While I am glad that the recent photo essay on Glasgow’s excess mortality blamed it on the city’s housing policy and not its people, I was saddened to see how the piece presented a wholly negative view of the city (The Glasgow Effect: examining the city’s life expectancy gap – a photo essay, 26 February).
For the vast majority, life in Glasgow is not a grim death sentence. The city is Scotland’s largest urban economy and its base for arts and media. Glasgow is home to three universities, one of the world’s most prestigious art schools and – in the west and south – some of the UK’s most culturally vibrant and bourgeois districts outside London. This does not detract from Glasgow’s appalling social inequalities, but it is far from the hopeless, dying city portrayed in the article.
It must be noted that while Glasgow city council has Scotland’s lowest life expectancies, Scotland’s two council areas with highest life expectancy, East Renfrewshire and East Dunbartonshire, both fall within Greater Glasgow. They are home to 203,000 people and both begin just a couple of miles from the city centre yet are excluded from Glasgow’s demographic data. This counterpoint rarely makes its way into media portrayals of the city.
Lastly, there is the loaded term of the “Glasgow effect” itself. The Glasgow Centre for Population Health, whose use of the phrase in the title of a 2010 report, now discourages its use as the mystery surrounding excess mortality has been solved. There is no “Glasgow effect”, only a policy effect that has left long-lasting damage.
Glasgow is undergoing an unprecedented level of development, socially and commercially. The article’s lopsided portrayal of the city will only add to the social apartheid it discusses and deter tourism and investment. There is much more to Glasgow than ill health and desolation. I hope future Guardian coverage of the city reflects this.
Gavin Moffat
Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire
