The chair of Glasgow School of Art, Muriel Gray, has defended the management of the Mackintosh building – which was gutted by fire in June – as “exemplary”, while acknowledging she could have done more to communicate in the immediate aftermath with local residents and businesses affected by the second blaze in four years.
Gray used her appearance at Holyrood’s culture committee on Thursday to insist the art school management was horrified by the experiences of local residents. Some were excluded from their homes and businesses for months by the safety cordon imposed by Glasgow city council’s building control, while the painstaking work to stabilise the remaining structure of the devastated building continued over the summer.
“We will not move forward a single inch without consulting them,” Gray pledged.
But one of the MSPs for the city centre, Sandra White, challenged Gray’s assurances, pointing out that the board’s decision to rebuild the Mack, a project that could take a decade to complete with all the associated disruption, had been taken without local consultation. “I cannot accept that a trust that is paid for by public money is not consulting with local residents,” said White.
Another local MSP, Pauline McNeill, told Gray she was “deluding herself” if she thought she had a good relationship with the local community, a comment that was greeted with shouts of assent from residents watching the session in the public seating area.
In a combative evidence session, Gray also refuted media reports that the art school had jeopardised the safety of the Mack building by holding fundraising tours there whilst reconstruction work following the 2014 fire was ongoing.
Responding to a question from the MSP Annabelle Ewing, Gray said “speculation in the press has been skewed and wrong”.
“There was nobody allowed on the site who did not go through an induction procedure and vetting,” she said. “There was no ‘milling around’ on a construction site of that importance.”
Giving evidence alongside Gray was Liz Davidson, the senior project manager of the Mackintosh building restoration, who explained that the great international interest in the process, in particular of the Mackintosh library that was badly affected by the 2014 fire, did involve visits, lectures and events.
“It was actually written in our tenure that we wanted to demystify construction and bring people into the process, but when people did visit there was a very strict protocol,” said Davidson. She confirmed there had been no visits in the week of the June fire.
The committee also heard from Davidson that a fire suppression system had been 60% completed at the time of the second fire. While the cause of that blaze is yet to be established, MSPs also learned of the scale of the continuing investigation by the Scottish fire and rescue service, which has only just gained access to the building, and were told that Police Scotland still had 70 witnesses to interview.
In a submission to the committee, the former GSA director Tom Inns, who resigned 10 days ago, suggested any rebuild of the Mack could be taken out of the hands of the art school management and overseen by a trust.
Gray, who would not be drawn on the reasons for his resignation, described this as a “minority view”, saying there was “no debate” that the Mack would be rebuilt as a working art school.
Asked towards the end of the session by the committee chair, Joan McAlpine, if she had any regrets after Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s iconic building was hit by two consecutive fires, Gray said: “We keep asking ourselves, could we have done this better? Is there something we missed? Is there a lesson we can learn to take forward? So we are very self-critical.
“I don’t have any regrets about the process, I have massive regrets that these things have happened – but no, I can’t in all conscience say that I would have done anything differently.”
