Have Glasgow’s ‘worst’ event promoters struck again?

Dear readers. We’ve still not landed upon a pithy moniker for you all. Bell-ters, Bellsters, Ringers? We’ll keep workshopping it. Moving on, if you’re sick of hearing about English bank holidays, worry not, we’ve been patiently plugging away at Bell central to keep you abreast of happenings and noteworthy news in the city.  

Before all of that, a public health warning from Calum. To those of an olfactorily sensitive disposition, we recommend giving the Queen’s Street/George Square area a miss, until a powerful stench disperses at least. Cycling in this morning, your writer could barely face waiting at a red light for the overpowering smell of bin juice that lingered from the top of North Hanover Street, down onto George Street — reaching peak pong on Bell Street. Perhaps it’s Venom, Spider-man’s nemesis, who’s adopted a new form of sensory warfare to prevent Spidey’s ongoing filming work? One thing your author did notice is evidence of what can only be described as a smeared bin discharge, caked onto the road surface like a spilled bowl of beige soup. In fact, he even noticed a few turnips in the mix, inter alia. Truly a rude awakening to start the week. 

Now, onto some slightly more savoury reading. We’ve got a bumper edition for you folks, so pour yourself a cup of joe and strap in.

Glasgow in Brief

🎶 You don’t need us to tell you how hard it is to run an independent music festival in this economy. Still, when In the City — which had been due to take place in Barrowland Park over the weekend —  was postponed with only three days’ notice, it caught our attention. The Sugarhill Gang, Huey Morgan, Jazzy B and James Lavelle were all due to play at the festival, billed as a celebration of 850 years of Glasgow. Low sales (day tickets at £34.50; two days for £64.50), was the stated explanation for postponement. Organisers are now “working hard to reschedule a date that works for all artists that were due to perform”. Ticket-holders will have to wait until a new date is announced, at which point they can either choose to use their existing ticket, or request a full refund. So far, so rudimentary (even if having to await a date to request a refund seems slightly unfair). 

The festival appears to be organised by Whistler on the Green, the pub which was re-opened by Brian Traynor and Ricky Scoular in 2020. The pair were formerly behind A’challtainn restaurant and the events space at BAaD. If that doesn’t ring a bell, what about Playground of Sound (PoS), “one of Scotland’s largest event promoters”? PoS organised Playground festival in Rouken Glen for a number of years, as well as Junction 1, although ‘organised’ is putting it a bit charitably, if rumours are to be believed. A deeply sus number of headline acts pulled out of both festivals at the eleventh hour, and online rumours over payment disputes followed. Traynor left PoS in 2022, and the company was dissolved in April of this year. 

At the time of peak Playground chaos in 2021, Optimo (Espacio) took to social media to explain why they stopped their set for 15 minutes, describing the organisers as “amongst the worst individuals we have ever had to deal with in over 3 decades of performing”. They also made the claim that “literally every other local artist we have spoken to has a similar, or worse story than ours about their treatment”. Optimo’s public statement did not escape the notice of Unite Hospitality, which then shared a document from an employment tribunal court, in which the owners of A’challtain — in liquidation by this point — were found to have unlawfully deducted the claimant’s wages. Suffice it to say, we’ll be paying close attention to the rescheduled date for In the City, and whether there are any big-name drop outs at the last minute.

Meanwhile, if you’ve got the inside scoop on In the City or Playground of Sound, do give us a bell: editor@glasgowbell.co.uk

🏘️ Accommodating asylum seekers has been a hot topic in the local press over the past week. With various figures flying around that aren’t always clear or verified (and some ending up being widely shared on far-right Facebook pages, here’s our fact-checked explainer. 

For those who’ve applied for asylum but are awaiting a decision, the Home Office pays for their accommodation. Scotland on Sunday reported that only one hotel in Glasgow is used to house asylum seekers in this situation. More broadly, Scotland houses 1,573 asylum seekers in hotels across 13 local authorities. This is less than 5% of the total number in the UK being accommodated in hotels. Accommodating asylum seekers awaiting a decision is not a significant source of pressure on Glasgow City Council’s ability to provide homeless accommodation. 

