Paisley failed to become a UK City of Culture. They decided to do it on their own

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Paisley failed to become a UK City of Culture. They decided to do it on their own

It’s Friday afternoon and the weather is threatening to ruin everything in Paisley. Large drops of rain begin plopping onto four neon snakes weaving around the Corinthian columns holding up the town hall’s facade. A blustery wind threatens to blow away a three-foot decorative spider lurking in a nearby bush. Remaining steady is a giant glowing ‘Paisley Halloween’ sign, planted blasphemously outside Paisley Abbey.

These are the trappings of an occasion that takes a year of planning, a contract worth £170,000 and immeasurable anticipation. This year, organisers of annual Paisley’s Halloween Festival are watching a forecast of two successive storms, and an amber wind warning, with growing anxiety. Just a day earlier, Graeme Crawford, senior communications officer for Renfrewshire council, anxiously told me that the event’s ground team were frantically preparing for the “worst”.

Despite this, there’s a healthy crowd of people milling about for 4pm. I walk past a family of four dressed as vampires, fully committing to the festival, despite the actual Halloween weekend being eight days away (the council hold theirs a week prior, fearing potential attendees would be out guising). As I head up Smithhills Street, the town has a buzz to it, which is a sentence I never thought I’d write about Paisley. 

In fact, I never thought I’d write anything about Paisley. I’d never been there, prior to this article. All I knew about the town was that it has a good abbey and Paolo Nutini was born there. Other than that, what is there to actually do? I suppose I’d adopted Glasgow’s tendency to sideline Paisley, in thought and deed. 

But what I’m seeing reminds me of some small American town you’d see in a cosy film, where the protagonist wears hand-me down knitted-jumpers and the community turns out to help her at the climax. I’ve been charmed, along with tens of thousands of others — exactly as Renfrewshire council planned. You see, the local authority is making a huge wager on Paisley: that the town can be transformed from a punchline into “Scotland’s events capital”, as Councillor Lisa-Marie Hughes, the council’s culture spokesperson puts it. Bigger than Edinburgh, bigger than Glasgow. It’s an extraordinarily ambitious goal. And it all started with a failure nine years ago.