Small Finds #1
The Mitchell Carpets
At the darkest time of year, when spirits are low and days short and the colours of spring seem far away, I like to go to the Mitchell Library and spend a while looking at the carpets.
They can be seen on floors two through to five of this elegant Glasgow building. Actually, ‘seen’ is the wrong verb. Better to say ‘experienced’ or, depending on your taste, ‘endured’. They help keep the library quiet, deadening footsteps, but are themselves the loudest thing in the place. They are psychedelic; a happening, a trip.
On my most recent visit I counted eight designs. The stair carpet – a bubbling red and black – gave the impression that a volcano had erupted somewhere above and was flowing down through the building. Low sun slanted in the windows of the Reading Room and made the celtic knots on the carpet glow. It was the coldest day of winter. Everyone seemed glad of the free heat. An old man dozed in front of a computer, waking every few minutes to sing gently along with The Dubliners on YouTube. A young woman in a hijab, laying down her mat in an alcove near the lifts, bent and rose in prayer.
Made in the late 1970s by Hugh Mackay & Co, a Durham firm, the carpets cost £203,991.70. The designer, name unknown, must take their place alongside the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece and other anonymous geniuses of art history.
The patterns grow more intense as you ascend. On the fourth floor, if the kaleidoscopic swirl of gold and orange Paisley pattern is not sufficiently eye-watering, you need only walk a few paces to find yourself on a carpet that brings to mind crop circles or Neolithic spirals. That bronze statue on the Mitchell’s copper dome has it easy, squinting into the rising sun. Pity the retinas of the poor staff, who must work in perpetual noon. It’s no place, I’m told, to have a hangover.
Given that they were laid more than forty years ago, and have since been walked upon by millions of library users, the carpets appear in remarkable condition. As a librarian once sighed, ‘They’re gonnae outlive us all.’
The Mitchell is a wonderful place, and the cult of the carpets is part of what makes it so. I wonder how many people, weavesdroppers like me, visit the library not to look something up, but to look down in dazzlement and delight?
Many thanks to Dawn Vallance, principal librarian at the Mitchell, for welcoming me to the library and talking with me about the carpets.
When I was a library school student in Sheffield our class was taken to see the new Mitchell extension as part of a Scottish field trip. This was Easter 1980. The carpets were down but the shelves weren’t yet in, so you can imagine that the patterns were even more dazzling! The pride in them was almost palpable. At the time I had no thought of ever living in Glasgow, still less that I’d be walking over the same carpets 40+ years later.
Weavesdropper! A classic.