Just a few weeks into my term as council leader, I shared my concern that Glasgow’s city centre was not everything that it could or should be.
Speaking at a conference on inclusive growth, I said the heart of our city was too reliant on shops and shiny offices. It was far from poor, but it could be so much more.
Crucially, I felt it was still too vulnerable to the kind of economic shocks that had set Glasgow back so harshly in the decades before.
I have to say, I drew a fair amount of criticism for it.
However, instead of asking “who’s to blame?”, as the headline for Alison Rowat’s column in The Herald did, the council and its partners were already focused on a different question: “what do we need to do next?”
It is the question that led us to create a Connectivity Commission that set us on the path to the creation of a Clyde Metro; recruit a City Urbanist to lead an independent Place Commission; create a City Centre Living residential strategy; beat competition from across the UK to bring Channel 4 to the city centre, and turn the much-loved but desperately under-employed Kelvin Hall into a film and television studio.
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And it is why we created a public-private City Centre Taskforce, co-chaired by Chamber of Commerce chief executive Stuart Patrick and councillor Angus Millar, which is overseeing delivery of a comprehensive City Centre Action Plan.
From investment in cleansing and maintenance of the city centre, to lobbying for enhanced powers from government, city partners are taking a determinedly practical and strategic approach to building a city centre that can better weather the impact of shocks and events that are beyond our control.
Global investors and event organisers, including the Cycling World Championships which continues until August 13, and Banksy which runs to the end of the month, continue to bank big on Glasgow as a vibrant, exciting city that’s working to face its challenges head on.
Looking around the city centre reveals the huge scale of development activity – and the investor confidence that underpins it.
Footfall in the evenings and at weekends is now reported to be around 20% ahead of pre-pandemic levels.
Overall, spending in the city centre is nearly 25% ahead of where it was pre-pandemic. What we are seeing, however, is a shift away from general retail towards food and drink.
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And, while those footfall figures show people rediscovering the joys of a good night-out, people have been slower to return to the city centre during the day, Monday to Friday.
Clearly, that tends to suggest pandemic hangover, with fewer people travelling to the office every day – but, I think, it also illustrates how over-reliant Glasgow’s centre had been on its transient, 9-5 population.
The loss of any city business will always be a cause for sadness and some reflection – and there’s no question that the hospitality industry throughout the UK is suffering badly, with unprecedented inflation in food and fuel costs coming hard on the heels of the pandemic.
However, bromidic nostalgia for a city centre that was set up to fail will only take us so far – and almost certainly in the wrong direction.
The evidence is that Glasgow’s city centre is far from in decline, as Alison Rowat inferred. What it is – and what it must be – is in transition.
The experience of the pandemic confirmed what many of us already understood: that the most resilient city centres are those that are also neighbourhoods for residents; that have a broad mix of uses of space and buildings; that are home to an innovation economy; and where people can walk, wheel, sit and mingle freely and safely in streets that are not choked by traffic and pollution.
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That’s the kind of city centre Glasgow is already in the process of becoming.
Retail will remain an important part of Glasgow’s city centre economy, but we need to work with a sector that is in flux, to rediscover a sustainable future for it in the city.
We can already see that emerging through hugely ambitious, multi-billion pound redevelopments proposed by the owners of the Buchanan Galleries and St Enoch Centre – which will not only replace these dated urban malls with a much more vibrant mix of retail, residential, leisure and other uses, but will restore active on-street frontage and sections of Glasgow’s historic street grid that were destroyed when they were built.
This “de-malling” is something we are seeing happen in cities across the world, but Glasgow’s can be particularly transformative. More importantly, these investments are a huge vote of confidence by the private sector in the immediate and long-term future of Glasgow city centre.
They will also contribute to an ongoing repopulation of a city centre that has the lowest residential population of any of our UK comparators.
Bringing people back to live in the heart of Glasgow may be the single most important thing we can do to secure its vibrant, resilient future.
Here too, we can find opportunities in our challenges: the council has created a strategy for the repurposing of 400 former office buildings. And while we work to find new life for old buildings, developments across the city centre are creating new, environmentally sustainable Grade A office buildings that will meet the needs of the hybrid working era.
The redevelopment by Bruntwood Sci-Tech of the “People Make Glasgow” Met Tower as a space for the kinds of businesses that are emerging from the neighbouring Glasgow City Innovation District shows what’s possible when imagination is applied to our thinking about what a city centre can be for.
Glasgow city centre is Scotland’s single most important economic space, supporting 170,000 jobs. It deserves properly informed analysis and discussion about its problems, successes and future potential.
And – rather than bemoaning of the loss of a past that is not, in any case, in anyone’s interests to recreate – it needs champions and partners with the imagination and forward vision to build an economically, culturally and environmentally sustainable and resilient city centre, for residents, visitors and businesses alike.
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