Different Aspects of Glasgow. Part One. Laurieston/ Tradeston District. October 2024.

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Like any town or city there will be old and new not far away from each other. Rich and poor districts existing side by side, expanding or contracting over the years and decades with boom or bust economies and changing lifestyles/ technology having an influence. No other bus ride I've taken over the last ten years however showed this change so completely. 

Clyde Street Waterfront. As Scotland's largest city and the UK's 4th largest, I think Glasgow could do far better than this for a prized riverside location. It never used to look as bad as this.... I only noticed it going like this during the Covid pandemic lockdowns. This section at least has murals but mostly it's just run down and depressingly messy. Not a good look for the city. I found myself wondering what visiting tourists think of it? Compare this with Liverpool's vibrant and popular Docklands area. Another post industrial city but one getting it right. I did hear on TV there are plans to refurbish Argyle Street and Clyde Street/ the waterfront... but for the present time it looks like this. Judging by the number of city centre hotels though, Glasgow still gets loads of tourists with numerous conferences occurring ( The International Interpol Intelligence gathering conference with the UK PM in Glasgow has just ended and The Commonwealth Games may well take place in Glasgow in the near future.)

The Riverboat Casino beside the Clyde Walkway.

Which highlights the downside of everyone aspiring to be a Banksy. Very few will make it as professional artists or make any kind of a living at it but everyone wants to leave a tag at least. From the 1960s to the 1990s in Glasgow most of the graffiti was largely confined to the outlying council estates ( where I lived) but now it seems to have made a retro comeback, like vinyl records,  not in the estates but right in the city centre itself, for some reason.

Despite being very close to modern buildings, billion pound investment centres, posh hotels, and other brand new infrastructure.... (Barclays Bank newly constructed plaza seen here.) Graffiti is widespread along the riverfront... on both banks.

Same place, same spot, just turning around to face the city centre district. 

Same place, same spot again, trying not to get knocked down by bikes racing past. Glasgow's International Financial Services District, just a stones throw from nearby Tradeston. I travelled into Glasgow City Centre in mid October 2024. I've thought for a long time that Argyle Street from Glasgow Cross to Anderston looked run down and grubby ( despite being a major shopping street and still busy) with the nearby Clyde Street, Glasgow's waterfront, a graffiti strewn mess for years. despite a few good murals standing out from the general squalor of the place. Part of the blame lies with online shopping, as it's easier to do that than take a bus to visit city centre shops. For the first time, wandering round, I thought that tourists might be better off staying in the hotels around Finnieston and visiting  Glasgow's West End instead, ie ...Byres Road and Partick. Not as hectic, not as many e- bikes to avoid, hardly any graffiti, loads of good museums etc. They could take a bus or train into Glasgow City Centre just as easily from there for day trips. It's only a few stops away. Five minutes travel. 

Bridge Street demolition. I've known about Clyde Street and the River Clyde waterfront for several years now but crossing Glasgow Bridge on the 38 bus was an altogether different experience...... as that was even worse. Maybe many UK city centres look like this now... I don't know.. I don't get around as much as I used to... but I was pretty shocked at the change. Laurieston i.e. Bridge Street and Eglinton Street were never upmarket places but they look fairly desperate now. 

Bridge Street  has been closed for many months now and the buses get diverted around it. Loads of rubbish and squalor in plain sight yet still many small businesses surviving here.

 Tradeston, Glasgow's original trading estate district does not have much of a resident local population being a warehouse/ cash and carry/incoming entrepreneur network of streets but I'd imagine you could work here and if successful, as the owner, live in upmarket areas further out. 

It's probably very quiet and deserted at night once the workforce departs, hence the extreme levels of graffiti... but I've never seen it as bad as this before.  

You could say it's an area in transition at the moment. Given the massive Barclays Bank complex is really close to here the eventual plan is maybe to gentrify this district, knocking down the older stuff and rebuilding with office towers and completely modern infrastructure.... but that could take years.

Meanwhile it looks like this....

As the 38 bus to Woodfarm trundled slowly along Eglinton Street I was amazed at the decline.

