City – The Drouth

10th September 2026

FOOTBALL AND FOOTFALL: the Conflicting Right to the City by Wattana Songpetchmongkol

Everyone knows that for the respective communities who support the two big football teams in Glasgow, there is more than just football at stake. The issue is, of course, avoided in polite society, but down on the street it's not so easy to pretend it doesn't exist. This is a new Glaswegian's view from Wattana Songpetchmongkol.

18th July 2025

Published by TheDrouth

RAIN, STEAM AND SPEED by Huddled McMasses

The American founding fathers took classical Rome as the model for their new Republic. Huddled McMasses examines the development of that story in a tale of two films with classical, particularly Roman, avatars - Gladiator I and II. He sees American popular culture as a mirror held up to the current drift to greater authoritarianism and more rigid patriarchical political structures.

11th May 2025

Published by TheDrouth

ANALOGUES OF McEWAN by Johnny Rodger

The recent opening of the exhibition of drawings 'Tracing Rossi' at the Stallan Brand studio gallery in Glasgow offered an opportunity to examine author Cameron McEwan's in-depth published study of the influential architect Aldo Rossi. Via discussion of a relatively obscure and neglected project by Rossi, the book 'Analogical City' makes weighty claims for architecture as a poetic, political and above all, critical practice. Johnny Rodger reviews.

19th April 2025

Published by TheDrouth

STREET CLUTTER by Maria Burke

I am a walker – I love walking. I love the freedom of roaming around, being curious, looking for often-missed details. I walk on mycommute to work; I walk to get my steps in; I walk to take photographs for content for my Twitter and Instagram pages; I walk out of necessity because inner-city parking is too costly and too stressful and public transport is increasingly getting more expensive. I am a proud pedestrian.

4th April 2025

Published by TheDrouth

A VISIT TO A MUSEUM WHERE TIME DOES NOT EXIST by Mark Rego

A meditation on time in architecture by philosopher and architect Mark Rego. In this piece Rego examines the apparently paradoxical union in an art museum of a painter who rejected time, and an architect 'whose works are perhaps some of the most embodied in temporality.' Alvaro Siza's Museu de Arte Contemporanea in Chaves, Portugal to house the works of Nadir Afonso.

29th March 2023

Published by TheDrouth

A BALCONY IN CHICAGO
by
Murdo Macdonald

Is 'dwelling' always an invasion of some type? In the stoical approach, which is the inescapable ethos of our contemporary of the ecological and the sustainable, it seems so, yes. Here, in appropriately ossianic mode for these end-of-times, a paratactical Murdo Macdonald muses on the hybrid in Chicago.

23rd January 2023

Published by TheDrouth

THE GLEAN review by Sara Stevenson

Billed as 'groundbreaking', the Edinburgh City Art Centre exhibition, Glean - curated by Jenny Brownrigg - gathers the work of 14 pioneering early 20th century women photographers and filmmakers. Sara Stevenson reviews it for The Drouth, and considers it an 'impressive achievement'.

13th January 2022

Published by TheDrouth

Repointing the Brickwork:
The birth of the Arches PART II
intro by Raymond Burke

Our recent review of the new book on The Arches by Bratchpiece and Innes noted the great achievement of the work in showing how that institution was at the heart of a grassroots creativity in Glasgow. But before the internationally famed club came the prelude -the Theatre company that kept the Arches open and made it all possible. Raymond Burke has set the record right on this, collecting and introducing the story of the Arches Theatre through the words of the actors themselves. We publish in two parts: this is PART 2

6th January 2022

Published by TheDrouth

Repointing the Brickwork: The birth of the Arches Theatre
intro by Raymond Burke

Our recent review of the new book on The Arches by Bratchpiece and Innes noted the great achievement of the work in showing how that institution was at the heart of a grassroots creativity in Glasgow. But before the internationally famed club came the prelude -the Theatre company that kept the Arches open and made it all possible. Raymond Burke has set the record right on this, collecting and introducing the story of the Arches Theatre through the words of the actors themselves. We publish in two parts: here is PART 1- the story goes on.