Printed Matters: Fare

Photo: POST

By Sara Bellini

Sometime during the first lockdown, I found myself longingly holding a copy of a beautifully designed magazine called Fare that I had picked up because of the word ‘Glasgow’ in all caps on the cover. It was already clear to me at that time that my trips to the UK were cancelled for the immediate future and possibly indefinitely - so I started exploring momentarily inaccessible places through literature.

Reading Fare turned out to be an immersive experience where I would go back and forth from the page to my memory. The texture and complexity of the city were there: the sounds and smells as well as the visuals, and most importantly the taste. Glasgow is not an obvious place where to look for outstanding culinary experiences, and yet if you’re open to serendipity, you’ll find plenty of them.

Fare is a travel magazine focusing largely on food, one city at a time. It was founded three years ago by Ben Mervis - food writer and contributor to Netflix Chef’s Table - combining his degree in medieval history, his experience working at noma and his passion for writing. It would be more precise to state that the magazine is about the cultural scene of a specific place, as it doesn’t feature only tasty treats. But culture is an abstract and general term, while Fare looks at the particular with a meticulous and gentle eye.  

Beside Glasgow, Fare has been to Istanbul, Helsinki, Charleston (SC), Seoul and Tbilisi and the latest issue on Antwerp is just out now. The choice of location as well as the themes of the articles set the magazine apart from more mainstream publications, which tend to stick to big names and offer a polished and homogeneous image of a city. Rather than featuring well-known Michelin-star chefs, Fare looks for stories of ordinary people that have managed to create - inside or outside their kitchens - something valuable for the community around them. The way these stories are captured in full colour - through words, photography or illustrations - makes sure they can be enjoyed by readers that have never been to or will never visit the place they’re reading about.

Food is a vessel to pass on traditions and link generations across time and sometimes across space, like in the case of Punjabi immigrants in 2019 Scotland. It’s also the glue of community, especially in multi-ethnic and economically diverse cities. Food brings people together to share something that goes beyond your five-a-day and is rooted into collective memory. Food is about people and the relationships between them, as well as their relationship with the place(s) they call home. That’s why it’s important to tell these stories and we hope Fare will keep doing so for a long time.

Here is our chat with Ben Mervis:

Photo: POST

What have you learnt from Fare in the past three years?

I've learned so much: about Fare itself (what it is and isn't), and about creating a magazine. Most indie publishers like myself have little or no prior experience with magazine publishing before getting started. As a magazine, we've really found confidence in our voice and design in the last couple of issues. In some ways, I regret Fare not being a quarterly magazine, because each issue is a chance to improve on the last, to tweak things that went wrong and try out new ideas! I'd love to have more opportunities for doing that.

Could you talk a bit about the connection between food, history, community and culture at the heart of the magazine?

Yeah! So my background is in history--medieval history--however, I fell into the food world when I moved to Copenhagen several years ago. Traveling around the world with my then-boss, René Redzepi, I began to understand new cultures through their food: meeting cooks and craftsmen and hearing local histories tied to food production or technique or ingredients. It was incredibly fascinating. When I started Fare it was a very natural convergence of all of those things.

Why did you choose the print magazine as a format? 

To be honest I chose print before I knew or had decided anything about the magazine itself! This came as a love of print.

How do you pick a city and which aspects of its culinary scene to highlight?

City selection is about creating a balance within the 'series' and choosing cities that are different enough to make each issue feel wholly unique and its own.

What are the literary inspirations behind Fare?

One was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I love the idea that the same city could be described in a thousand different ways.

What are your plans for the next issue and how has Covid changed them? 

For the time being, Covid restricts our travel, so we're changing the structure of our magazine slightly to bring on a guest curator. They're an individual who intimately knows the featured city, and we collaborate with them on finding the right voices and themes for the issue. That's something you'll see for Issue 8 and Issue 9.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to share with our readers?

One thing we're really buoyed by is the fact that, in times like this, a desire to travel has not faded--even if the opportunities to do so have. We're really encouraged by the fact that so many people have written to us to say how Fare has helped them 'travel' in this time when armchair travel may be the closest they get to the real thing! 

Pick up a copy of Fare at Rosa Wolf in Berlin or at one of their many distributors across the UK and Europe. And if going into a shop is not a possibility, you can order it online.

Five Questions for... Amanda Thomson

Amanda Thomson is the author of A Scots Dictionary of Nature, a collection of nature-related Scots words from 19th and early 20th century sources and a beautiful representation of the relationship between the Scottish people and their landscape. She teaches at Glasgow School of Art and in her art and writing she explores themes of place, home, nature and migration.

Amanda has just signed a book deal and is currently working on a collection of hybrid essays about landscapes and a video and writing project about an alder tree. She’ll be the artist in residence at Small Halls Festival this November, and travelling to Southern Africa with other nine writers as part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival initiative Outriders Africa. 

What does home mean to you?

