Tongland was (and sometimes still is) a local nickname for the area of Calton, Glasgow controlled in the 1960s by a violent Scottish teenage gang called the Tongs.
Tongland appears in Gillies MacKinnon's 1995 movie Small Faces, set in the 1960s.[1] The Tongs' and other gangs' power over the area and their decline in the 1970s is described in Janey Godley's 2005 autobiography Handstands in the Dark.[2]
The phrase and widespread local graffiti "Tongs Ya Bass" arguably became Glasgow’s unofficial motto in the Sixties and Seventies.[3] The Tongs financed themselves by levying protection money on local shops and were marking out their territory with this graffiti.
Its legendary origin was in an East-End cinema near Fielden Street[4] where some of the gang were watching the 1961 Hammer film The Terror of the Tongs about the Chinese secret society. There McCabe shouted out 'Tongs ya Bas' for the very first time and later renamed himself Terror McCabe.
Virtual world OSGrid has a virtual Tongland in a creation of the streets of a post-apocalypse Glasgow.