Once upon a time – fifty years or so ago – I went to the movies for the first time. The cinema, a converted cork factory known as the Korky (aka The Ardgowan) was situated on Weir Street, Tradeston. Closed in 1963, it was demolished in 1965. Enchanted by this early experience, ever since I’ve conflated cinema with memory and reality and myth – and the bizarre idea it was somehow connected to me. The film I saw that day was the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) deemed a flop during its first run at the height of the Great Depression.

How an American movie made in the 1930s arrived at a Glasgow picture hall three decades later is lost knowledge but the message of Duck Soup – not least its prescient take on European sabre-rattling – resonated with its Glasgow slum-dwelling audience, whose lives on a good day mirrored the anarchic slapstick played out on screen: loud, fast-lipped extras in an overcrowded monochrome set, politically tuned to the key of socialism but repressed (in script jargon) by external reversals borne of internal weaknesses. The rest is history one might say, if only history didn’t have the nasty habit of repeating itself. Riots? This city wrote the book on it – and a worthy subject for a future blog.

Glasgow, a great filmgoing city, once hosted no less than 180 cinemas and where even a backstreet dive such as the Korky could accommodate an audience of almost 1200. The running joke was only the rats got a free pass. Somehow in my fevered – no doubt false – recollection, the Korky was a flea-bitten salon with wooden benches and a white sheet on a wall passing as a silver screen, a place where two jeely jaurs could secure entry as seen in Bill Douglas’ My Ain Folk (1973). Sadly no photograph of the Korky exists, but an elevation of its facade can be seen on the excellent Scotland’s Cinemas website.

My interest in Glasgow’s picture halls was rekindled recently when invited by Sunny Govan Community Radio to contribute a series of shows. Like the rats of the Korky, I had a free pass so my suggestion of music, movies and memories was welcomed. As it happens, a spit away from Sunny G’s Govan Road HQ stands one of my favourite old haunts and a good example of a purpose-built cinema, The Lyceum, built in 1938 on the site of the old Lyceum Music Hall which, in the fine tradition of so many of the city’s venues caught fire. Its replacement, a sleek Moderne construction of faience tiling and glass brick, was less a temple to the seventh art than a statement of optimism in a place where it was and is most needed.

An alien spacecraft of a building, today The Lyceum still rubs along with its late Victorian and Edwardian red sandstone tenement neighbours. Long vacant, its function as a cinema ceased decades ago and suffered the same fate as so many old picture halls when it became the County Social Club, a bingo hall. My one abiding memory was watching – of all things – an Andy Warhol double bill – Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974) – the kind of adventurous programming that most arthouse cinemas can only dream of today.

Significantly, 1938 was also the year John Brown Shipbuilders launched the Queen Elizabeth on the Clyde and when Glasgow staged the Empire Exhibition.

The last great expo before WW2, the Glasgow Empire Exhibition was the city’s final showcase as an industrial powerhouse and imperial servicing department. Staged in Bellahouston Park, a suburban greenspace bordering the Ibrox, Mosspark and Pollokshields areas of Southside Glasgow, it was the UK’s second Empire Expo after the 1924 Wembley Exhibition.

Principal among the VIPs attending the Empire Exhibition was George VI, subject of the film, The King’s Speech, (2010) starring Colin Firth. Recently I chanced on a Pathe newsreel of the Expo’s opening ceremony and found it oddly moving, less because of Bertie’s evident stammer than the respectful silence of the tens of thousands attending, mainly Glaswegians, an audience to this day cited in countless TV documentaries as the most hostile in the annals of British theatre. Yet in this most theatrical of arenas, as the King made his address, the hush of the crowd lends pathos, a crowd who only two decades earlier had witnessed a previous Majesty’s armed forces deployed against them in George Square. That the film, poorly edited, was never publicly screened speaks to the Establishment’s – and possibly the Monarchy’s – unease over his performance.

