Lunch on Saturday with an old friend. He’s hasn’t been in Glasgow for 20 years so I ask him what he thinks of it now. He makes a face. Not good, he says, more decay, more neglect, more dirt. As someone who hasn’t been in the city for a long time he’s in a good position to judge how it's changed, but I can’t help bristling on behalf of the dear old place anyway. It’s ok for me to slag it off because it’s mine. But it hurts when someone else does it, even when they’re right. Look around: he’s right.

So I tell my friend some of what’s been going on and, having lived all over the UK, he makes the valid point that a lot of what Glasgow’s going through is not unique. Other British cities are facing it too: the decline of the high street, the decline of the 9-to-5 office culture, the economic crisis, the council budgetary crisis. I point out that Glasgow’s city centre population is a fraction of Manchester’s, Liverpool’s, Newcastle’s, hence the empty buildings with no purpose. I point this out between mouthfuls of Stereo’s spaghetti with marinated yuba (very good). Stereo is based in a building designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and even he’s suffered from the neglect and decay.

I then hear that a petition has been started to save Possil train station. The building hasn’t been a station since the 60s and hasn’t been in use since the 90s when it was a bookies and it’s now in a pretty bad way. A campaigner, Andrew Moore, has started the petition partly because his family has fond memories of the place but mainly because the area has lost so much of its original architecture. Andrew says the building is in a state of dangerous neglect and he’s right: it is.

The fact that we’re talking about the building means it’s probably a good time to revisit the list of........

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