In this episode I speak to my good friend and all-round Glasgow legend Keira McLean. Keira is an artist, tutor and co-runner of RDW Glass (along with Rich Welsh), who make exquisite stained glass windows, often with a distinctly Socialist twist. Keira makes zines, runs workshops in communities, and has produced some incredible artworks celebrating Glasgow’s left-wing tradition.
Her latest venture, a thrilling piece of workers theatre called The Fire That Never Went Out, is currently in the works — you can read about it here in the Glasgow Times, and we discuss the play as an ongoing work in progress, in dialogue with working class communities around Scotland, and the country’s long socialist tradition.
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Reading recommendations from Keira McLean
We start out by talking about Keira’s work with stained glass. At RDW she teaches workshops in the community to spread knowledge and skills about the artform. She also goes out into communities when a new installation is commissioned, working with them to make something that will represent key scenes or figures from that community’s past and traditions.
You can see examples of her work online, including Scotland’s only stained glass window celebrating the miners strike of the 1980s in Kincardine, a work celebrating the life and ideas of Stuart Christie, a Scottish anarchist writer and publisher; a window at art space Platform Easterhouse celebrating the culture of the local schemes; a piece telling the story of socialist organiser and educator John Maclean at Pollokshaws Library, and a window at Glasgow’s Woodside Library highlighting the contributions of Scotland’s suffragettes, focused on lesser-known and forgotten women who campaigned for their rights. We talk about some of these specific works later in the show, and you can see pictures of them on Keira’s Instagram. She also talked to Scottish Indy Pod recently about her work, so if you want to learn more after the episode, watch it here.
It’s fascinating to me that Keira’s work emphasises both the trade and craft of stained glass making, and engages with its history as a form of political and social image-making. As Keira later says, the trade itself is under threat, with fewer and fewer people able to learn how to repair or restore older windows, of which Glasgow has a great many. While conservatorships exist to train new makers, they are often inaccessible to working class people, and there are currently no further education courses.
At the same time, artists like Keira are using their skills to create new works that reject the stuffy traditions of religious and ornamental stained glass in favour of works that connect with the communities in which they are installed, and which tell the story of Scotland’s strong tradition of radical politics. We talk a little about the now-defunct course at Glasgow Clyde College where Keira learned the trade, and her efforts to bring it back. After the show, Keira also pointed me at Michael Donnelly’s definitive history of Glasgow’s stained glass tradition. He was the long term partner of Elspeth King, and worked at the People’s Palace alongside her. The book is called Glasgow’s Stained Glass: Making the Colours Sing, and can be downloaded here for free.
Read here about the Glasgow Museums collection of stained glass from the 1900s, when the city was a world leader in the art and production of these works. Keira mentions the windows in Glasgow’s Cottiers, a former church turned events venue, as a particularly breathtaking example of the work from this era. She also mentions Harry Clark’s work at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, and the windows in Glasgow’s City Chambers. Importantly, she sees stained glass as an architectural form of art, something site-specific that speaks to the buildings and communities in which it is installed. It’s this belief that led her to the practice of creating community-led installations for which she has become known. As Keira says: “Stained glass doesn’t belong in a gallery, it belongs to the city… It’s a storytelling medium.”
We briefly talk about Keira’s uncle Jack McLean, a celebrated Glasgow journalist and trade unionist who had a big influence on her outlook and politics, along with her Communist parents. You can read McLean’s obituary here to learn more. She mentions some other key figures in Scotland’s radical tradition including William Gallacher, a trade unionist and politician, Labour politician Mary Barbour, and activist and organiser Helen Crawfurd — one of the feminist figures and suffragettes depicted in Keira’s window for Woodside Library, along with Jessie M. Soga, one of the only documented people of colour involved in Glasgow’s campaigns for universal suffrage.
Some of these figures, and others, are mentioned in Kenny MacAskill’s excellent book Glasgow 1919, about the history and politics of Glasgow’s ‘Red Clydeside’. Later, Keira also mentions the left-wing uprising in 1919 that saw tanks deployed in Glasgow’s town square, as detailed in Tanks on the Streets? The Battle of George Square, 1919 by Louise Heren and Gordon Barclay.
From there, we start to talk about the Craigallan fire, the subject of Keira’s new venture as a practitioner of workers’ theatre. She mentions Bob Grieve, a town planner and professor who became a ‘fire sitter’ at Craigallan. The fire, which legend says was kept burning for twenty years until the start of World War II, was a gathering-place for young people and left-wing activists during the depression, embodying a tradition that goes back deep into Scotland’s roots as a storytelling and outdoors culture. Her play The Fire That Never Went Out tells the story of the Craigallan fire, and examines its relevance for an age that has arguably lost touch with its folk traditions, and its radical history.
Keira mentions a few other key influences on her approach to making art, including seminal industrial band Test Department, and theatre-makers 7:84. We also talk about S.C.U.D. (the Society for Crushing Useless Dick), a zine Keira and I worked on together (which sadly has no online footprint), inspired by the work of Valerie Solanas. You can hear more about my fascination with Solanas in a recent essay for my Crisis Masculinity project. We talk about the resurgence of DIY zine-making culture in Scotland, centred around Glasgow Zine Library, and how this could feed into reclaiming some of our agency and identity back from the online world of clout-chasing and social media.
