ABSTRACT
When I was young I always thought of Glasgow as being some sort of metropolis. It was quite a large city, with well over a million inhabitants. If it was a metropolis, it was a strange one, very unlike Edinburgh, full of incongruities and surprises, offbeat, brash, politically aware and restless, open to change, trying to live down, or alternatively live up to, its rather gamy and violent image. I remember seeing Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis in the early 1930s, and saying to myself, Mm, yes, that’s the sort of thing!—darkness and light, machines, smoke, social conflict, crowds of people milling about, a sense of the modern. So if you can subtract the idea of dominance from the metropolitan, I like a metropolis, and that may be no more than to say that I like cities, and indeed the larger the better.
