If you think you know Byres Road, I recommend you do what I’ve just done and take a stroll along it with Barclay Price. Barclay is an author and historian who’s written a fine new book about the famous Glasgow street and as we walked down it the other day, he kept stopping every few yards to point out something I’d never seen before, or tell me something I didn’t know, some of it fascinating, some of it horrifying to be honest. I thought I knew this place, but didn’t.

The sometimes-violent history of the street was particularly interesting. Barclay told me how, back in the 1960s, a guy in the pub came at him with a hatchet. He also told me about the gangs with exuberant names – the Maryhill Fleet, the Partick Cross Boys – for whom Byres Road was the territorial border. And a little further back in history, he talked about the riots at Curlers pub in the 19th century and the murder in Ruthven Lane and the murder in Ashton Lane. It’s a colourful history, the history of Byres Road, and sometimes the colour is red.

But the more we walked and talked, the more I felt like there was a message to be picked up from the street for people, like me, like you probably, who are worried about the state of Glasgow: the big (suspicious) fires that have broken out, the bulldozers that have moved in, the shutters that have come down, the decay, the neglect, the rubble. I don’t want to exaggerate – there are huge parts of this extraordinary city that are still wonderful and beautiful and well-preserved – but you know what I’m talking about. You can see it.

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Murder, riots, and the missing tenement: hidden story of Byres Road 

What struck me about Byres Road in particular is that in some ways it’s been immune to the changes and in some ways it hasn’t. Down at the bottom of the road, I got talking to Elizabeth Graham who runs the barber shop that’s been in her family for a hundred years. It’s still thriving and has loyal customers but Elizabeth, who’s 63, tells me she’ll be the end of the line. Also: look around this part of Byres Road and you’ll see evidence of the struggling high street – the shutters, the words “to let”; they are here just like anywhere else.

Obviously, Byres Road doesn’t have quite the same problem other high streets do because there’s lots of people around with lots of money, but even here, the idea of a high street sustained only by shops is looking ropey. Cafes and coffee shops probably have a more positive future – just a few doors up from Elizabeth’s shop is University Café which has been here since 1918 – but internet shopping has had its effect on Byres Road like any other place. As with the centre of the city, we’ve got to shift more of these buildings away from commercial to residential; it really is the only solution.

But let’s go to the other end of the road because there are lessons to be learned there too. We think of the West End as a place that pretty much escaped the major road building programme in the early 60s that flattened large parts of the city, but thanks to Barclay’s book, I now know that it was a close-run thing. Standing at the top of Byres Road, he tells me about the proposals that could have made this part of Glasgow feel and look very different indeed.

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Basically, the plan in the 60s was that Great Western Road would become a dual carriageway expressway with no access for traffic from any of the existing side roads. Only a few crossing points for pedestrians would exist and these would be by tunnels running underneath the dual carriageway. However, the existence of the old railway tunnel at the top of Byres Road made a pedestrian tunnel under the road impractical, so instead, it was planned that the new carriageway would rise up and over the existing junction.

When Barclay first told me about all of this, I imagined the plans were scrapped in the end because West Enders were horrified and objected to them, but what Barclay’s research shows is that it wasn’t opposition from locals that put a stop to it but an economic downturn. In other words, it very nearly happened and the top of Byres Road, and Great Western Road, had a lucky escape. You can see how it might have been from other parts of the city that did not escape, like Charing Cross and Kinning Park. Imagine it, and weep.

This was something Barclay and I talked about quite a bit. We discussed how, had he chosen pretty much any other part of Glasgow to write about, the book he produced would have been quite different: it would have been the story of demolition, of destruction, of wipeout. Byres Road may have escaped the planners with a fetish for bulldozers but the lesson is clear over 60 years later: the best city planning preserves and protects what’s there.

There are some signs – but only some – that the lesson is being learned. You may have read some of the pieces I’ve written this year about the Vogue Cinema in Possilpark, which at one point was under a serious threat of demolition. However, thanks to the furore that campaigners such as the architect Alan Dunlop kicked up, it’s now been listed. It’s a reminder that even in areas like Possilpark and Springburn that have been devastated over the last 40 or 50 years, demolition and destruction is still a threat.

As Alan Dunlop has pointed out, keeping old buildings like the cinema and converting them into other uses including housing needn’t be complicated or expensive; in the case of the Vogue, the housing could sit behind the art deco façade and you’d have a place to live that would be like nothing else in the city. You can see something similar in Govan where in the area to the south of the bridge the planners have introduced some new housing that compliments and blends in with the fine buildings that are already there. It’s how it should be done. More please.

(Image: University Cafe)

What’s the message of it all? It is, I think, that the parts of Glasgow that have been saved or are still working, or have been developed relatively sensitively – the new Govan bridge, the Vogue cinema in Possilpark, Byres Road – demonstrate that we create new buildings as well as preserve Glasgow’s built heritage. We can do both.

For example: Barclay and I had a good look at the new university buildings that have gone up at the bottom of Byres Road on the site of the old Western Infirmary and on the whole they’re good: there’s a bit of flair, the materials are appropriate for a city where it’s always raining, and we haven’t flattened good historical buildings to make way for the new.

The concern is though, that had Barclay and I gone to almost any other part of Glasgow, the picture would not be so positive. In other words, my worry is that we’re still not learning the lessons of the past. My worry, as we head back up Byres Road, is that the message still isn’t getting through.

A History of Glasgow’s Byres Road by Barclay Price is published by Stenlake and is available at stenlake.co.uk or from bookshops.