The artist who swept Glasgow's streets for 30 years

BBC News

4 hours ago

When Allan Richardson was 17 he wanted to go to art school, but one day he returned home from school to find his dad had secured him an interview for a job with the council."All I wanted to do was my art," said Allan. "But my dad said to me, 'you can do your art but you have to have something to keep you'."Allan went to the interview and the following Monday he started work as a "litter boy", going round the streets and emptying the bins.Painting took a back seat over the next decade as he worked in various council jobs before settling on sweeping the streets of Glasgow's west end.
For 30 years, until his recent retirement, Allan kept the city's Byres Road and its surrounding streets clean but he also made sure he had his paint palette and sketchbook in his pocket. Drawing and painting almost every day during his lunch break, and often with his handmade sketchbook balanced on the bar of his cart, Allan quickly became accustomed to searching for the west end's hidden gems."People walk by going to work or university, or they're on a phone and they're just walking ahead thinking about where they need to be, but there is so much all around them."That was the good thing about my job, I would see all of that and think 'that's an interesting feature on that building, I might come back and draw that'."
Allan, who is now 60, said the area had changed a lot over the three decades he cleaned and painted it.He said Byres Road has always been a centre for students, but the butchers and jewellery stores of the past have now been swapped for chain takeaways and coffee shops.Making a plan in his head as he swept the streets, Allan has painted hundreds of buildings in the west end from the cobbled backstreets and popular student hangouts to the Kibble Palace in the Botanic Gardens and the iconic tower of Glasgow University's Gilbert Scott Building."There's a lot of good architecture in the west end and there's a lot of history, which I really like," he said.
Part of Glasgow west end's story
Allan said one of the reasons he stayed in his job so long was the people he met and spoke to each day."For some of the older people in the area, chatting to me would make their day as they maybe wouldn't speak to anyone for a couple of days," he said.One of the people Allan spoke to and became a close friend of was renowned Scottish writer and artist Alasdair Gray."I used to sweep his street," said Allan.He said he had no idea who Gray was but the paintbrushes in his window had caught his attention as he passed by, so the next time Allan saw him, he asked if he was an artist."He invited me in to have a look around at his work but he never introduced himself," Allan said."It wasn't until later I discovered who he was, and I would chat to him like with any of the other locals."One day Gray asked Allan if he could draw him."I went to his flat and he sketched me," he said."A few years later, I discovered I was going to be on the new mural at Hillhead subway station after its refurbishment, which was fantastic."I can now go to the underground and see myself standing there with my brush as part of the story of the west end."
Gray, who is best-known for his first novel Lanark, died in 2019. His Hillhead subway mural shows a panoramic and detailed sweep of the west end, from Byres Road looking east towards the centre of Glasgow.It shows many of the streets Allan swept and drew for 30 years.
Now retired, Allan said it's time to move on and learn something new as he hopes to do more art classes and explore new places in the city with his Glasgow Urban Sketchers group.