Change is afoot at John Lewis in Glasgow. Is it a sign of better things to come, asks Mark Smith

It’s not easy when you see your life – or a large chunk of it anyway – being torn apart by bulldozers and cranes and crushers. I spent 20 years at The Herald’s old offices on Renfield Street in Glasgow so it was a bit of shock to see the building being demolished the other day. Up there, where the tangled strips of steel are, is the spot where our desks used to be. I send a picture of it to an old colleague. “Wreckage of my career,” he says.

He says something else as well that sticks with me, about how short the life of a modern building is. The Renfield Street office is less than 30 years old, but that’s the way it is now: many modern buildings are put up with the expectation they’ll be taken down again in 25 years or thereabouts and so it has proved with The Herald building. Surrounded as it is by some fine examples of Georgian and Victorian Glasgow, it does feel wasteful, reckless, wrong.

But I walk down the road a bit and there it is again: the Buchanan Galleries shopping centre, opened 27 years ago, which in retail years is 107. There were plans recently to pull the place down and start again, and it almost happened, but we’re now getting a redevelopment and ‘modernisation’ instead that’ll start in the summer. Meet me here in 20 years to see it happening all over again.

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