After the Garden Festival by Lex Lamb and Kenny Brophy, Thursday 4th December at 7:30pm in the Park Centre

The final Antiquaries meeting of 2025 will be on Thursday 4th December at 7:30pm in the Park Centre, 45 Kerr Street, Kirkintilloch with tea and coffee available from 7pm. Lex Lamb and Kenny Brophy will give a presentation on "After the Garden Festival".

The 1988 Garden Festival took an abandoned dock and used it to change how the world saw Glasgow, and how Glasgow saw itself. But how did the form and history of that site influence the spectacle that grew out of it over those 150 unforgettable days of summer? And when the gates finally closed, what became of it all? In this talk, After the Garden Festival Project Lead Lex Lamb and archaeologist Kenny Brophy look at the site before the event as well as the eventual fate of its features, artefacts and landscape with the help of hundreds of individual submissions and leads. A surprising amount, you will find, is hidden in plain sight. The talk will draw on extensive interviews Lex has carried out with GGF major players and staff, and archaeological excavations carried out in Festival Park by Kenny in 2022 and 2024. If you think you know the story of the Glasgow Garden Festival, be prepared to think again.

Image courtesy of Michael Gannon

Image courtesy of Kenny Brophy

    

Lex Lamb is a web and graphic designer with a lifelong amateur interest in all sorts of past spaces, structures and stories, particularly in the Glasgow area and mostly either very old or relatively recent. He was project leader of the After the Garden Festival project and is currently writing a comprehensive account of the history and form of the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival, for publication in 2026.

Dr Kenny Brophy is a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Glasgow. He has over 25 years of experience of researching and carrying out fieldwork on aspects of the Scottish Neolithic period. More recently he has begun to research the archaeology of the recent past, with excavations at the Glasgow Garden Festival site followed by the exploration of a 1970s concrete skatepark in Kelvingrove Park. He is a former President of the Glasgow Archaeology Society, and blogs as the Urban Prehistorian.