Tongland was a local nickname

Nickname

A nickname is "a usually familiar or humorous but sometimes pointed or cruel name given to a person or place, as a supposedly appropriate replacement for or addition to the proper name.", or a name similar in origin and pronunciation from the original name....

 for the area of Calton, Glasgow

Calton, Glasgow

Calton is a district in the Scottish city of Glasgow. The name Calton is derived from the Gaelic "coillduin", which means "wood on the hill". It is situated north of the River Clyde, and just to the east of the city centre...

 controlled in the 1960s by a violent Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 teenage gang

Gang

A gang is a group of people who, through the organization, formation, and establishment of an assemblage, share a common identity. In current usage it typically denotes a criminal organization or else a criminal affiliation. In early usage, the word gang referred to a group of workmen...

 called the Tongs.

Tongland appears in Gillies MacKinnon

Gillies MacKinnon

Gillies MacKinnon is a Scottish film director and writer.His film credits include Hideous Kinky, Small Faces and Regeneration.-Personal life:...

's 1995 movie Small Faces

Small Faces (film)

Small Faces is a Scottish film directed by Gillies MacKinnon about gangs, specifically the Tongs, in 1960s Glasgow. It stars Iain Robertson, Joseph McFadden, Steven Duffy, Kevin McKidd, Laura Fraser, Mark McConnochie, Clare Higgins, Garry Sweeney and Alastair Galbraith.The film was produced in...

, set in the 1960s. The Tongs' and other gangs' power over the area and their decline in the 1970s is described in Janey Godley

Janey Godley

Janey Godley is a British stand-up comedian and writer. Her autobiography, Handstands in the Dark, was a UK Top Ten bestseller and she was a 2006 Scotswoman of The Year finalist...

's 2005 autobiography

Autobiography

An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

 Handstands in the Dark.

The phrase and widespread local graffiti

Graffiti

Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....

 "Tongs Ya Bass" arguably became Glasgow’s unofficial motto in the Sixties and Seventies. 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 where some of the gang were watching the 1961 Hammer film The Terror of the Tongs

The Terror of the Tongs

The Terror of the Tongs is a Hammer Film starring Geoffrey Toone, Christopher Lee and Yvonne Monlaur.The film is a quasi-remake of Hammer's Stranglers of Bombay from 1959...

 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

Virtual world

A virtual world is an online community that takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. The term has become largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of...

OSGrid has a virtual Tongland in a creation of the streets of a post-apocalypse Glasgow.