A problem I encountered all summer was trying to stay on a budget while realistically not being able to spend all day in the park.

For all the effort of corralling friends, packing the blanket and the cheap badminton set, and selecting picky bits from the M&S garage, after a few hours, someone needs a toilet.

From where we usually sit, that means decamping to the Queen’s Park Café on Victoria Road. So, you waddle over there, wait in the queue snaking around unimpressed regulars, feel a moral obligation to buy a pint, and then suddenly the park seems a lot less desirable than a pub with a toilet.

Alone with a book, the same problem arises. It feels like the park has a natural cover time, like it’s asking for my table back after two hours. This is supposed to be a public space, but I don’t find it genuinely accessible to the public. Sure, nobody charged me to enter its iron gates, but being a fully public park means being able to linger there – and that requires a bit of infrastructure.

For me, this is a small inconvenience. For a parent with a small child, a pensioner, or someone managing a health condition, the lack of facilities determines how long this “public” space is available to them. Glasgow’s own public-toilet strategy acknowledges this: in a consultation of almost 2,000 people, about 95 per cent said the city did not have enough public toilets.

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Can Queen’s Park Glasshouse actually be saved? Here’s what the numbers say

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