“Glasgow city centre seems to be dying,” says Anne Gibb, perched on a stone bollard on Sauchiehall Street, watching the Christmas shoppers hustle by. Ahead of her, the human stream parted around yet another segment of the precinct that had been fenced off as contractors dug up paving.
“At one time you could have spent hours here,” says Gibb, casting a look around to the dark and vacant premises of once-thriving stores such as BHS and Marks & Spencer. “But now half the shops are empty and there’s nothing to replace them.”
Hers is a familiar refrain from visitors to Glasgow city centre in recent years, dismayed at the gap sites, stalled renovations and streets overlooked by empty windows of abandoned upper office spaces.
The decline in footfall and rise in online shopping, accelerated by the pandemic, has hit hard, while the rapid inflation in construction costs and interest rates means that much-needed residential conversions have stalled.
With the city celebrating its 850th anniversary in 2025 and hosting the – albeit slimmed down – Commonwealth Games the year after, there’s a galvanising awareness that global media will again be focused on the city.
Last year began with what some considered a clarion call and others a provocation when the writer, critic and former editor of the Architects’ Journal Rory Olcayto published a searing essay on the state of the city. His central thesis was that Glasgow’s much-vaunted reinvention from 80s post-industrial decline to 90s and noughties cultural and commercial contender had ground to a near-halt.
“Glasgow itself doesn’t know what it’s for,” says Olcayto now. “Glasgow needs to think like a global city once again. At the moment it feels more like a wayward town.”
Without a champion, he argues, the city has been overshadowed by London and Edinburgh, falling far from its position as a vibrant world city in the Victorian era – an expansion powered by the slave trade, as Glasgow has begun to acknowledge. It is meanwhile “leached on” by the rest of Scotland: Olcayto points out how residents of wealthier suburbs around the city do not pay a penny towards its upkeep in council tax.
Examples of this “lack of ambition” are everywhere, says Olcayto, who spent more than 30 years living and working in and around Glasgow. Take the Egyptian Halls, the vast A-listed commercial space designed by Alexander “Greek” Thomson opposite Central station. It has lain empty for 15 years and is shrouded in grubby scaffolding.
There are pockets of redevelopment along the River Clyde, including the newly opened Govan-Partick Bridge, “but not enough and it’s not joined up”, says Olcayto. Major cultural centres such as the Lighthouse and the Centre for Contemporary Arts are mothballed, while the Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building remains a burnt-out shell, a decade on from when it was first damaged by fire.
“We’ve seen too many world-class buildings left to rot and then be demolished in Glasgow,” Olcayto says. “The art school should be at the centre of a regeneration plan for the city centre, its rebuild serving as an inspiration for a new retrofit culture in the city that would lead the world in the reuse of existing buildings.”
Many such buildings make up the visibly crumbling Victorian heritage of the former UK City of Architecture and Design. Last year, Historic Environment Scotland added a further 43 buildings to its “at risk” register, taking the total to 143.
“This stretches much further back than the pandemic or austerity,” says Niall Murphy, the director of Glasgow City Heritage Trust. “It’s the legacy of de-industrialisation and depopulation in the 1960s and 70s. You get these border zones, and particularly to the south of the city centre, like the area around Bridge Street, where the urban clearance of the notorious Gorbals moved out around 90,000 people. We have these grand buildings, built to last, that don’t have a purpose any more.”
With many of these buildings under multiple – or elusive – ownership – Murphy wants to develop “a culture of building maintenance” across the city: a requirement to carry out five-yearly surveys, for example, as happens in New York and cities around Europe.
Murphy is mindful of the city council’s deal-funded Avenues project, which aims to transform the streetscape and is responsible for the current upheaval in Sauchiehall Street. “If we want to increase the city centre’s population we need to improve its amenity,” he says.
Ruari Kelly, Glasgow city council’s convener for housing and built heritage, says the city centre is still adapting to “a new reality” post-pandemic. Kelly heads the Built Heritage Commission, established last year with the express purpose of managing and restoring the city’s vacant and derelict properties.
As well as short-term interventions – such as removing buddleia across the city, one of the main culprits in damage to heritage buildings – the commission will lobby UK and Scottish governments on funding and legislative change.
Kelly welcomes Glasgow’s 850th anniversary as a means to “focus minds”. He says: “For me, 2025 has to be a year of urgency. I will be pushing council officers, owners and politicians to move as quickly as we can, because lots of these buildings don’t have time to wait.”