I’ve been thinking about and actually writing about home a lot over the summer. For me, it can go from the micro, and being with my partner, to the house that we live in, or the place where it is. It’s about a feeling of missing a place and longing to be there, and that deep exhale of relief once you reach it. It’s not something that any of us can take for granted at all, so there’s a thankfulness to know I have a place I call home, when there are so many in the world who don’t.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

Abernethy Forest, where I did my PhD and is now a place I call home; the North West Highlands. I am smitten with Scotland and the Highlands and Islands. 

What is beyond your front door? 

I have a field which hasn’t been grazed by sheep or cattle for a couple of months. It’s been full of white and red clover, germander speedwell and all kinds of grasses, occasional deer and hares, and the aforementioned alder. The farmer has just cut it and bailed hay, and the swallows and house martins are swooping by just now on their way south. 

What place would you most like to visit?

I love living in Scotland and would happily spend all my time here. I always love going to the islands – North Uist in particular for the birds, and Shetland, and I am not long back from Sutherland in the North West. Now, and unexpectedly, I am very excited to be going to spend time in Southern Africa.

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now? 

Reading, I’m jumping between books: Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing and Sadiya Hartson’s Lose Your Mother. Looking at the Collin’s Book of British Insects to figure out what kinds of moths I’ve been seeing.

Watching – This summer there have been red deer and hares in the field, swallows and house martins on the wires and just now the sun is coming and going and the trees are flouncing in the wind. The rain’s coming over from the West.

Listening to – this summer I have been listening to Braebach’s Frenzy of the Meeting a lot, also Duncan Chisholm’s music; Kinnaris Quintet’s amazing Free One, and Ali Hutton and Ross Ainslie’s Symbiosis II is the perfect album for the drive between Glasgow and the North – A lot of Scottish folk music.

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Life and Death and the Walls of Weetabix: A walk up Glasgow's High Street

By James Carson:

It’s best to stop at the lights. With traffic coming from all directions, the slightest trip could put me in hospital. But it’s too long a wait for one young lad, who strikes out for the other side, ignoring the blitz of angry beeps. Beside me, a baldy bloke with hairy ears glares at the youngster, who’s now happily powering up High Street.

“Obviously trying to make a statement,” he says, eyebrows twitching. “And the statement is he’s a dickhead.”

I’m at Glasgow Cross, once the bustling centre of a medieval burgh. Today, the fish and cloth traders of old are long gone, replaced by pubs and pawnbrokers, chip shops and bookies. 

It’s the last day of winter. Tonight, the golden hands on the face of the old tolbooth clock tower will be wound forward into British Summer Time. As ever, Mother Nature is one step ahead. This afternoon, Glasgow is wearing her spring collection: a cloak of yellow sunlight, with matching cerulean sky, accessorised by feathery white clouds.

To the south of Glasgow Cross lie Saltmarket and the River Clyde; to the east is Glasgow Green – the city’s oldest park. And westward is Argyle Street, a place of pilgrimage for those who worship at the church of St Marks (and Spencer). But today I’m heading north, up High Street. It’s a road well-travelled; I often use it as a shortcut when I’m in a hurry. Today I’m taking my time.

The 120-foot clock tower at Glasgow Cross was once attached to the tolbooth, a multipurpose building whose functions included town hall, jail and reading room. Perhaps most importantly, the tolbooth was a gathering place, a stage for the mercantile glitterati to see and be seen. It was built in 1626, the same year as the finishing touches were being put to the new St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. But while St Peter’s endures, Glasgow’s tolbooth was demolished in the 1920s, one of many fine buildings the city fathers have sacrificed to the wrecking ball. Only the slender clock tower remains, marooned on its own little island as Glasgow flows around it.

History is in the stones of this quarter, and in the street names: Brunswick Street recalls the House of Hanover; Blackfriars Street is named after an order of Dominican priests who founded a church near here in 1248.

High Street gets its name from the High Kirk, better known today as Glasgow Cathedral, which crowns the top of the street. If this were Bordeaux, say, or Zagreb, this quarter would be known as ‘The Old Town’, with quirky little shops selling vegan shortbread, clock tower fridge magnets and inflatable kilts made in China. There would be restaurants with buxom wenches in authentic medieval smocks, serving authentic medieval haggis. A historical tramcar would jangle its way up and down the street, ferrying tourists from Baltimore and Brisbane. 

On the lower reaches of High Street, the vibe is very different from this imagined world. People are doing Saturday afternoon things: football fans on their way to the match, students brunching on sausage rolls. There’s a Turkish restaurant (“opening soon”), a pub (closed), a charity shop (closed down), a bedding store, another pub, student flats and another pub.

Actually, not just another pub. A sign outside declares it to be Glasgow’s oldest, dating from 1515. This is a bit of creative PR on the part of the owner. The bar actually dates from the 19th century, although its shabby appearance wouldn’t look out of place in The Flintstones.

The pub may be nothing to look at, but its neighbour is a real beauty. With a two-storey step gable and a gorgeous little domed canopy (a tempietto, if you please), the former British Linen Bank building is like an exotic fusion of Amsterdam townhouse and Mughal temple. It stands now in solitary confinement, badly in need of some TLC.