However, the council has repeatedly drawn attention to its disproportionately large population of asylum seekers compared to other UK cities. Glasgow does support the highest number of asylum seekers out of all local authorities in the UK, according to Home Office data from June. As of June 2025, Glasgow City Council supports 4,152 asylum seekers, the highest number for a local authority in the UK. However, Glasgow is only the fourth highest local authority for supporting asylum seekers per million inhabitants, coming behind Hillingdon and Hounslow in London, and Halton in the northwest of England. 

This is due to a combination of Glasgow long having been Scotland’s only dispersal city (a place where the Home Office is allowed to send asylum seekers to receive support), the SNP’s decision to remove priority access for certain groups to temporary accommodation, and the recent surge in the number of asylum applications being processed by the Home Office. This has made Glasgow particularly appealing for out-of-towners applying for homelessness. In the year 2024/25, 1,050 homelessness applications were made by those who had been granted asylum in a UK city other than Glasgow. This constitutes 12.4% of total homeless applications made in Glasgow that year. It’s these figures that council bosses say is putting pressure on the city’s ability to provide accommodation for those experiencing homelessness. Scotland on Sunday reports that this has added an extra £40m of cost onto the council. 

But something that has got our goat is an unsourced claim seen in the Scottish Daily Express and the Scottish Sun that Glasgow is the UK’s “asylum seeker capital”, with “4,386 mostly migrant households” in temporary accommodation in the city. However, The Bell has not been able to find a source for this figure, although the most recent official figure of 4,278 from June suggests it is credible. We also couldn’t verify the number of “migrant households” in temporary accommodation in Glasgow. However, this fact check piece from the Glasgow Times in June states that “non-refugee homeless applications outnumbered refugees by more than two to one.” This makes the “mostly migrant households” claim in the Express and Sun highly unlikely to be true, despite it lending arsenal to the ammo of numerous far-right Facebook groups.

🍺We’ve had a few DMs over the past few days asking us if the Star Bar has been sold to Drygate (itself owned by Tennent's). If you’re not familiar, the Eglinton Toll pub is one of Glasgow’s most famous buildings, and its budget three course lunch is the stuff of legend, as is their karaoke. The Herald’s Kevin McKenna visited last month, reporting that the £4 three-courser won’t be changing. “Apart from a lick of paint here and there, I’m changing absolutely nothing,” said the new owner, David Low, the Glasgow businessman famous for his 1994 Celtic takeover strategy. 

The genesis of the rumour is threefold, centring around a recent facelift. The St Andrew’s Cross pub got a dark green lick of paint last week; the old sign was removed; lastly, Drygate-branded stanchions emerged outside. One user on Reddit remarked that it was “a sign absolutely no where is safe from gentrification”. Robbie popped his head in on Friday, wandering up to the bar and explaining to the debonair barman that he was a journalist interested in Low’s takeover of the pub. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a man playing pool who looked remarkably similar to David Low, who cocked his head and sidled up to the bar. “Do you know David Low?” the barman asked with a sly smile, before explaining the man was his dad. The pool player then announced he was Low’s brother, Kenny, who’s now running the pub. An excitable Kenny gave us a tour, showing us the old sign now affixed to the wall in the lounge, and explaining that the outside will soon be handpainted. The Lows plan to renovate the bar area, putting on open mic nights and DJs to attract the sort of clientele that drink at the Laurieston, Heraghty’s and the Allison Arms. They’re keeping the lounge area much the same for the locals. As for the £4 lunch, well, that will be going up to £5 due to inflation. There will be a “few menu tweaks”, “but the whole ethos of it will stay the same … for a lot of older people it’s their main meal of the day”, Kenny explained. In fact, it will actually be three courses from £5, then staged upwards. Still, it’s hardly the tsunami wave of gentrification some of Reddit would have you believe.

As for the stanchion barriers outside, it’s got nothing to do with a Big Brewery takeover, and everything to do with cyclists whizzing down the pavement and knocking over their customers. Kenny tells me three customers have been hit; one woman even had her shoulder dislocated. “We want to save these traditional pubs, that's why we're getting involved,” Kenny said, responding to the gentrification rumours. His brother David bought the Arlington in 2021, selling it on last year after turning its fortunes around. He’s also in the process of buying Brechin’s Bar in Govan. “There's been no investment [in these pubs] for decades, we’re trying to save them, we’re the good guys here,” Kenny added. Later that night, we got an email from David. “There’s no gentrification or plans to change anything. Rather, what it’s had is its first makeover in thirty years with new signage to follow and that’s about it. I'm in the business of protecting what's left of the community pub.” 

