I blame Stanley Kubrick for most of my deepest fears: computers, corridors, patterned carpets, twins, eye drops, axes, cow’s milk, Tom Cruise, and underpasses. The first time I saw A Clockwork Orange in the 1980s – on a dodgy VHS, far too young – the droogs laying into the tramp in the underpass with their sticks and fists and feet turned me ice-cold and still does. I wonder too if it was then that hawe really started to think of skyscrapers and flyovers and pedestrian walkways not as places of the future and change but as places of danger and threat; the modernist dream, killed by Kubrick.

Whatever the explanation, the urban underpass is still a nervy kind of place for a lot of us, somewhere to avoid or hurry through, the last remnant of the age when pedestrians were told they were going to have to play second fiddle to cars. Over the years, in some places, there have been various attempts to rehabilitate the underpass and cheer them up with lights and paint and murals, but it’s all been doomed in the end, a losing battle against brutalism; the dread persists.

The latest effort in Glasgow has been the underpass by the subway station at Cowcaddens, which I pass through often, if I can bear the Kubrickian dread. The last time I was there, a group of guys were going at the walls with spray cans and another group in high-vis vests was supervising them. It was an example of “official” graffiti, one of Glasgow’s “graffiti wall” experiments, the idea being that a sanctioned place might reduce the unsanctioned stuff or change how we see it. In council speak: “by identifying spaces as graffiti walls, we anticipate improved quality of graffiti practice and artwork with enhanced public awareness and appreciation of graffiti culture.”

It hasn’t quite........

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