Not sure if this row of shops is closed for good or only temporarily but it does look unused. Looking at Google street map cameras for summer 2024 some were still open then.... and not as much graffiti on the shutters.

Confession time. When I left school in the early 1970s I got a job down here as a young apprentice so I've witnessed three different sets of housing stock rise and fall in this area. Tradeston/ Gorbals. One early memory was working in a tenement street, houses built late 1800s early 1900s, the housing stock of the 1930s razor kings of old Glasgow, when up and coming hard guys would carry open razors for fighting in the streets as depicted  in the 1935 tabloid best seller  No Mean City. Only thing I caught in that old tenement though was fleas, dozens of them hungry for a meal, as we were renovating an empty block of flats, recently vacated. As this was a fairly regular occurrence then in the old tenements and the building trade my gaffer had a quick solution to the problem. " Buy Keating's flea powder Son. That will kill them fast." That night on the way home I bought a packet and sprinkled it between my bed sheets, intrigued by the illustrations of all kinds of dead bugs meeting their end after coming into contact at the merest whiff of the powder. It could have been DDT or arsenic for all I knew back then as I'd never had bugs before that point but it did the trick. Now, with google and curious to find out I looked it up.

https://www.terahertz.co.uk/tk-instruments/history

Not thought about this product for 40 years. Glad to find out it was only a plant extract after sprinkling it inside my bed on several occasions. Now they build satellites for space exploration.  I got fleas on five different occasions so I was a repeat buyer of the stuff. It didn't happen often but it was just one occupational hazard back then of working in old buildings. But I much preferred that to working indoors in an office. My gaffer lived out past Hamilton so he used to drop me at bus stops wherever we were working that day and I made my own way back to Nitshill from there. Once from East Kilbride, Several times from Wishaw, Motherwell, Kirkintilloch, Airdrie etc. It sometimes took me 2 hours or more to get home at night. In the winter months a long cold slog in the dark. I had to carry a torch just to see bus stop information and street names. A tough education of working life yet I enjoyed it. Exploring different towns and cities has been a lifelong passion for me. Always on a tight budget though. Later in my early 20s it gave me the confidence to start exploring London on my own, the biggest urban prize of all in the UK. I did that in my spare time over five years. Not every district... just the most interesting parts.

Another memory of working in that period, early 1970s, was working on the top floor of an old, mostly empty, 4 level tenement in the Gorbals, 10 below with snow everywhere. It was freezing in the empty rooms, several cracked/ broken windows so my gaffer noticed some thrown away furniture in the back court and sent me down to get it. We soon had a fire going in the living room fireplace which raised the temperature enough so that we could feel our fingers again, working with metal tools in our hands all day. At lunch, sitting round our fire, we read some of the 1950s newspapers from under the lino we'd saved, always more interesting than current news stories. Spread down by the tenants moving in for both cheap insulation and to cover any bumps that might poke up into the lino. No central heating then, only coal fires and ice forming in the sink in hard winters. Minus ten was fairly common back then. One annoying habit my gaffer had though was going to a cheap transport cafe near the Gorbals if we were working in houses nearby. It was frequented back then by down and outs putting methylated spirits in their cups of breakfast tea so the strong smell of that often put me off my roll and sausage, even though it was good value and tasty. I don't imagine methylated spirit drinkers lived very long as that unhealthy practice seems to have died out nowadays.

An old electricity power station at St Andrew's Cross. I think it used to have tall chimneys decades ago, now long gone, but still a power hub in part of this building.

 Old YMCA building. St Andrew's Cross. Glasgow. A detail.

Same YMCA building. Eglinton Toll/ St Andrew's Cross. In decades gone by this used to be a busy population hub and meeting place. A notable convergence. Not so much nowadays. This is looking towards Shawlands.

The Star Bar. Eglinton Toll. Exact same location but looking towards Tradeston/ Glasgow City Centre.

The old Plaza Ballroom. Now converted into flats with only the low red sandstone frontage retained.

Unusual box style apartments at Eglinton Toll... to be continued....