Adura Onashile

The Guardian 23 April 2021

Glasgow’s Merchant City is a construct. Before the wave of post-1980s regeneration, nobody knew the city centre district by that name. With its new identity, it was branded as a destination for a fashionable crowd in search of boutiques, restaurants and wine bars.

The merchants themselves were already commemorated in the road signs: Ingram Street after tobacco lord Archibald Ingram; Buchanan Street after plantation owner Andrew Buchanan; Glassford Street after John Glassford, the most successful of the tobacco traders.

Merchant City advertising campaigns did not dwell on how these men built their wealth. That job has been taken on by writer and director Adura Onashile who, working with the National Theatre of Scotland, has built an app-based walking tour that compels us to remember. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).