What Does ‘No Mean City’ Mean?

‘No mean city’ means a city that is not small, poor or insignificant. In Glasgow the phrase is best known as the title of a hard-hitting 1935 novel about the Gorbals slums, but the words themselves come from the Bible, where Saint Paul calls himself ‘a citizen of no mean city’. Over time the phrase became shorthand for Glasgow’s tough, hard-man reputation.

The Bible verse behind the phrase

The words are spoken by Paul the Apostle in the Book of Acts, chapter 21, verse 39, where he introduces himself as ‘a citizen of no mean city’, meaning his home town of Tarsus. Here ‘mean’ carries its older sense of lowly or insignificant, so to call somewhere ‘no mean city’ is a piece of understatement: it is, in fact, a place of real importance.

The 1935 novel

The phrase entered Glasgow legend through No Mean City, published in 1935. It was written by Alexander McArthur, an unemployed Gorbals baker who drew on the life around him, and H. Kingsley Long, a London journalist brought in by the publisher to shape McArthur’s writing into a novel. It tells the story of Johnnie Stark, the ‘Razor King’, who rises and falls in the violent slum underworld of the inter-war Gorbals. The book sold in huge numbers and became one of the most famous, and most argued-over, works ever written about the city. For the wider history of the gangs it drew on, see our page on Glasgow crime.

A reputation the city has fought

For all its success, No Mean City left a lasting mark. It fixed an image of Glasgow as a place of gangs, razors and violence that the city, and the Gorbals in particular, has struggled to shake off ever since. The poverty and the crowded tenements the book described were real enough, but the razor-gang era was already fading by the time it appeared, and the reputation long outlived the reality.