouse-like Hilton Hotel and Tayside House - the home of Dundee City Council, with interiors reminiscent of Stasi headquarters in East Berlin.
The next level down was criss-crossed with pedestrian walkways - an antithesis of New York's elevated railways - spanning over vast, half-empty car parks, shopping malls and underground passages – the only places, where a passer-by could hide from all this aggressive ugliness.
The painful familiarity of the scene was later explained to me by Hamish Glen, Artistic Director of the renowned Dundee Rep Theatre, according to whom Dundee was a popular “natural” location for the movies, set in communist Eastern Europe. Whenever there was a need for a bleak "totalitarian" urban landscape, the ingenious British directors - rather than wasting money and nerves to obtain Soviet (or East German, or Romanian) visas, used to come to Dundee, which offered the same drabness, while remaining superficially "Western" and visa-free. This could not fail but enhance the city's persisting negative stereotype, which, it has to be said, was largely created by Dundonians themselves.
My new acquaintance, Professor McKean of Dundee University referred in one of his articles to "a certain perverse masochism in the Dundonian ... designed to keep intruders, visitors and tourists at bay." True, cities (and even whole countries like Scotland) can suffer from inferiority complex - a condition, often resulting in depression, which, as some psychologists assert, is but an aggression, directed against oneself. It was Dundee city fathers who, having passed the so-called "City Improvement Act" in 1871, started demolishing its medieval city centre - then second in its beauty to Edinburgh alone. It was they, who decreed in 1952 that Dundee had only eight buildings worth keeping. It was they who, in a campaign to obliterate Dundee's industrial past, meticulously ruined and vandalised almost all remaining buildings of architectural value that still remained in the city in the 1960-70s and built car-parks, walkways, ugly shopping centres and Scotland's first council estates (locally known as "multis") in their stead. Having dealt a massive blow to the city’s already dwindling self-esteem, this last demolition triggered an unprecedented decline of Dundee’s economy and culture, for environmental ugliness is the worst enemy of creativity.
Echoes of that old cultural masochism could be heard recently, when many Dundonians in their letters to "Evening Telegraph", a local newspaper, demanded that Dundee's two award-winning museums and heritage sites - RRS Discovery and Verdant Works Jute Factory be closed down or moved elsewhere. Verdant Works, the winner of the European Museum of the Year Award in 2000, was in particular danger. It looked as if many locals were bent on writing off the whole of Dundee's industrial past as that of poverty and despair, brought about by the satanic jute mills, and didn’t want to be reminded of it too often. They did not understand that one couldn’t be secure in one's present, unless confident of the past. By “confident”, I mean knowing the full truth about it. It was only when Stalin's crimes became common knowledge in the USSR during glasnost that the country was able to progress towards a more democratic social system.
Losing Verdant Works would be a tragedy for Dundee, because the museum, with all its interactive hands-on exhibits, its fully operational Victorian jute-producing line, its numerous displays on work and leisure in Victorian times, is truly unique. It will take not just some additional funding, but also a major reappraisal of the city's history on behalf of many a Dundonian, to save Verdant Works from closure.
Another example of Dundee’s persisting inferiority complex is the gross over-promotion of William McGonagal, the "world's best worst poet", whose name I saw on a Discovery Point billboard, listing three most famous Dundonians of all time, alongside a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and a World Athletics champion - a joke that has gone way over the top. The very logo of modern Dundee "the City of Discovery" struck me as somewhat overexposed, too, particularly when screaming from derelict 1970s facades and from signs like "Food Discovery Chinese Take-Away".
Any inferiority complex is a two-way street, and outsiders have contributed to the negative stereotype of Dundee as much as the locals. Many of my Edinburgh contacts, on learning I was going to Dundee, would wrinkle their noses: "But this is the armpit of Scotland. What on earth will you do there?" Or take the wide-spread Dundee jokes to the effect that there's no toll charge on the way to the city as you drive there from Fife, but the toll is on the way back - the only reason anyone ever stays.
The most outrageous case of "official" negative stereotyping, however, occurred last week, when the Scottish Prison Service Chief Executive Tony Cameron claimed Dundee would love to be the location for a new jail, because "a lot of prisoners come from there".
Despite all these, I couldn’t help noticing that the city's new self-confidence was on the rise.
The stretch of Nethergate next to the Queens Hotel, which was teeming with drunks and junkies only several years ago, has now been “gentrified” beyond recognition by the impressive modernistic complex of Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) – one of Scotland’s ten top attractions. Faith Liddel, DCA Director, who used to run the Edinburgh Book Festival, told me that its success was not unpredictable. “Dundee had an enormous hunger for arts and a huge potential – with all its high-tech industries and a large student population. Dundonians needed something to rest their beauty-hungry eyes on, and DCA was able to satisfy this craving to some extent.”
Architecturally, DCA complex was an antipode of a typical 1970s Dundee structure. It was all light and openness. Everyone who entered the open-plan building was constantly confronted with art – be it in its galleries, cinemas, in the hugely popular bar, or even in the toilets. DCA quickly became Dundee’s cultural hub, from where, as Faith assured me, it was possible “to have an intimate dialogue with all 150,000 Dundonians”. With the internationally famed Rep Theatre across the street, it formed the bulk of the city’s emerging “cultural quarter”.
“Do you know that five best modern Scottish poets live in Dundee?” Faith asked me. I was glad she didn’t mention “best worst” poets – pace W. McGonagal. Many Dundee intellectuals expressed their profound dislike of McGonagal as a symbol of mediocrity and bad taste, sending a wrong message to aspiring artists and writers. They told me they saw the future of Dundee as a centre of excellence and ideas: the new “Ideopolis”, as opposed to the clichéd “Juteopolis” of the past.
I could see their point: the budding self-confidence of Dundee required new “icons” to replace McGonagal. “Welcome! Thrice welcome to the year 1893/ For it is the year that I intend to leave Dundee/ Owing to the treatment I receive/ Which does my heart sadly grieve,” he lamented clumsily in one of his doggerels testifying to the fact that his relationship with Dundee was not always a happy one.
I came to love the wry gap-toothed smile of Dundee – a reflection of its tormented and well-hidden, yet beautiful, soul. I wanted to hope that one day (in 2003? This would rhyme with “Dundee”!), unjustified stereotypes and complexes will leave this long-suffering city for good – in the manner of its famously talentless son William McGonagal.