Is this the way to breathe new life into Glasgow?

The people they left behind lived beside the yards and factories where they worked. And when these industries were deemed obsolete they were simply discarded. None of them had ever been paid enough to dream of moving west. The empty shop-fronts and derelict spaces that currently disfigure Sauchiehall Street have been a fact of life east and north of the city centre for several decades.

As these neighbourhoods withered the city tribunes and their planners, it seemed, began creating physical barriers to marginalise them further. Thus, the M8 was driven through them, cutting them off from the heart of Glasgow. The M77 was bulldozed through Pollok on the south side to shorten the distance from home to office for Newton Mearns residents.

Yet, as parts of the city centre have been engulfed in the white heat of on-line shopping and the actual heat of devastating fires, those places long neglected are undergoing a re-birth. In the north, the Sighthill Bridge over the M8 has re-connected Springburn, Milton and Barmulloch to the city centre.

The planners, perhaps as an act of contrition for the misdeeds of the 60s and 70s, are now seeking to make the built environment more handsome and fit for human existence. South of the river, a new Gorbals has arisen from Sir Basil Spence’s concrete dystopia.

Yesterday, a mile or so east of the city centre, there was another significant moment in this renewal. The old B-listed sheds of Glasgow meat market between Duke Street and the Gallowgate in the Calton district were formally handed over to the trust charged with transforming this area. It forms the second phase in year three of a major development already beginning to breathe new life to an area long characterised by post-industrial dilapidation.

The old meat market between Duke Street and the Gallowgate (Image: free)

What marks all of these developments are the astonishing improvement in the quality of the affordable and social housing. Once, when the slums were being cleared, the planners and officials simply herded the urban refugees into concrete blocks on a build-them-cheap-stack them-high basis, as though they were packing comestibles on supermarket shelves. Then they awarded themselves bonuses and civic honours for having “improved” the lives of these citizens, all of whom would surely be grateful at having hot running water, inside toilets and proper insulation.

The real built heritage of Glasgow is interred in the old east end monuments that can still be observed by those who care to look. They were constructed to supply the needs of the communities that formed around them. They also reflected the challenges of daily life here.

They stand in rude contrast to the west end’s built finery which arose largely to prettify the chi-chi caprices of its residents: fake mansions, clothes shops and fine steepled churches of a kind that always cling to neighbourhoods such as these.

Running alongside the remains of the old meat market is the Duke Street hospital. Further along is the site of the former Duke Street prison, the toughest jail in Scotland, where the most violent men (and some women) were sent for execution. Like now, most of them would have been traumatised by the effects of multi-deprivation and economic inequality.

When the meat market was built in 1871, Glasgow was beginning to exhibit the extremes that capitalism bequeaths: wealth for a few merchants on the back of a population explosion and a high infant mortality rate where up to half of all children in some of these communities died before the age of five.

As the meat market grew, thousands of farm workers poured into the city looking for work during the summer months. Happily, some of the sandstone walls and arches that bounded the market have been preserved to provide a connection between Glasgow old and new.

Some of the new housing developments in Calton and Bridgeton have won architectural awards. They’ve been designed, it seems, on a model far removed from the spartan utilitarianism of the 1950s and 1960s. They reflect the radical idea that perhaps working-class and poor people can have taste and aspirations too.

The social history of the meat-market tracks the changing lives of those who worked there or lived beside it. The B-listed cattle sheds housed the cattle-pens – a perverse reflection of the over-crowding in the nearby buildings where humans were forced to live.

In 1919, after the First World War, they were briefly re-fashioned as military barracks for 10,000 soldiers and several tanks. They were intended to quell the threatened unrest arising from thousands of men returning from war and finding no jobs. Union demands to shorten the working week to allow more scope for employment were refused; the 40-Hour Strike began and thousands headed to George Square for a rally.

The soldiers now billeted at the meat-market were an apt metaphor. Working class men have always been used as canon-fodder in Britain’s wars of empire; now they were actually being deployed in places where animal fodder gathered before being slaughtered.

The gates and wall at the west of the meat-market and abattoir are also protected. Incredibly, the old iron coats-of-arms are still there. James, an elderly gent who’d stopped to enquire as to the purpose of my loitering, suggested that Glasgow City Council needs to remove them.

“It’s tempting fate to keep them up. There’s so much good work being done around here and it would be a tragedy if someone came along and half-inched them. Can you media types no’ get someone to restore them,” he asks. “You’re absolutely spot-on,” I reply. So, over to you, Susan Aitken; how about it now?

He was a child when the meat market was rebuilt in 1970 to become an abattoir and then a car auction and dealership. It had ceased trading in 2001 after the foot-and-mouth outbreak. In another act of civic hooliganism it was demolished in 2007, save for the arches and entrance gates now forming the curlicues of the smart new housing developments.

James then tells me of some darker moments when the derelict abattoir was used for its original purpose as local gangland feuds were brought to a bloody conclusion. He also recalls the time when cow made a break for it in the 1960s and led a police chase down Duke Street.

The 25-year pre-lease of the meat market agreed this week will enable completion of a plan that will truly transform this area. At its centre will be a walkway from Duke Street, over the railway towards the meat market sheds, now re-purposed to house a community sports hub, affordable office space and some shops.

Councillor Ruairi Kelly, convener for neighbourhood assets and services at Glasgow City Council, said: “The Meat Market project is transforming a site in the East End that had lain vacant for 20 years, and recent progress has been remarkable in the shape of the building of new affordable homes there.

“The work that the Meat Market Heritage Trust will do will further this transformation, improving the environment for the local community and visitors, and bringing new life and opportunities to the historic sheds and superintendent’s house.”

The 500 or so affordable and social homes which will gather around it also carry the promise of addressing another city centre problem: how to bring people into the heart of the city.

It takes less than half an hour to walk directly into Central Station from here. From the Gorbals it’s even shorter, while the Sighthill Bridge is already ferrying north-Glasgow residents directly into Queen Street and George Square. Perhaps the task of re-populating the heart of Glasgow has already begun.