Take a look. Take a look at the excavators and the dump trucks, and the piles of bricks and sand, and the posters showing us what it might look like when it’s finished: warm sun on the faces of smiling people in an imagined future. But take a look too at what the place is now, because these are the streets that lay bare Glasgow’s crisis and the extent of the problems that need fixed. I walk round and think: I don’t know how we’re going to do this.

There’s three streets I want to talk about specifically because they’re at the heart of a plan that’s just been published by Glasgow City Council. The plan is for the area south of the river between the Sheriff Court at one end and the train lines at the other and ending near Bridge Street subway; it’s the north part of the area known as Laurieston and don’t you forget it. I was chatting to locals in the pub once and mistakenly referred to a part of Laurieston as The Gorbals and they put me right in no uncertain terms: the two areas may be bosom buddies but the lines between the two are clear and passionately protected.

The plan of action for the area has been drawn up by the council because it’s badly needed. Glasgow has been bedevilled by fire and neglect, and other things, and nowhere more so than in Laurieston. The India Building on Bridge Street was pulled down in 2024 after part of it collapsed and a large part of the already neglected Georgian terraces round the corner on Carlton Place are in a seriously bad way after a fire the same year. Bridge Street and Carlton Place are two of the streets I want to talk about, the other is South Portland Street, because there we have the problems, and the potential, concentrated into a few ramshackle roads.

I say ramshackle, but it’s worse than that. While drawing up its........

© Herald Scotland