Please bear with me while I rant on about a property development adjacent to the Diary Towers in the West End of Glasgow. Honest it is not a case of Nimby - Not in My Back Yard.
It is a case of Nimfy - Not in My Front yard. Glasgow City Council are anxious to fill in as many gap sites as possible before the 1999 UK City of Architecture and Design and one of these holes, to be filled at great speed, is a wee bit of ground bordering the River Kelvin in Otago Street.
I admit it is a great personal sadness that the three-storey block of flats will cut out the light from the aforementioned Diary Towers, much to the distress of the clematis in the front garden. Possibly more distressing is the fact that this edifice will block out the view of the excellent Landsdowne Church and St Mary's Piskie Cathedral spires on the Great Western Road.
Let me trouble you further with some planning detail. The site was previously occupied by Hubbard's Bakery. When it was built in Edwardian times, capitalists had a sense of place, a sense of architecture. The frontage for this building which produced humble scones and loaves of bread was constructed in the style of a Venetian palace. The building had to be demolished some a decade or two ago because of subsidence. A property developer was quick on the scene, as they are in the West End of Glasgow. Flats would be built on the land. The planning department decreed that the original Venetian-style facade be recreated. The developers agreed.
Those developers then sold on the land to Beazer Homes but the commitment to retain the facade somehow got lost. The plan now is for a concrete structure with yellow brick-style facing. Not even real yellow brick but a kind of stick-on almost-brick facade.
But the most heinous crime, if you will bear some more local detail, is the developer's plan for Otago Lane which abuts the development site. It is a small backwater of the West End with some shops and mews flats which hark back to the 1960s. There is Kenneth Chapelle, repairer of antique clocks; Voltaire and Rousseau, the eclectic bookshop; a bric-a-brac emporium; a record shop; and guys who play guitar a lot. What the lane also has is original cobbles which have been there since the days that Hubbard's bakery's horse-drawn carts delivered the morning rolls.
The planners and developers have decided in their infinite wisdom that the cobbles be covered in tarmac to make it easier for the purchasers of these yellow-brick flats to get their BMWs and four-wheel drives down the lane and into the underground car park.
We cannot stop the developers building their yellow-brick monstrosity in time for Glasgow's glorious year as City of Very Few Gap Sites. But there is still time to save the cobbles. Architects and developers appear able to concrete over with impunity our green ground and our very sky.
It surely would not be too much to ask to spare a stretch of cobbles. George Galloway, the local MP, is never slow to man the barricades. Quoting a revolutionary from Paris of 1848, George committed himself to the struggle. He said: ''We will fight to the very last cobble.''
While the Diary is in rant mode, we may as well deal with a book called Cafes of Europe. It was written by a chap called Roy Ackerman who is a celebrated restaurateur, bon viveur and television presenter.
''All over Europe,'' he says, ''the discerning are rediscovering the everyday pleasures and atmospheres that are unique to the cafe genre.'' So what great Scottish cafes has Mr Ackerman chosen? The Balmoral in Edinburgh, which we had always thought of as an expensive hotel. The Malmaison brasseries in both Edinburgh and Glasgow which are splendid places for a beer, a coffee, or a meal.
Other places mentioned - the babbity Bowster, the Willow Tea Rooms, the Rogano, and the Gandolfi in Glasgow - are all wonderful in their own way but do not merit the description cafe. Let us nominate a super Scottish cafe. It is Coia's Cafe in the unfashionable Duke Street area of Glasgow.
The Coias, pere et fils, offer the best cappuccino in Scotland. For those that way inclined, they also have a magnificent range of Havana cigars. The queue for their home-made ice-cream speaks for itself. Their food has been described in Peter Irvine's Scotland the Best as the kind of meal you dream about on the plane back from Tenerife. Personally, I think he is talking here about the home-made steak pie. The University Cafe on Glasgow's Byres Road has its devotees, usually former students at Gilmorehill seeking comfort food in the shape of a spaghetti bolognaise and a cup of coffee.
No harm to you, Mr Ackerman, with your homage to cafe society all over Europe. But get yourself along to Coia's in Dennistoun for a real treat.
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