I’m in the Gorbals and the first person I bump into is Monica from New York. She’s visiting Scotland for a while and has come for a wander round the area and as it happens I can tell her she’s standing outside – possibly, potentially, we’ll see – the best building in Scotland. She has a look at it, takes it all in, and tells me she’s “not sure”. Me neither.

Let me walk you round it. Sitting just behind Gorbals library by one of the main roads through the south side, it’s a block of 31 flats, all for social rent, and from the back it’s pretty unremarkable apart from roofs that pitch down towards the middle. The frame-style construction is also pretty normal but it’s clad with light sandstone brick facades, which is a good idea: bricks withstand the Glasgow weather better than the horrible white rendering that was popular in the 80s and 90s.

Now let’s look at the front of the building, which is much more promising. Here we’re faced with what looks like a succession of pillars and is it just me, or are there vibes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, those monolith things built by an unseen extraterrestrial intelligence? The angles are also tricksy and a little unsettling in a good way: are the towers the same height, do they face the same way? They push forward for attention, like sibling rivals.

So do I like it? Yes, I do, I think, and I like it even more when I think about where it is. We all know what happened to the Gorbals in the 60s: middle-class planners and architects pointed to it on the map and ordered the bulldozers in and the people out, to the big new estates and the new towns. Looking back now, we can see it was the wrong decision and it meant that for a long time the Gorbals was a bleak, deconstructed place. In some ways, it lost its sense of place altogether, because you need things and stuff to make a place and the things and the stuff had gone.

More recently however, there’s been a real effort to recreate the sense of place in the Gorbals and some of the architecture has been inventive and good. There’s also been an effort to build around squares and parks that mean it feels very different to those place-less housing estates that people drive to every day after work. There’s also a healthy high street through the middle of the Gorbals that has a library and a butcher and a deli and a second-hand bookshop. It’s good.

The new Gorbals flats, called North Gate, sit right at the end of that high street and, although the project’s been done on a budget, you call tell its designers, Page/Park the architects, have taken a bit of inspiration from Glasgow’s sandstone tenements and also tried to learn from the mistakes of the 80s (let’s not do the 80s again eh?) Page/Park are also responsible for another of the excellent developments in the area, opposite the Citz, where they’ve incorporated a beautiful tenement, the very last survivor in the Gorbals, into a more modern development. Take a look. It works.

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But could the North Gate flats really be the best building in Scotland? We learned this week they’ve been nominated with four others for the 2024 Andrew Doolan Best Building in Scotland Award but look at some of its rivals. The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh (a beautiful building and always my first choice for a place to work when I’m in the city). Also the Burrell Collection (I’m slightly embarrassed to admit this, but I love that building so much it inspired me to take up sketching again – I just sat down and drew it.) Can you see the North Gate flats winning over those two? Don’t think so.

I’m not being mean about the building here: as I say, I like it and so did Monica from New York when we talked a bit more about the history of the Gorbals and what it’s been through and the effort that’s being made to rebuild it. And, if we’re being honest, a lot of Scotland’s social housing stock is ugly and utilitarian and these new Gorbals flats prove that it doesn’t have to be that way. It also consciously blurs the distinction between public and private housing: no one can tell the difference any more, which is a good thing.

(Image: The rear of the flats)

Having said all that, I wish the designers, the architects, the planners were pushing things a little bit more. Some of the best of the recent work in the Gorbals incorporates colour, and metalwork, and sculpture to create surprising little artistic moments all over the place (my favourite: the pineapple bollards). It’s inspired by the past but not stuck in it; it also seems to be trying to give the Gorbals a new connectable identity – we can never go back to the tenements, so why not try something new? Judged by those rules, the North Gate flats are good, and likeable, but perhaps not quite as radical as they could have been.

It strikes me too, as I walk round the area, that there’s still more work to be done. I walk over to the Greek Thomson church on Caledonia Road. Check out the pictures of how it used to be, surrounded by tenements, and you’ll probably get all nostalgic and melancholy. But try thinking instead about how it could be, incorporated, like the last tenement in the Gorbals, into something new and modern and different. I think I can see it in my mind’s eye. But I’m wondering who has the power, and the will, to make it happen.