KYQ4: Pollok Park and Harry Benson

Wednesday 17 October 2018

Pollok Park and Harry Benson

Pollok House from White Cart Water

When we lived in Glasgow in the 1980s, Pollok Grounds was our local park. It was a good mile away from home but provided everything a local park should do and more. It is the largest park in Glasgow with 480 hectares. The estate had belonged to the Maxwell family from the 13th century and its last occupant was the 10th baronet, Sir John Stirling Maxwell, an MP and founder of the National Trust and Forestry Commission. He was by all accounts a benevolent patrician who cared and provided education for the staff who worked on the estate. He planted hundreds of specimen trees in the estate and gardens. The house and estate were gifted to Glasgow Corporation in 1967 with the provision for the Burrell Collection to be housed in the park.

Pollok Grounds were designated a Country Park in 1980 before the construction of the Burrell Museum in 1983. Pollok Grounds have become the host over the years to the police sports ground at Lochinch, police dog and horse training unit, golf course, cricket club, lacrosse club and rugby club. It is laced with cycle trails, footpaths, and a herd of highland cattle are a popular attraction for children.

It had been our intention to revisit our old haunts during our summer sojourn in Glasgow but I had managed only one run in the grounds during the summer. It had been the highlight on most of my regular training routes in the 1980s. Twice a week on a 7-mile run home from work, once with my running club and at the weekend for my Sunday morning run if I was not racing. Our children learned to ride their bikes there, and any weekend visitors were taken there as a means of letting young children tire themselves whilst adults enjoyed the walks and the newly opened Burrell Museum. The building was a spacious modern design that blended harmoniously into the mature woodlands that Maxwell had planted.

We had only occasionally visited Pollock House and today that was the objective, partly to see the gardens and partly to see the Harry Benson photographic exhibition. We were not disappointed, the gardens were looked after by the Council and although it was the fag end of the year, the displays were still impressive. The house is now managed by the National Trust and needs some investment but the photographic exhibition was quite outstanding.

Harry Benson had been a newspaper photographer in Glasgow before being dispatched to photograph the Beatles during their epic trip to the United States in 1964. He stayed on in the United States where he managed to capture all the Presidents from Jack Kennedy to Bill Clinton and artists from Dolly Parton to James Brown. These were exhibited along with shots from Glasgow in the 1960s that captured the children playing in the tenements and people going about their business. It was a sublime collection of photographs that captured the emotions and raw humanity of its subjects.