After the break we talk more about The Fire That Never Went Out. Keira tells the story of the Craigallan fire, situated at the start of the West Highland Way, and how her participation-led approach to the play’s creation has helped shape the production through community workshops and collaboration with local people, and artists like Doctur Normul, a talented Glasgow singer-songwriter. You can watch one of her performances below, with backing from Becci Wallace, courtesy of our friends over at You Call That Radio.
We talk about ‘workers theatre’, which has a strong tradition in Glasgow. Keira mentions Ena Lamont Stuart’s Men Should Weep, first staged in 1947. The show was later revived by 1970s Scottish theatre collective 7:84, established by playwright John McGrath, and Elizabeth and David MacLennan. Read more about the genesis of 7:84 here. Glasgow was also home to other radical and working class theatre groups in the 1970s, including TAG Theatre, based at the Citizens Theatre, and Borderline Theatre, who platformed an early-career Billy Connolly.
These companies, and others like them, took the radical step of depicting authentic working class lives and experiences — something Keira’s work seeks to restore and revive. Keira mentions John McGrath’s manifesto about workers theatre and what it could achieve, A Good Night Out, as a key influence on her approach, along with Peter Brooks’ book The Empty Room. She also mentions the great Italian playwright Dario Fo, who used humour to talk about class politics and working class culture.
All of this fed into the creation of The Fire That Never Went Out, and the formation of the Red Flag Players, alongside other artists and writers like Joey Simons and filmmaker Caireen Stewart. They will showcase some of their work in progress at the next Glasgow International Festival. As Keira says, the Craigallan fire was a place where anarchists, Communists and socialists would meet to talk about revolution, and escape the predations of poverty.
These fireside radicals were involved in the creation of the Carbeth Hutter’s community, led by socialist organiser and Citizens Theatre chairman William Ferris, where returning soldiers from the first world war were granted camping rights. The huts went on to become a place where working class people could come to enjoy the countryside and escape the cities, championed by figures such as mountaineer Jock Nimlin and broadcaster Tom Weir (of Weir’s Way fame), both of whom acted as ‘fire-sitters’ at Craigallan. Keira’s play asks the question, could we have a Craigallan fire today? What would that look like?
Keira talks about the more familiar approach to community engagement by publicly-funded artists and collectives, which tends towards an exctractivist approach, pillaging the stories of a local area or local people to produce bourgeois art for middle-class audiences. This is akin to the approach to community outreach that Darren McGarvey describes in his best-selling book Poverty Safari, which won the Orwell Prize in 2018. We talk a little about how and why the current public funding landscape means middle-class gatekeepers keep working class artists out of the theatre, galleries, and other arts sectors. Keira feels strongly that working class practitioners shouldn’t be required to assimilate into this middle-class cultural space. As she says, quoting Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
We finish by talking about a few more writers, organisers and activists that have inspired Keira’s work. She briefly namechecks John Berger and Slavoj Žižek, but her main recommendations are all drawn from Glasgow’s radical history — past, present and future. She mentions Ian Montague, editor of radical newspaper The Voice. She also praises John Miller and his wife Mary Miller, activists and ‘libertarian theologists’ from Glasgow’s Castlemilk area.
Keira talks about activist Cathy McCormack, author of The Wee Yellow Butterfly; Castlemilk anarchist activist John Cooper and his wife Carol Cooper; and Carol Craig’s book The Tears That Made the Clyde, which shines a light on the poverty and depredation still present in Glasgow’s working class communities. More about the Coopers, and other key figures from Glasgow’s radical past, can be found in the Spirit of Revolt Archive at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library. She also mentions her volunteer work with Living Rent, supporting people in insecure housing in the Glasgow area, and the 2021 Kenmure Street protest that successfully stopped an immigration raid, and which is the subject of a new film.
Huge thanks to Keira for an illuminating conversation. I definitely learned a lot about Glasgow’s history from listening to her, and I hope you did too. We need a hundred Keiras, a thousand, if we’re going to make it through the next few decades. If you’re listening in Scotland, watch out for productions and showcases of The Fire That Never Went Out near you very soon.
Next up: Alasdair Maloney’s Caledonian Gothic
My next guest is theatre-maker, rapper, spoken word artist and podcaster Alasdair Maloney. Together, we were members of early-aughts performance trio Chemical Poets, and alternative music collective Black Lantern Clan.
Since then, Ali has produced acclaimed works for the stage, including Hydronomicon (with Strange Exiles theme creator Asthmatic Astronaut), and the long-running Edinburgh scratch night Anatomy.
He returned last month with the long-awaited season 2 of his horror podcast Caledonian Gothic, combining his love of horror with the rich tradition of Scottish folklore, and more eldritch, Lovecraftian themes. You can listen to the first episode below, and read more about the show at Ginger Nuts of Horror.
See you in a few weeks! Take care of each other.
— Bram E. Gieben, Glasgow, April 2026