A second clip – also unused – features uncut rushes of the Exhibition site but fails to identify the precise event or its location, stating that it is a ‘fairground’ somewhere in ‘Scotland’, a lack of knowledge (or curiosity) that gives London film archivists a bad name.

The most authoritative account of the Expo, The Empire Exhibition of 1938: The Last Durbar, (1988) was written by the late Bob Crampsey, the respected teacher, sports broadcaster and polymath whose meticulous research and delightful reminiscence deserved more than the markdown price I paid in Bargain Books. Crampsey’s book is not mere record of the event, but a portrait of a proud, provincial city emerging from WW1 and inter-war years of depression to a state of optimism, hope even, for a better future.

One of a long line of civic morale boosters, the Exhibition was conceived of as part industrial shopfront and part theme park, simultaneously displaying an invented past in concert with an invented future. As in any theme park, the Pavilions of Bellahouston were both real and unreal in the sense that a film set, however concrete, only serves illusion. Bucolic confections such as An Clachan and The Highland Castle, built as shortbread tin crowd-pleasers, recalled the Victorian reinvention of Scotland that predated Hollywood’s take on the nation in Brigadoon (1954).

Viewed from a 21st century perspective, the audacious modernity of the planning, scale and construction of the site defies its latter day equivalents. Audiences gripped by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) or the Art Deco scenic design of Hollywood movies such as Grand Hotel (1932) believed that one day Glasgow could look like this. Built on the shortest of timelines, for the briefest moment, a small corner of the city fulfilled that dream. Surviving photographs reveal the craft and effort expended, demonstrating that the trades involved could rise to more than the motive of a paypacket – in this case, the pride and ambition required to outdo London, which as now, went largely unremarked in the national media.

Where today can one glimpse what the future might or should have looked like? Yet only three years before the Expo laid its foundations, a spit away from Bellahouston, the City of Glasgow Corporation’s development of social housing, built on the greenbelt site of Mosspark was as removed from the Bauhaus as it gets. In neighbouring Pollok during the 60s-70s, the common hope was that a Mosspark tenant would die, so desirable were these twee cottagey, pitched roofed, four-in-a-block and semis, with their front and back patches of gardens and their ‘bought house’ facades.

Crampsey notes that the summer of 1938 did not favour Glasgow. Heavy rainfall and high winds marred the Pavilions of Bellahouston Park but fortunately the Exhibition boasted its own cinema, only a few hundred yards from another, local cinema – The Mosspark Picture House, hidden in a side street, where as a family we watched the bibical epic The Red Sea (1956) and Disney’s classic The Jungle Book (1967).

At Bellahouston, little of the Exhibition remains. The park’s personality is split between art and sport, as evidenced by the Palace of Art, now devoted to the Sports for Excellence Centre. Behind its stern and dignified pale grey facade, I once ‘danced’ in the title role of Stravinsky’s Firebird in an extracurricular school show, cast less for my balletic chops than my long and unruly red hair. Like many Glasgow landmarks doubling for elsewhere, the Palace of Art also stood in for some Soviet monolith in a BBC drama.

The park’s recent construction, The House for an Art Lover is based on an original Charles Rennie Mackintosh 1901 scheme for a German design competition and was built between 1989 and 2006 – a timescale hardly competing with the construction of the 1938 Exhibition. To the casual observer Mackintosh’s design remains attractive, so it’s sad that in order to survive it flogs itself as an upmarket wedding venue, cafe and gift shop. In direct competition, less than a mile away is Pollok House, managed by the National Trust for Scotland and, judging by the exterior rusting ironwork and leaking roof – only months ago I witnessed antique, leather-bound books ‘left to dry out’ in a public area – the current keepers are not quite managing.

The most visible and iconic symbol of 1938 was the Tait Tower – the Tower of Empire, a 300 foot erect slice of modernity that shortly after the event was deemed an obvious target for Nazi bombers and subsequently razed. The war may have been won but over a half century later, when the Glasgow Science Centre built a tower in hommage to Tait, its 360 degree rotation gearing frequently broke down, suggesting that whatever engineering prowess Glasgow once possessed, like the new tower’s neighbouring bridge, is flawed, perhaps irreperably broken. Fitting then that these days the Science Centre Tower is referred to by Govanites as the Junkie’s Needle.