In fact, this whole stretch of High Street feels rundown, although little shops are doing their best to cheer things up (“The Best Steak Pie in Glasgow!”). It’s possible that Billy Connolly was thinking of this very spot when he once mused that if a nuclear bomb ever fell on Glasgow, no-one would notice the difference afterwards. Since the Big Yin made that observation, much of the centre of Glasgow has been given a makeover, morphing from industrial relic to Barcelona of the north. Decades of grime were removed from civic buildings and a constellation of starchitects sprinkled the city with their fairy dust.

It’s been an impressive transition, and Glasgow has somehow managed to achieve it while retaining its essential character. It’s a city that can celebrate the great works by Van Gogh and Dali displayed in its galleries, while simultaneously applauding the artistic genius who used the medium of spray paint to declare that “Boris Johnson is a pure fanny.”

The final section of High Street curves round towards Cathedral Square. There are lots of empty properties here, but also a cluster of new-age businesses, dispensing everything from aromatherapy to tarot card readings. And there’s an off-licence, so if the cards say your future’s not looking rosy, you can quickly hit the rosé.

Above the shops, sturdy tenements in red sandstone lend an air of dignity to the street. If Toulouse is La Ville Rose, and Aberdeen is the Granite City, then Glasgow is simply red. The russet colour features strongly in tenements all over the city. They’re made from an iron-rich building material that dates back nearly 300 million years, when Scotland was covered by a vast desert. The same colour can be seen today in the sands of the Sahara that are sometimes carried by dust storms to fall on Glasgow as ‘blood rain’.

The vision of Glasgow Cathedral at the top of High Street is an uplifting moment. It was built between the 12th and 15th centuries, and is the only mainland Scottish cathedral to have survived the Reformation intact. The interior has soaring gothic arches and sublime stained glass. Below, the tomb of Glasgow’s sixth century founder, St Mungo, underlines its historical resonance. When it was completed, Pope Nicholas V declared that a pilgrimage to Glasgow Cathedral was the equal of one to Rome. It’s fabulously beautiful. 

Across the square, the Museum of Religious Life and Art is less so. Opened in 1993, it was intended to blend in with its venerable surroundings, but doesn’t quite get there. The exterior walls seem to have been crafted from breakfast cereal (it’s known locally as Fort Weetabix), and there’s a Disneyfied attempt at a bishop’s castle. The whole effect is less medieval masterpiece, more product of the muddle ages. I could spend the rest of the afternoon exploring its exhibits, but I’m enjoying the warmth of the sun on my face. It’s time to walk among the dead.

Glasgow’s Necropolis occupies a hill overlooking the cathedral, with panoramic views across the city. I feel at peace among the tended plots, but I’m not alone. The place is teeming with tombstone tourists, with voices from France and Germany, Poland and America.

Here, every stone tells a story; different circumstances, but always the same ending. Death at war, at sea, and all too often, in childbirth. Most of the permanent residents here are from well-heeled Victorian and Edwardian families – merchants and magnates, aristocrats and knights of the realm. But there are surprises, too: a Polish freedom fighter, the matriarch of a Gypsy dynasty; the first woman to graduate in medicine from Glasgow University. Even in a graveyard as grand as this, there are no answers to existential questions. Only an eternal verity: life goes on until, at some point, it doesn’t.

From up here, I can retrace my afternoon walk. I’ve only covered about half a mile, but I’ve reached across the centuries. It was the medieval High Street that nourished the relationship between the cathedral’s community at one end and the market traders at the other. Which is why, for all its faults, this stretch of land retains a special place in the city’s history and heart: no High Street, no Glasgow.

***

James Carson is a writer from Glasgow. His work has appeared in various magazines, including From Glasgow to Saturn, The Skinny and ExBerliner, and his stories have also been selected for anthologies such as Streets of Berlin, Tip Tap Flat and A Sense of Place.

Home Where Home Is Not, at Glasgow Women's Library and Platform

Interregnum n.1, laser cut puzzle bricks, cork and wood, by Sogol Mabadi, 2018 / Photo Credit: Iman Tajik

By Sara Bellini:

Home Where Home Is Not is the brilliant title of an exhibition that combines the works of two Glasgow-based artists, jointly organised by the Glasgow Women’s Library and Platform. Sogol Mabadi and Birthe Jorgensen, both born outside the UK, explore the concept of ‘home’ in a context where people move freely and their identities are shaped by their multiple homes. 

Both Platform and Glasgow Women’s Library are arts centres involved with the local community and aiming at fostering creativity and making art accessible to everyone. The exhibition includes wood sculptures, sound art and installations and will be open until 3rd August in both locations. Admittance is free. 

As part of the exhibition, on Thursday 18th the artists will talk about Languages of Belonging with Amanda Thomson, visual artist and author of A Scots Dictionary of Nature. On Sunday 21st writer and director Julia Lee Barclay-Morton will give a performative tour of the exhibition in both locations. Check the websites about opening times and event tickets:

Glasgow Women's Library
Platform