Cranhill Arts Project: Meet the Glasgow community group that painted itself a better future

In 1981 in the east end of Glasgow, there was no call for maracas made of papier-mache. 

“The idea of ‘community art’ was a big thing at the time, where an artist would come in to paint a brick mural and the members would maybe get to paint a brick,” says Jamie Tracey, recalling the days when the would-be artists of Cranhill painted themselves a better future. “We didn’t want a big set of giant papier-mache false teeth or maracas in the park. We wanted to experience the stuff the artists had learned at university. We wanted to be taught how to do it, rather than have someone else doing it and asking us to fill in a wee bit here and there.” 

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Cranhill Arts was established in 1981, a cultural response to diminishing opportunities. By the turn of the decade, when Glasgow was awarded the European Capital of Culture garland, the creative hub was doing much more than filling in here and there. 

The organisation, established in a housing scheme with terminally high unemployment typical of many working-class manufacturing communities caught in the teeth of deindustrialisation, had flourished into an influential group spanning international politics, trade unions, tenants’ rights, poll tax demos and even the British music scene. 

Tracey said: “My brothers went to photography classes. I’d just been made redundant from my job as a roofer, and I’d left school with nothing, so I went up and printed a few t-shirts. I was 22, there was a good atmosphere, so I started hanging around.” 

As with many who hung around, Cranhill Arts helped shape the next four decades of Tracey’s working life, away from the devastating effects of Thatcher’s post-industrial wrecking ball on housing schemes and her “no such thing as society” assertion. They knew otherwise up Skerryvore Road. 

“At that time in Cranhill, if you got a job you were lucky,” said Tracey, who has been the organisation’s chairperson for over 40 years. “The arts project created an economy for us. We made stuff and people bought it. We were making t-shirts, posters, trade union banners. We sold them at May Day festival, and
I even took a load of them down to London to a left-wing bookshop called Collet’s (the Charing Cross Road radical bookshop, which closed in 1993). 

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“I got a job in youth work because of the work I was doing at the arts project and I’ve ended up doing that for 30 odd years, across Glasgow, and further out.” 

Five decades later, Cranhill Arts’ work is being celebrated in an exhibition at Street Level Gallery in Glasgow city centre. Entitled Glaswegians, the collection of work is a fraction of the prolific group’s output, which spanned screen printing, graphic design and a documentary photography project which generated 30,000 stills of Glaswegians of all stripes going around their lives in the city, now being digitised. 

The people of Cranhill, all too often the gritty subject of the street photographer’s lens, turned their cameras on every corner of the city, including fee-paying private schools like Hutchesons Grammar and Kelvinside Academy. 

Alistair McCallum became artist in residence of Cranhill Arts at a time when Scotland’s biggest city was searching for a new identity. Shipyards, locomotive works and foundries had gone; Garden Festival and City of Culture jamborees were growing through the brownfield cracks. 

Yet the echoes of Frank Sinatra singing at Ibrox Stadium as part of 1990’s European cultural capital celebrations didn’t change much for those in the city’s schemes. 

“Cranhill was built after the war, people went there to raise their families,” said McCallum. “It had a tradition of community activism, food co-ops and credit unions. The people who set the project up were doing something to help a place with 50% unemployment. It was part of that movement to fight poverty and make conditions better. When I came in I could click into that. There were so many people unemployed but soon we had people with experience able to do things.” 

Utilising his contacts across the city, art school graduate McCallum played a pivotal part in elevating Cranhill Art’s profile. By the end of the decade, the group’s designs and screen prints were synonymous with social and political causes. Posters for CND, the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC), poll tax demos, May Day rallies for workers rights, support for the anti-apartheid ANC and Nelson Mandela articulated working-class politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s in and around Glasgow.

McCallum said: “We made a poster for a night in support of the ANC and sent them copies of it. They liked it so much they put it on the front of their calendar and ended up seconding a guy to Cranhill Arts for a year to find out more about what we were doing.” 

Central to the exhibition is a striking photograph of Billy Bragg performing in the back court of a Cranhill tenement originally built for single women, as part of a “modernisation not privatisation” demo amid a climate of poll tax warrant sales in 1990.  

“A lot of musicians and bands that we ended working with were supporting things like Medical Aid for Palestinians, poll tax demos, or the campaign for a Scottish parliament,” said McCallum. “It felt like we were part of a wider thing going on at the time. Cranhill might have been at the edge of the city, but it was at the heart of all that.” 

Cranhill Arts remains active in the city’s east end today after 44 years as a creative community cornerstone. 

“They’ve tried to cut the funding, and people don’t let it happen,” said Tracey. “Part of what  Cranhill Arts is about is having a voice and expressing it. I think it will be there for a long time to come. “ 

Cranhill Arts: Glaswegians is at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow until 5 October.

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