‘He called my mother a prostitute’: How Glasgow’s tour guides sell our city

Put yourself in the shoes of Bonnie the Floridian. You arrived in Glasgow last night, having jaunted around Skye, Loch Ness, and had a day or two enjoying the culture and scenes in Edinburgh. You love Sam Heughan, the hottie from Outlander. You’re only human. On your first morning in Sam’s hometown, Glasgow, what better way to get your bearings than being guided by a local? You find said man waiting outside a pub, you’re excited, you introduce yourself. He replies in a different language. You thought you shared a mother tongue. English. Isn’t that what they speak here?

Poor Bonnie stands smiling at Gordon Hart, our guide for this two-hour whistlestop tour from George Square to Buchanan Street through the Merchant City and back. 

“Were we hard to find?” he asks her, enunciating each syllable slowly. It’s no use.

“Uh huh” she replies, with a glassy, panicked look, working at full speed to decode what on earth he just said. 

Louise, a walking guide for a rival company and whose tour I crashed on Friday, has also trained herself to enunciate so clearly it sounds painful for her. An earnest Yank asks her to say something in her real speech. Lousie, Partick-raised, puts her hand on her cheek, thinking, and replies “here gonnae let us clap yer dug”. Wide eyes, open mouths. 

Whatever struggle the guests have with the accent, however, they love that it’s there. It’s part of the Glasgow offering: ‘Hear English like you never have before’. (Yes I know Scots is a minority language, recognised as such by the European Union, let’s not get into that here). And although that might jingle the cringe bells for some of you, it’s worth remembering that the accent and language diversity in the UK is enormous compared to places like the US and Australia.

But how are we selling Glasgow to the masses of tourists that flock here every day? Especially as most of them, to be frank, don’t really know why they came. As I discover, many tourists seem to happen upon Glasgow as a day-or-two trip while really visiting Skye and Edinburgh. What impression are we leaving them with?

Marketing Glasgow

Gordon Hart starts with shock value. “Women had very few options back then”, he explains, standing outside the Gallery of Modern Art. He’s describing the days of tobacco and sugar merchant William Cunninghame, whose grand 1780s home is now the gallery.

“You either hoped your husband wouldn’t die,” he continues, surveying the group, “you were an indentured servant,” – now he taps a woman in her 60s on the shoulder – “or you were a prostitute. Sorry I’m looking at you”. 

The woman he’s looking at widens her eyes in shock, but laughs it off, as do most of the group. He’s half an hour into his walking tour of central Glasgow and he’s now already won the 27-person-strong group over. Bonnie included. Not only do they now understand his accent, they get the Glasgow gags (the memories of which do, admittedly, seem to linger — Hart recalls a review from one friendly Costa Rican family along the lines of “good tour, but he called my mother a prostitute”).