St Enoch Centre will not be demolished, the new director confirmed. This is a mistake, writes Herald columnist Marissa MacWhirter.

In the disconcerting stretch between Christmas and New Year, I find myself spending a lot of time in and around shopping malls. Whether it's browsing sales, going to the cinema or for food, this liminal time of year always pulls me to these liminal places.

Shopping centres around the world have collapsed into a non-place, an in-between where, by and large, the restaurants are the same, the temperature is the same, and everything is neatly controlled by invisible hands working in back rooms and a secret network of hallways between units.

Most of them were once anchored by department stores that no longer exist. Where they once formed the destination at the end of a corridor, many shopping malls now have these strange paths to nowhere, the looming vacant units boarded off, the shops that lead to them dwindling.

This past year, I spent a lot of time reporting on shopping malls and town centres, but nowhere captures this liminal quality of shopping centres as severely as St Enoch Centre in Glasgow. It was Scotland’s first major indoor shopping mall, built on top of the remains of the St Enoch Railway Station in the late 1980s. When Margaret Thatcher cut the ribbon in February 1990, its massive glass roof was considered the largest in Europe.

You get the best view of this giant greenhouse of consumption from the rear, but these days the consensus is that the back of St Enoch Centre is a no-go zone. It’s dangerous. The imposing........

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