With this in mind, my last trip to Bellahouston Park was not one I thought I would have to make. In the company of my sister, one bright and breezy day we ventured to the park on a clandestine mission, one of sadness tempered by the humour of our ineptitude. How exactly do you scatter the ashes of your kid brother? A brother who died too young in the most tragic and messy of circumstances in another continent. To cite suicide would be wrong but close enough to the mark, suffice to say drugs – not nice drugs – were a component of his death.

Had he lived in another age, it’s likely that my brother, like my father, would have become an engineer, one of a number of skilled tradesmen who built the ships, factories and power stations that kept everyone else employed. But he wasn’t. Born in 1970, my brother aspired to another, different life that led him to Art School where after five years he pursued a career as a commercial photographer and hoped eventually to become a filmmaker. The reasons he didn’t are the same age-old reasons why anyone who lives long enough may conclude their dream is beyond their reach. Unlike most of us, sadly my brother didn’t live long enough to reconcile himself to what is unobtainable in the short span left to us when the dreams – and the drugs – wear off.

This last photograph is where our brother lies – literally pushing up daisies, an image I’m sure he’d appreciate. At the very least what my sister and I did that day was to put our brother to rest on the site of Tait’s Tower, that ghost building of a future beyond reach. Remains on remains as invisible as Harry Bell’s ancient tracks.

Apologies to my subscribers who got an email alert for this blog entry. I accidently put it up without the accompanying photos. Thanks for your understanding.

Democracy is a lie reads the graffito. As the peoples of North African and Middle Eastern nations voice dissent against their autocratic leaders, I’m caught short by the message sprayed on a wall on a Gorbals side street round the corner from the Citizen’s Theatre. On a biting cold day I pick over the remains of the blowdown of one of the Norfolk Court high-rises and wonder, what would the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya think if they ever washed up in this city?

The world turns but in the Gorbals, as in all provincial post-industrial areas, the legacy of first-world Western democracy is all-too-evident in a city made rich and poor by the shifting fortunes of its industry and the venality and short-termism of its politicians. On Gorbals Street huge mounds left by the demolition are slowly eroding as the debris is shovelled up and transported to provide aggregate and landscaped banks for the M74 Extension currently nearing completion only a few hundred yards away.

Whenever confronted with these great piles of rubble subliminally I reach a pitch of high anxiety, knowing the construction methods employed in Glasgow’s tower blocks involved the liberal use of asbestos as a safeguard against fire. But unlike plutonium or uranium, asbestos has no half life and therefore is arguably more lethal. Did the planners and architects know this when they devised the solution to Glasgow’s slums? And were they aware that these monoliths would stand for only 50 years, a shorter span than the Victorian and Edwardian red and blonde stone tenements they almost replaced?

While making The Devil’s Plantation, I spent a lot of time looking at the city from all angles, aware of the proposed razing of Glasgow’s high rises and its impact on the skyline, a cityscape very different from the one seen in a piece I once made for BBC Television. My programme opened with archive footage from a film made for Glasgow Corporation in 1949 titled Glasgow Today and Tomorrow and directed by Erica Masters to illustrate the Bruce Plan, Glasgow’s version of the Marshall Plan, devised after WW2 to address the city’s housing crisis, said to be the worst in Europe.

There’s something terribly affecting about the film, in particular one sequence featuring architect’s plans and models of a futuristic Glasgow complete with motorways (decades before the M1 was built) and little helicopter type machines, proposed, I believe, in the optimistic spirit of post-WW2 as modes of public transport. Like most civic plans, however, the reconstruction of the city was destined to go the way of the Milngavie Monorail, in that new housing was built then left to deteriorate.

