Over the years numerous visitors came to Glenrothes from all over the UK and abroad to see at first hand how an artist could be fully employed in the development of a town. As well as other artists many of these were staff or councillors from other towns, old and new, and I was subsequently invited to visit several towns in the UK to advise them on the setting up of similar artist positions. Livingston, East Kilbride, Stevenage, Rochdale, Peterborough and Northampton were among some of the towns which proceeded to employ artists, often using the term 'Town Artist'.

In 1981 the Australia Council invited me to undertake a two month lecture tour of Australia. The request was to lecture mainly on the 'Glenrothes experience' as well as other topics like artist/architect/planner collaborations and community arts in the UK. I visited all the major cities, and much more besides, giving talks to planning department staffs and professional associations, councillors and aldermen, arts bodies and groups, artists, schools of art and architecture and the general public. The organisation, and the publicity, by the Australia Council for my trip was extremely thorough and audiences were high throughout the tour. I arrived in Darwin and then spent a week or so in each town; Alice Springs, (taking in a visit to Uluru - Ayers Rock as was, a present from the council, coincidentally it was my birthday the day I climbed the rock), Brisbane, Sydney, (including suburban towns) Canberra, Melbourne, Launceston/Tasmania, Adelaide and Perth. I spent two weeks in Bowral, NSW, as the only non-Australian at a 'training workshop' for artists from all disciplines selected for their work in social settings and community groups. It was without doubt the most expertly organised and themed workshop I have ever experienced. The programme of the tour was extremely full and I think by Adelaide and Perth I was beginning to feel the strain. Some days would consist of lectures or meetings in the morning, afternoon and evening, at each being lavished by Australian hospitality a feature of the visit I have never forgotten. It was Andrea Hull (now Principal of the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne) of the council who extended the invitation and Deborah Mills who organised the details of the visit, both impressive and charismatic people. Undeniably I saw Australia through 'rose-coloured spectacles.' I never really met that right- wing 'okker' Australia that is so much part of the character of the place. I was met and handed on each time to even more wonderfully sympathetic artists, art officers and art lovers who showed me immense generosity. I was impressed by the active, radical cultural activities of the unions and town councils. I subsequently read in some Australian publication a reference to the time before David Harding's visit and the time after it. The notion of the Town Artist certainly interested a number of town councils resulting in the employment of artists though not as far as I can gather on quite the same basis as I had experienced in Glenrothes.

After eight years with Glenrothes I began to feel that I needed to move on. I had for two or three years been a part-time consultant to the Department of Environmental Improvement of Glasgow City Council. Later the city, with the Scottish Development Agency, set up, along the lines of a new town development corporation, the Glasgow East Area Renewal - GEAR. I proposed directly to it that they should employ me as an artist. This time I proposed that I be employed as an artist/planner contracted and paid at the same level as the planners and architects. GEAR was very interested and we got as far as letters of exchange and very close to signing a contract when it all fell through. Glasgow City Council had heard about it and had objected to the appointment. Its argument was that art and employing an artist were outside of GEAR's area of responsibility. The city council claimed that only it dealt with these matters. I was very disappointed as I felt that I had created a position which would have been even more ground-breaking than that of the Town Artist in Glenrothes. Art could have been built in to the renewal process at the very beginning and given a level of importance in such processes it had hitherto not achieved, even in Glenrothes. From my experience there, I had learned that when an artist is on the inside of planning and architecture one can achieve things that are impossible to do from the outside. Most of the towns that took up the idea of the Town Artist failed to realise this point and employed the artists in departments of leisure, recreation, culture, etc., from where the artists had to struggle, often without success, to make things happen.

In September 1976 I organised an exhibition entitled, 'Building People Art'. It was housed in a large, new, empty, office space in the town centre. Part of the aim of the exhibition was to take stock of the work to date and to open it up to a wider public. It was not however an exhibition of the many public art works in the town. Its aim was more subtle and complex. It aimed to show the integration of the artist with the society of Glenrothes as a whole; how it evoked responses from the various professional disciplines, the building site workers and the people of the community; how it had influenced similar activities elsewhere in this country and abroad. It included working drawings, photographs, models, maquettes and six 8' x 4' tables topped in clear perspex under which were dozens of letters from people here and abroad, internal memos, small sketches from notebooks and a myriad other bits and pieces all of which attempted to show how the works came about and what response there had been to the whole notion of a town employing artists. Two excellent photographers, residents of the town, Aase and Peter Goldsmith, had committed themselves to a long term project of not only photographing the finished art works on site but also often, of the process of making them. These superb photographs, some in very large format, contributed much to the exhibition. The touchstone to the exhibition was expressed in a poem by Bertolt Brecht, 'About the Way to Construct Enduring Works.' It was suggested to me by Douglas Eadie, the writer/filmmaker, who had stayed at the 'writer's cottage'. When his year was over he and his family moved into a house in the town staying for a number of years. He made a film about the poet William Soutar using Balbirnie House as a location. Later Douglas wrote a film treatment on the story of the town artist in Glenrothes. But in the end it was shelved as the money to make it could not be raised. It is worth quoting from Brecht's poem at some length. As Douglas had perceived, it seemed to sum up my attitude to my work in the town. Its provocative thoughts have remained with me and shaped my work since.