Overview

Was Glasgow's Garden Festival a pivotal event in the city's decade of self re-invention, a colossal waste of resources, or a great day out?

Depending on how you view it, Glasgow's Garden Festival was the pivotal event of the city's miraculous decade of self re-invention, an object lesson in what Glasgow was (and perhaps still is) capable of, a colossal waste of resources which trivialised a once-proud industrial powerhouse or simply the best day out Glaswegians have ever had. Lex Lamb felt that all of these viewpoints pointed to a vital need to record the physical evidence of the event as well as the memories of the people who made it, before either were lost. In this talk he explains how that journey resulted in the first full account of the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival.

Lex Lamb is a Glasgow-based designer and writer with a lifelong interest in local history as well as landscapes and spaces of all types.