The notion, that the heavy industry that sustained the Empire and two world wars could and would keep Glasgow afloat to the common good and not the privatised military-industrial compact that governs our cherished democracy today was, with hindsight, misguided. Every time I watch Glasgow Today and Tomorrow I feel both sad and angry at my own naivety and ignorance, of how these public information films were pure propaganda. Who watched this film, I wonder? Who was it made for, and what was its real agenda? That I knew the answer all along is of little consolation.

Growing up, my old school, the recently demolished McGill Primary in Pollok, had a room dedicated to the purpose of showing TV, 16mm films and filmstrips, a now-defunct medium harking back to the days of the Magic Lantern. The output of National Film Board of Canada featured high on the programme, usually in the form of wildlife documentaries and oddities such as the life of a lumberjack, where the sight of toppling trees to a young audience incited flashbacks of the demolitions most of us had witnessed prior to moving to the schemes.

With cinema and TV as our major means of escape we devoured these films, eager for any experience that excused us from the grind of reciting times tables and conjugating verbs. The greatest attraction was the ability to sit in a darkened room and dream of other, exotic places, a possibility made attainable by the times we lived in, the last generation since Queen Victoria’s era that governments sought to ship out labour, not for the shoring-up of Empire but to populate its replacement, the Commonwealth, at a time of declining industry at home.

During the 1960s, when the opportunity (some might say expedience) of emigration for the skilled manual workforce was still in play, through our adjoining bedroom wall I often overheard my mother rage at my father on the matter of moving abroad. By the time I sat in that darkened room at McGill in 1970, all bets were off. Films featuring construction work in Sydney or sheep husbandry in New Zealand were as redundant as Clydebank shipbuilders. With the ten pound passage withdrawn and the schemes completed, in my own family’s case as with many others, what resulted was the absence of our fathers, men who for want of a decent wage stood on roadsides waiting for a lift to some distant town, or by train, off to Corby and what was left of steel, or in my father’s case, to transfer his skills from ships to power stations to nuclear plants, nuclear submarines and oil terminals.

By the early 1970s, like so many concrete exclamation marks, Glasgow’s skyline was punctuated with tower blocks, both in the inner city and outlying greenbelt. Not all of the schemes boasted high-rises but those that did displayed little coherence. Blocks appeared on any available gap site with scant regard to the extant buildings or for that matter, planning, as seen in Ibrox, Govan, Maryhill, Cardonald and Anderston. In other areas such as Barmulloch, Sighthill and Castlemilk, Toryglen and the Gorbals, blocks were erected en masse but as per the post-war schemes, local shops, launderettes (washing machines being rare), pubs, cinemas, sports facilities, dancehalls and community centres were an afterthought in that too many instances never materialised.

The Gorbals, arguably the most recognisable area of Glasgow to those outside the city, if more of a psychic construct than an actual place, underwent wholesale redevelopment from the mid-1960s onwards, including the notorious Hutchesontown C. Designed in 1959 by Sir Basil Spence, Hutchie C, also known as the Queen Elizabeth flats, was based on a Le Corbusier model in Marseille, a city with an average 12 hours sunshine in July as opposed to Glasgow, averaging a mere 5 hours in the same month. In the way of all architects, responsibility for the flaws of Sir Basil’s construction was abdicated on completion. From the day in 1965 when the first tenants arrived, claims Sir Basil’s website, the failure of Hutchie C was due to the city council’s lack of maintenance, casually omitting the fact of the city’s higher than UK average rainfall.

That the Spence website features a video of the developments’ blowdown less than 40 years later only concedes the failings of its originator, whose concern for the housewife’s laundry and the building’s hanging gardens paled insignificant against the problems of chronic dampness, child-minding from a 20 storey remove, the feelings of loss and isolation from one’s neighbours and a massive spike in heating bills for those unused to billed heating as opposed to coin-fed meters.

What’s unarguable here is that compared to the privately-rented tenement hovels housing the majority of its citizens, initially Glasgow’s high-rises were desirable dwellings, with heating, bathrooms and usually more than one bedroom. No longer did parents have to sleep in proximity to gas cookers or watch their children play in rat-infested middens or share a single toilet with the family next door. High-rises boasted rubbish chutes, lifts with removable panels designed for the transport of coffins and communal drying areas.

