I knew it was bad but not this bad. It’s early afternoon, about 1.30pm, and I’m standing in the middle of the road to take a picture. I can stand in the middle of the road to take a picture because there’s no traffic, none at all. No cars, hardly any people, shuttered shops, and Christmas decorations no one’s bothered to take down. Dear God, what have they done to this place?

Some things are familiar. The freezing cold wind that’s trying to find a gap in my scarf. The seagulls that are trying to find scraps of food; one of them is giving me the evil eye from his perch on a graffiti-covered fence in front of empty shops. One side of the road is completely closed off because, we’re told, there are ambitious plans for a market, shops, and a “sunlit seating area” for outdoor events. Sunlit seating area? In Aberdeen? Wise up min.

The main problem is there’s no one here, or virtually no one, and nowhere much to go. At the bottom of the street, the department store Esslemont & Macintosh is derelict and shut, along with Fraser’s, John Lewis and Debenhams (M&S is also shutting). In the doorway of an empty shop, a guy offers a paper cup for coins and further down, a guy with a bottle in his back pocket slugs from another bottle in his hand. I’ve got to be honest: a lot of the people who are hanging about have clearly started early on the substances that keep them going. Some shops are open, like the very fine Annie Mo’s. But where are the people to spend money in them?

Some of the issues on this street are not unique – like everywhere else, shopping has shifted from Union Street to online – but the custodians of this once quite grand place, the council, have made it worse. First, they built malls that drained the lifeblood away; now they’ve introduced bus gates that make driving anywhere around Union Street tricky or expensive or both. Before I set off, my mother issues me with an apocalyptic list of streets I must not use under any........

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