Dear Orange Place: Glasgow in Color
1/26/22
Do cities have colors? Perhaps. It’s likely that the color palettes we assign to our cities are highly personalized. My vision of Sofia is quite purple, but I don’t know what I attribute to this. Berlin, on the other hand, is very decidedly gray. Maybe a city’s color is a collective experience; Berlin’s grayness being a shared element of its denizens. Despite the historical etymology of “dear green space”, Glasgow has several confounding elements that make the city look and feel distinctly orange. Let me list these orange elements of Glasgow, or at least the one’s I perceive:
Cones – Glasgow is absolutely the cone capital of the world (Source: Me – if there is a city that could be an alternative to this please please let me know). Between the significant presence of cone induced construction and the self-aware cone-culture of the city (i.e. the habit of coning the heads of statures, namely the Duke of Wellington outside GOMA, and consequently the image of the coned horseman being repeated artistically in bars and on tour busses – this is something I plan to write more on) the city is brimming with primo orange conage. While I will admit to Glasgow’s cone scene being uniquely diverse (never have I seen so many blue cones!), the overwhelming orangeness of Glaswegian ’s cones is a constant presence in the city.
The Buildings – A lot of the buildings are constructed with a certain stone, that while not explicitly orange, it’s that burnt brown that gives of absolute vibes of orange – an orange feel that is complemented by the rest of the city’s orange. It’s a brick aesthetic, a living orange that is featured on the literal construction of the urban space.
The Orange Order – Let’s get this one out of the way. Whenever I mention these observations IRL people always say, “be careful saying Glasgow is orange”. And the reason behind that is because of the presence of the Orange Order in Glasgow. My understanding of this is very limited and the description will be pedestrian, but based on convos with folks and a mean Wikipedia search, The Orange order is a fraternal order connected to Protestantism, having a deep-seated relationship to the protestant Dutch king, and this is linked to the historic protestant-catholic conflicts which then delineates to Rangers vs. Celtics football tribalism, consisting, seemingly, of right-leaning old men. This is the dark side of Glasgow’s orange reality.
Street Lights – For some reason, the street lights in Glasgow are not the proper lights in other major cities. Or at least the ones that I have visited. They have a softness to them, a softness that can only be understood as orange. The whole city, barring some select major streets, is filtered with an eerie luminescence that makes everything seem more orange than it really is. A permeating light blurring one’s field of vision in the night. Wandering the streets in the night time is simply swimming in orange.
Tennent’s – This may be a tad cheating, but the beer of Glasgow is Tennent’s. The brewery is east of center and you can smell the beer wafting through the air when walking along the hilly necropolis. Tennent’s is more than often the cheapest and most available beer at any bar and in the shops. While not orange, the logo of the beer is a deep red T against a yellow background. Basic color theory attributes an orange element to the can design. Hope this isn’t too much of a stretch, but even sans orange Tennent’s is a major aesthetic feature of Glasgow.
The Subway – The Glasgow subway system is explicitly aesthetically orange. The design of the logo: orange. The color of the tickets: orange. The map: orange. Even the trains themselves and the design of the subway stations are very much Orange. I’ve even heard that sometimes the whole system has the moniker “the clockwork orange” due to its circular design and orange color (source: friends), however I never encountered this term on the day-to-day.
Persimmons – This one is personal, but for whatever reason, persimmons were a very cheap and common fruit during my first couple of months living in this city. Their near shiny orange skin and flesh exists in my memory as the flavor of my Glaswegian October. The fruit has a common feature of my breakfasts and snacks, a personal form of sweet orange which I consumed with delicious intent.
Irn Bru – Scotland is the only country in the world that does not have coco-cola as the hegemonic soda king (source: my friend). The home soda of Scotland is Irn Bru – an orange-colored soda with a flavor I cannot quite place. And like everything else on the list, the sweet fizzy liquid is helplessly orange. The soda is all over the city, empty bottles litter and in bulk on grocery store shelves and in the hands of people walking the streets. Like tennets, the drink is a central part of the city’s beverage aesthetic.
Perceiving Glasgow as orange is a self-replicating process; the more I see Glasgow to be orange the more orange I see, only affirming the colored aesthetic which I have attributed to the place. Glasgow does mean dear green place, and there certainly is a lot of Green, mostly due to the parks. There’s a contrast between the natural green of the environment vs the orange of human production. But based on the above examples I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that there is a distinctly orange pattern in this city, an orange that permeates everything, from the streets to the food and drink to the political beliefs of the denizens.
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