Walking round the Gorbals today is a dislocating experience. In the shadow of the last remaining block of Norfolk Court, I visit the Citizen’s Rose Garden, a rubbish tip by any other name, its benches broken, decades worth of strewn litter and stunted greenery, not a single rose bush in sight. Nearby I spot a sign calling for volunteers to tidy the area, positing the question – whither the Big Society now? For a main thoroughfare, it’s eerily quiet, with virtually no one on the streets and few cars. By the entrance to Norfolk Court, on a metal railing I note a set of modest bouquets, doubtless a tribute to someone’s recent tragedy.

Close to the block a large sign announces a new construction, The Glasgow House, or rather, two low-build houses of traditional, some might say regressive design, examples of what the GHA sees as the future of social housing, eco-friendly perhaps, but occupying a disproportionate footprint compared to that of the neighbouring high-rise. Later I learn that the reported cost of demolishing Norfolk Court is £6m, but whether that sum includes the razing of the last tower is moot.

Passing the earth-movers piling ever-diminishing mounds of debris I pause long enough to take a photograph and catch myself holding my breath. What are those large plastic containers of liquid next to the JCBs, I wonder? For the purpose of damping down the dust, that’s what, I tell myself, perhaps to prevent asbestos fibres from taking root in my lungs. I have no way of knowing, but the thought’s enough to propel me down the road and round the corner to Laurieston Road and the graffito.

Crossing the road I head east towards Caledonia Road when I’m stopped in my tracks by the sight of a double decker bus parked by the high flats. On closer inspection it turns out to be a mobile church, the Salt and Light which, according to its signage is bringing the presence of God to the hurting people of Glasgow. I talk to three women stood smoking outside and ask them if this is a regular occurrence. Aye, comes the reply, it comes every Thursday, adding, why don’t you go in and have a cup of tea? They tell me that Salt and Light is run by some ‘nice young people’. But with my camera weighing heavily in my hand, I feel like an intruder, so decline their kind invitation. What I don’t ask is whether these women feel they are hurting, or if the church requires hurting as a condition of entry. I’m troubled because it feels patronising and wrong for any church to assume that the people of the Gorbals are somehow more hurting than those living in Hyndland, say, or Newton Mearns and therefore more deserving of their ministry.

Retreating, I wander into the heart of the two tower blocks between Lonsdale View and Crown Street. Apart from the ever-present CCTV there’s no obvious sign of dereliction, just a pair of tired old blocks situated on the edge of recent, private, low-level developments, a build started in the mid-1990s that continues today, where further up the Caledonia Road, past the Southern Necropolis towards the old districts of Oatlands, Richmond Park and Polmadie, new, private housing is springing up a stone’s throw from the M74 Extension.

Retracing my steps, I head back towards the junction of Caledonia and Cathcart Roads, a corner that since the demolition of the tenements has been a kind of no man’s land. The one landmark of note is Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson’s Caledonia Church, built in the 1850s and described as ‘a ruined building’, the shell of which only survives today, I believe, due to its awkward position and remains a monument to the city council’s wilful neglect of Thomson’s genius as a native architect, a man who influenced the work of Frank Lloyd Wright among others. Perhaps it’s only fitting then that his memorial, situated only a short distance from the church in the Southern Necropolis, was vandalised before its official unveiling in 2005.

Later, I’m reminded that the Red Road flats in Barmulloch, mentioned in an earlier blog, were scheduled for demolition in 2010 but for numerous reasons the blowdown was postponed, possibly due to the triple suicide in March last year. That, and the ongoing issues of asbestos removal by the contractors, Safedem, a major beneficiary of Glasgow’s drive to rid itself of its tower blocks. According to their website, Safedem faces many challenges when it comes to blowing up buildings, not least at Norfolk Court, where letters to the mainly asylum-seeker tenants had to be translated into nine different languages.

