On the 40th anniversary of the first episode of Taggart, The Herald got the cast and crew together for pictures and there was only really one choice for the location: down at the docks in Glasgow, in amongst the wreckage and the rubble, the weeds, the crumbling brickwork, and the dark and deadly water. It was exactly the sort of place where Taggart and his team used to find bodies, or bits of them, before heading off to search the streets and alleys and pubs of Glasgow for the killer. It was a formula that made the series one of the greatest detective shows ever made, and it was beloved, and still is.

But look around the place now. The spot where the Taggart cast and crew gathered for the pictures only three years ago, on Clydebrae Street in Govan, is totally different. The rubble’s been cleared away, the weeds have been pulled up and a new park has been constructed. There’s also a plan to turn the old pump house on the site into a cafe and build 300 new homes on the waterside. When it’s finished, it’ll be a very different place indeed. DCI Taggart would hardly recognise it.

As it happens, I saw one of the Taggarts that was filmed in this part of the city on telly the other night and it too demonstrates how much Glasgow can change, and how rapidly. The episode was called Root of Evil and was set during the Garden Festival in 1988; it opens with a grumpy Taggart being forced to look at crocuses when he’d rather be looking at corpses, and captures the mad few months when the dockside was turned into a festival of art and flowers and food and primary colours. The whole thing was put up in a matter of months, and pulled down even quicker, with barely a sign that it was ever there and it’s now the site of the science centre, the BBC, and new flats, with plans for more.

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