IN Britain not very long ago it was considered funny when describing scenes of urban decay to compare them ruefully with grim-looking places in communist-era Eastern Europe. If the citizens of these maligned places were ever minded to retaliate large swathes of Glasgow’s crumbling city centre would be an appropriate place to start.
The news that Sauchiehall Street is to lose its flagship Marks & Spencer store will leave Glasgow’s most iconic street looking threadbare and derelict: a monument to a wholesale failure of imagination and creativity by a local authority that has failed in its primary duty of care to this beautiful old boulevard.
Marks & Spencer opened in 1935 and in an era when Sauchiehall Street was Scotland’s busiest and most important commercial thoroughfare. The firm’s bosses have cited a suite of factors that have become familiar in recent years as other UK High Street giants have taken drastic action to re-calibrate their businesses in the on-line, digital era. But the fact that the terrain immediately surrounding their Sauchiehall Street store now resembles a knacker’s yard will have made their decision easier.
Further down and across a dank pedestrian precinct, the decaying husk of what used to be BHS lies empty and in an accelerated state of disrepair. This store, which also looks onto Renfield Street and Bath Street, ceased trading seven years ago. It had once literally formed the entrance to the retail heart of Sauchiehall Street but has lately come to represent a cemetery gateway. Everywhere you look along this street are the graves of the fallen.
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