Still, it seems controversy surrounds the razing of Red Road. Nowhere can I find a reliable date for demolition, the most accurate quoted by the current owner, GHA, an unspecified date in summer 2011. One for the diary, I tell myself, to make sure I’m out of town, since the level of asbestos used in these buildings, released in the wrong wind conditions, would surely be enough to slowly kill the entire population prematurely, thus saving the Council millions, if not billions, in future provision for the elderly. The last word on Red Road I leave to Dr. Joe Murray, a one-time resident of the area in his moving reminiscence. His words – and the accompanying photographs – say more about Red Road than anyone else.

Two weeks after my Gorbals walk, I hit the road again, this time walking via Pollokshields to Ibrox, Govan and beyond and musing on the short distance between some of the most expensive property Glasgow has to offer and the least desirable housing in the city. Crossing the footbridge over the M8 by way of the sinister, rubbish-strewn back road bordering its southern side, I pause at the flats at the corner where Edmiston Drive meets Paisley Road West, many of which lie vacant, their windows clad in sheet metal, ready for the same fate as nearby Broomloan Court, recently demolished and curiously, one of the few high rises built with a gas supply.

Rounding the corner into Copland Road, I arrive at one of my old haunts, Iona Court, and its three tall grey towers that even a sunny afternoon can’t improve. For the first time I notice on the flat’s perimeter some very expensive landscaping – heavy granite sets and boulevardian tree planting – installed by the city council but left abandoned under a mulch of litter. After the hard winter, many of the city’s pavements are still scattered with red grit, the highways potholed to buggery. Iona Court is sure to go soon, as are many of the city’s high rises. From certain viewpoints the effect of these mass blowdowns is already evident, reducing Glasgow to flat earth, with fewer distinguishing landmarks separating it from the surrounding hill ranges. Is this the shape of the city to come? Tracts of low-level houses, low level warehousing, low level service industries and retail parks cleaved by motorway?

Passing through the old Moorepark area I head towards Craigton and Drumoyne on the Shieldhall Road, where a few modest high rises still stand. I soon reach Moss Heights, the first tower blocks built in Glasgow, notable for their appearance in a 1983 BBC drama, An Englishman Abroad, as Russian apartments. Occupied from 1959 (and built from 1953 onwards) at only nine storeys high, these flats are possibly the most aesthetically appealing of all Glasgow’s high-rises, both in terms of situation, south-facing and perched high on a hill, and in their design, the facades predating 60s brutalism, with curved private balconies and boat-shaped motifs on top by way of understated adornment. I love these buildings, having grown up with them while living in Pollok, unlike their counterparts off the Berryknowes Road, the last blocks built in Glasgow, which today are illuminated with green strip lighting, always a touchy subject to those of a sectarian bent.

Will Moss Heights survive GHA’s cull of the city’s tower blocks? I hope so, just as I hope the city doesn’t lose its shape entirely. Cities are defined in many ways and in Glasgow’s case for the last 50 years the tower block has become its defining image, not homogenous off-the-peg structures palmed off to its citizens as its latter-day icons, such as the ‘Squinty’ Bridge or the ‘Armadillo’, names insisted on us by their developers and the media, for constructions of a type found in any provincial UK city under New Labour’s and the Coalition government’s zeal for privatised but publicly-underwritten regen projects and in the absence of real, meaningful, manufacturing industry.

Location, location, location. Glasgow, in tandem with the developers who lubricate hardest, is about to greenlight a new generation of mega-tall buildings, according to the Future Glasgow website. But who can predict the future shape of the city? Not the people behind Elphinstone Tower, (the link’s worth checking out for the objection letters), whose original 2004 plan to build a 39 storey residential building on the site of the former Strathclyde Regional Council offices in St. Vincent Street appears to have stalled.