🍛Dishoom is offering 50% off food during its ‘soft launch’ (read: shrewd marketing strategy) until Thursday. This has had the effect of making the queues for Blank Street on Gordon Street look paltry in comparison, with diners reportedly waiting over an hour and a half for their fix of Irani café food. What better advertisement could a restaurant group with a £116m annual turnover hope for, than a line snaking all the way along Nelson Mandela Place? So in the spirit of public service journalism, here are a few mom-and-pop shops serving delicious Indian food in the city centre (where you won’t have to wait for hours in a queue full of food influencers). 

• Rishi’s Indian Aroma. 61 Bath Street
• Madras Café, 82 Howard Street
• Obsession of India, 25 High Street

Stories you might have missed: 

🛏️ Trade union secures win for Glasgow Village hotel staff, The National

📱 Black Scottish TikTok is having a moment, Guardian

🏘️ Over 1,700 flats and student rooms to be built at former goods yard site, STV

🍕 RIP Four Corners’ Pizza Hut, Glasgow Times

🚂 Proposal to expand Glasgow Queen Street station unveiled, BBC News

⛳ ‘Dangerous’ health guru offers £795 seminars at Trump Turnberry, The Times (£)

Read/listen/watch: ‘Can this landmark pub remain unique in a world of chains?’

“Pubs like the Star Bar reside in the folk memory of generations of Glaswegians. Memories of grand social occasions and family events here get handed on. They are in the DNA of their local communities,” so wrote Kevin McKenna in the aforementioned piece on the Eglinton Toll pub. It’s a great history of the gushet building, all the way up to its newest publicans — as well as an ode to the ever-diminishing old Glasgow pubs of yore.

We also rec:

• Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir ‘Frankly’ taps into SNP discontent over party’s future 
• BBC Radio 4’s ‘slow radio’ goes up the Clyde on the Waverley Steamer (18mins in).

Catch up and coming up: 

• Calum was out on the Kelvin over the weekend, waders on and rod in hand, as he surveyed the river’s regeneration. A regular reader described it as a “great article” on a “very interesting topic”. The reader also recalls seeing residents swimming to work along the Rhine in Basel when they were last there. “We’re nowhere near that yet and maybe never will be, but I think it’s so so important that we take the stewardship of our waters seriously,” they added. We fulsomely agree, and long for a day when we might swim in the Clyde once more. 
• Last week, Robbie was in Blackhill, hearing from a charity who’ve played an integral role in reducing social isolation and food insecurity, not to mention helping to drastically cut youth violence in the process.  

Growing hope in Glasgow’s most isolated community

A Blackhill charity is bouncing back from acts of vandalism stronger than ever

The BellRobbie Armstrong

Headline of the week: Would you climb Irvine's 25ft greasy pole for a ham?

Re:view - Rafa’s, 1103 The Hidden Lane

It’s little more than a hole in the wall in Finnieston’s Hidden Lane with a few benches outside, but there are layers of flavour to be found inside. Rafa’s isn’t really Mexican, more “South-western American”. You might think that means ‘Tex-Mex’, but it’s about as far from an Old El Paso kit as you can get. In fact, despite not trying to be authentic, the spot reliably serves up some of the best Mexican-inspired food in the city. There are tacos, burritos, asada, birria, carnitas and barbacoa depending on which day you swing by. Recently, we had a bowl of corn with feta, crema and lime, and two tacos: one with umami-rich mushroom, the other crispy fried courgette. Both were a delight, and had us wishing we’d ordered at least two more. BYOB, no bookings. Batter in. 

Glasgow calendar: Small Act of Love, Citizens Theatre

Making its debut in our Glasgow Calendar, the newly-reopened Citz premieres a Hunter Foundation and National Theatre of Scotland production after a seven-year revamp. Small Acts of Love follows the friendships which span 36 years since being formed in the aftermath of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 which came down over Lockerbie in 1988. 

The reopening is bittersweet following the death of the Citizens’ former artistic director Giles Havergal aged 87 on Saturday. He was reportedly planning on attending Small Acts of Love having first come to the theatre in 1953. 

Small Acts of Love, 9 September to 4 October, Citizens Theatre