You didn’t ask but here’s my story: I moved to Glasgow in the 1990s and my first thought was: this rain, is it normal? I lived in Finnieston before it was trendy then Shawlands before it was expensive, but it was all good to me: I love the city and if I could officially be a Glaswegian rather than an Aberdonian I would, even though real Glaswegians tell me I’ve got a nerve thinking I could ever become one of them. Are they having a laugh or are they starting a fight? (The doubt is another reason I love this place).

In recent years though – and you may know what I’m about to say here – I’ve struggled a bit. The state of George Square. The state of Sauchiehall Street. The Art School in flames. The loss of building after building after building. Sometimes it’s hard to love a place when others seem intent of making it worse or at least doing little to stop it. I still love Glasgow. But look at the scars.

Part of the problem, I think, has been the fact Glasgow has a very small population in its centre. The death of the high street – most obvious in our poor friend Sauchiehall Street – and then the pandemic also accelerated the problem. A great city should buzz and tingle after-hours but in the evenings the centre of Glasgow can in parts feel empty and lifeless, partly because no one is actually living there.

But good news: people are moving back. According to figures released by the council the other day, the number of people living in the centre has risen by a third in the past decade or so. In 2011, there were some 21,200 but now it’s 28,300. It’s also expected that the city centre population will continue to grow and that by 2029-30 it will hit around 34,600. This is all good stuff.

Is it enough though? The council has a “city centre living strategy” with the target of increasing the residential population to 40,000 by 2035 and that’s all well and good. But as the MSP Paul Sweeney points out, compared to other cities, Glasgow’s target lacks ambition; Manchester, for example, is aiming to have 100,000 living in its centre by 2026. Mr Sweeney also points out that 150,000 would bring Glasgow back to the same population density as London, but it would still be lower than Paris or Barcelona. We must up the pace, he says, and he’s right.

The potential problems with achieving that kind of target are obvious. For a start, Glasgow’s great exodus to the suburbs and the estates and the new towns in the 60s and 70s can feel like an irreversible trend; people like it out there and there’s the added bonus of getting to use all of Glasgow’s facilities without having to pay for any of it in their council tax. Result!

Some of the ways in which Glasgow has been developed in recent years have also worked against people moving to the centre. The potential of the riverside, for example, is woefully under-developed although there have been a few good signs recently: the new flats on the Broomielaw and the apartments in Govan near the new swing bridge. We also still have some way to go to overcome the mindset that the centre of Glasgow is for shopping rather than living (see Buchanan Galleries and the St Enoch Centre).

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There’s deeper stuff at work too. Listening to residents of Merchant City talking at their community council the other day, I was struck by the difference between the ideal of living in the centre – close to the shops and the pubs and city life – and the reality. Some of the residents talked about constantly finding used needles in the street and being harassed by people on drugs and the litter and the graffiti and the noise. A lot of it’s linked to poverty - and Glasgow isn’t to blame for its poverty - but it can create problems out on the streets.

All of these factors – the decay, the decline, the neglect, the social problems – probably explain why, of the people who do live in the centre of Glasgow, few of them are older. The most recent figures show that people aged 16-44 make up around 81% of Glasgow city centre’s population, with those aged 45 and over making up only 15%. Not only that, the people moving in would also appear to be younger, with the 16-44 population up significantly on ten years ago.

Some of this is understandable – when you get older, you want peace and quiet – but we’re also hopefully sowing the first seeds of progress here. Most of the growth in the city centre population is among young people and that’s fine and projects like the students flats on the site of the old M&S on Sauchiehall Street will encourage the trend further. When you’re younger, peace and quiet is the last thing you want so let’s go for it.

But the longer-term solution lies in a more mixed approach. Student flats are fine – more than that: they’re good, we need them. But moving only younger people into the centre of Glasgow, and encouraging the trend by mainly building student flats, is unlikely to create the sort of mixed communities that work best. The tenement in Shawlands I lived in when I was in my twenties was the ideal mix of ages and classes and circumstances and it worked for that reason. Communities mixed by age, class and circumstances are the way to go.

What this means for Glasgow is that it will need to look beyond big blocks of student flats if it is to boost its city-centre population in a positive and sustainable way. Changing the old M&S on Sauchiehall Street into flats is a good idea because the big shops aren’t coming back. But one of the reasons Paris and Barcelona have big city-centre populations is that they have apartments in the centre for all kinds of people not just students and young people. So why not encourage developers to look at other parts of Sauchiehall Street for different kinds of homes, for families and older people and professionals? Combined with Garnethill, it has the makings of a very attractive place to live.

(Image: Colin Mearns)

Obviously for such a change to happen, it will require a change of mindset from Glaswegians as well, because developers will only build if people want to buy. I must say there’s something a bit depressing about the succession of people who can’t see further than Jordanhill or Clarkston or all those other places that are perfectly nice but, let’s face it, not worth the money. In the future, a revitalised and refashioned city centre could be an alternative, but it’ll need some vision to make it happen.

Blythswood would be a good place to start I think. Like other parts of the city centre, it’s been pretty neglected in recent years but there are also signs of hope such as the flats springing up on Holland Street. Imagine as well the old townhouses on St Vincent Street, for years shabby offices, being turned back into houses. Wouldn’t that be good? Can’t you imagine yourself living there? I can, if I could afford it. And I like to think, whether I’ll ever be a true Glaswegian or not, that I would do it too.