Homeward bound, as I walk down Mosspark Boulevard, the exotically-named road running parallel to Bellahouston Park, the beautiful amber sunset kicks off the windows of the high flats on the eastern edge of the park. I’m certain if these, and many of the Glasgow high-rises were situated in central London, say, or Manhattan, the city wouldn’t be so quick to blow them down or nibble them to the ground, just as I’m sure many of their tenants would resist being shunted into yet another social housing experiment.

The Guardian once did a regular column called Notes and Queries. I recall reading a question sent by a reader regarding some scientific matter I’ve long forgotten. But I’ll never forget the answer -

“if you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, I suggest you set fire to the haystack, thus reducing the problem to two dimensions.”

And thus the ‘problem’ of Glasgow’s high rises might also be resolved. Pity then that it’s only ever pubs and nightclubs that catch fire in this burg. There’s too much asbestos in the flats for that to happen. As I complete my journey, at the other end of the news cycle come reports of the latest disaster currently playing out in Japan in the aftermath of its earthquake and tsunami. In all the talk of the fragility of the built environment, it would be crass to make any comparison with the tragedy occuring there, but there’s a sobering irony to be found on the streets of Glasgow, of the insidious man-made disaster of the last 50 years where in some parts, the parts no longer useful to late capitalism, you’d be forgiven for thinking an earthquake happened but nobody noticed.

As for the graffito – it wasn’t the heartfelt expression of a local ned. I suspect it was the work of a frustrated asylum-seeker, probably out of some African country, maybe living in Norfolk Court, maybe disillusioned, but obviously alert to the chimera of democracy, so good on them, whoever they are.

I see from my stats that several of you have tried to write to me at the address on this website which is may(AT)devilsplantation.co.uk, the AT being an anti-spam measure. Anyone wishing to get in touch should replace the AT with @ and I’ll get back to you asap.  Thanks.

Taggart, STV’s perennial cop show, returned to our screens a few weeks ago. For those who’ve never seen it, Taggart endures as a popular example of the crime procedural, despite its spell-it-out dialogue and declamatory acting. To promote this latest outing the show’s legendary strapline – there’s been a murder – features in an ambitious trailer displaying jaundiced shots of Glasgow where police tape spans every corner and crevice; the entire city posing as crimescene. Even the local branch of Waterstone’s is cashing in. On the first floor, lately devoted to all things criminal, I find a shelf headed There’s been a murderrr (sic) doubtless created by the same designer responsible for the signage in their bioghapy (sic) section. A bookshop. I mean to say…

From the southside I cross the new pedestrian bridge to the city’s designated financial district, along the north bank of the Clyde and up the steep gradient of West Campbell Street, where suddenly I’m confronted by a real crime scene; police tape wrapped round a council dumpster blocking the pavement close to the entrance to Gamba, one of the city’s better restaurants. Another murder? Not according to the BBC News website, reporting just another sexual assault. Or so it seemed until I spotted a second length of police tape spanning the opposite corner, which turned out to be a separate incident and a murder to boot.

Strathclyde’s Finest don’t name the victim of the sexual assault, merely that she was a prostitute, treatment on par with the serial murders of seven Glasgow prostitutes committed during the 1990s that to this day go largely unsolved. The murder victim, Michael Davis, 21, worked in the city’s financial district, killed during an unprovoked knife attack, the weapon of choice in a city where guns are the exception. At his workplace on Bothwell Street, once the site of the magnificent Victorian Gothic YMCA building, floral tributes to Mr. Davis line the entrance to its faceless replacement. Whatever else this city lacks, it sure ain’t crime, just as Taggart sure ain’t The Wire.

Many blogs ago, I wrote about the late Cliff Hanley’s autobiography, Dancing in the Street, struck by his acute observation of Glasgow’s ‘non-profit violence’ and the endemic gang culture that each generation or so attracts London BBC film crews to the city. One BBC Panorama production I recall from the mid-1960s featured the wars waged by razor gangs in Glasgow’s dancehalls. Riding on the back of the Bible John murders, the programme sought to expose the high incidence of violent crime by anecdote alone.

