GLASGOW HAS LONG HAD a reputation as a ‘hard city’ with a particularly masculine image. While this image of rugged masculinities was forged in the context of working-class labour amid the potent mixture of industrialism, migration and urbanisation that founded modern Glasgow, it has also often been associated with social problems such as male interpersonal violence, ill health and high mortality. In cultural representations, these forms of masculinity are frequently combined in the figure of the ‘hard man’ or ‘gemmie’, a working-class figure who displays an attitude of fearlessness, of violent defiance, and of fighting his corner against all odds. Nowhere is this manifestation of Glasgow masculinity more apparent than in representations of the youth ‘gang’. From H. Kingsley Long's rewriting of Alexander McArthur's Gorbals notebooks as No Mean City (1935), through to Peter Mullan's semi-autobiographical film NEDS: Non-Educated Delinquents (2010), images of Glaswegian masculinity have been interwoven with images of the gang, oscillating between fact and fiction, past and present. As the historian Andrew Davies has pointed out, No Mean City ‘cemented’ Glasgow's reputation as the gang city of Britain, while the ghost of its main protagonist, the fictional ‘Razor King’ Johnnie Stark, arguably continues to haunt it. Like the ‘urban legends’ that surround Glasgow youth gangs more generally, depictions of the city frequently collapse representation and reality.

This chapter seeks to unite historical and sociological perspectives in excavating the lived experiences of everyday masculinities and violence that lie behind this persistent image, while interrogating popular representations of the ‘hard city’. Investigating the historical relationship between gangs and masculinities in Glasgow has the potential to illuminate understandings not only of this specific context, but the contingent relationships between history, culture and geography in the patterning of Scottish masculinities more broadly.