It’s hard to believe really that Ricky Bell, the new boss of Glasgow Council, is only the second leader of the city to be appointed from the Scottish National Party because it feels like they’ve been in charge far longer than that, doesn’t it: years and years, ages and ages, aeons, since before time, like Manwe, or Jadis, or Leto Atreides the Second or something. Whatever: an awfully long time.

But we should give the guy a chance, so let me tell you about an encounter I had with him and what it might say about his view of Glasgow and his new responsibilities. Mr Bell is a councillor for Govan and he and I spoke just as plans for a new park down by the docks were taking shape. The old pump house there – which features prominently in the war film 1917 – is pretty much the only thing left on the site and the idea is to restore it as part of wider plans to lay out the area as a small park, with money from the Scottish Government, the Lottery and the council.

I walked round the place with Mr Bell just as the initial work was coming to an end and it was impressive. There’s obviously a reason the makers of 1917 chose the place to represent the ruined desolation of the Western Front, but the project managers have done a brilliant job in reclaiming part of it, creating a big area where public events can be held, and reclaiming all the old cobbles that were lying around to create a new path through the site. If the cobbles could speak, they’d say: what took you so long?

The plans for the area have not been entirely without controversy – development in Govan and other areas like it will always attract concerns about gentrification and rightly so – but it was encouraging to hear what Mr Bell had to say when I asked him about the subject. There’s a balance to be struck, he said, between gentrification and........

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