The parachuting-in of a London reporter: besuited, raincoat, skinny tie – channelling Conrad’s Heart of Darkness via Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – to Tiffany’s in Sauchiehall Street on a dark rainy Saturday night amid a swarm of wax-pale, sharp-suited youths only incited the kind of braggadocio normally seen in the seedier side of Palermo. Most compelling about this scenario was the reporter’s expression of faltering incomprehension as the youths recounted tales of gangland Glasgow. All that was missing was the pith helmet and swagger stick.

As documentary fodder goes, the premise: Glasgow = violence is hardly breaking news. Violent crime occurs in all major UK cities, with Nottingham currently topping the polls. Here in Chib Central, the verb ‘to malky’ (to slash a victim with a blade) never cut it with me (pun intended). Close as I am to the ground, I’ve never heard anyone use the word so I reject it as an outmoded literary trope just as I reject Glesga Patter compendiums for their manufactured couthiness in the service of profit, aimed at unwary tourists and gullible locals alike.

At least Michael Munro’s seminal work, The Patter: A Guide to Current Glasgow Usage (1985, Glasgow District Libraries) had the virtue of authenticity in its listing of the local lingo. Not that it would have helped much during my English oral exams at school, the purpose of which I failed to grasp, apart from earning derision from my teacher, Miss Beaton.

Among my fellow alumni of Hillhead High – Gordon Jackson, Alexander Mackendrick and Alistair MacLean – the veteran actor/comedian Stanley Baxter, so enamoured of Glasgow he moved to North London decades ago, is a prime provocateur in the city’s self-harm. His portrayal on network TV of the Glasgow dialect as foreign language, Parliamo Glasgow, reinforced in the nation’s psyche the perception of the city as an alien place.

Baxter’s schtick, that of a visiting academic translating incomprehensible Glaswegian argot in the best RP while simultaneously performing as a slang-slinging native, was lapped up by the punters, many of them fellow citizens, sat in their new council flats in front of rented or coin-slot TVs. As a kid, watching his shows induced in me a cringing toxic dread that dogs me to this day, acutely sensitive of how others are quick to diminish one’s character by dint of accent.

Parliamo Glasgow, undeniably popular, also exploited that endless seam of British comedy – class – with Glaswegians drawn as indolent, drunken, bestial scum. The backdrops to these sketches aped the bleakest of slum tenement interiors, where the characters’ sorry lives unravelled round a kitchen table littered with spent cans of McEwans Ale. Today you can still find bumper stickers, curiously contrived in the red-black graphic mode of London street signs – of unintelligible compound phrases – e.g. - huzzebrungabo’al? – ‘has our guest been kind enough to bring along a bottle to the party?’ Or punnaburrafurramurra – ‘please may I have a pound of butter for my mother?’

This perceived problem of the ugliness of British regional accents is not confined to Glasgow. In 2009 Beryl Bainbridge’s criticism of her fellow Liverpudlians’ mode of speech provoked scorn when she opined how ‘they all need elocution lessons‘. Bainbridge’s argument, citing Coronation Street and Brookside as the abetting villains in the decline of ‘proper’ diction, that Scousers ‘sound unintelligent‘, betrayed a cultural and class prejudice common to all who self-loathe.

In 1947, the socialist and feminist writer, Naomi Mitchison, described Glasgow thus -

“It is a disgustingly ugly town, a huddle of dirty buildings trying to outdo one another and not succeeding. The population is as ugly as the buildings. Walk down the Gallowgate – notice how many children you see with obvious rickets, impetigo or heads clipped for lice; see the wild slippered sluts not caring any more to look decent.”

The language deployed by Mitchison, born into the Haldane dynasty, beggars belief for its naked hostility – ‘wild slippered sluts’. Unlike George Orwell’s investigation of the social conditions of the Lancashire working classes in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), one senses Mitchison’s lack of curiosity of or concern for the inhabitants of Gallowgate, plainly failing to engage with those she so blithely denigrates.

One suspects, like Mitchison’s condemnation, at the heart of Bainbridge’s criticism is a deeper hatred of Liverpool and its people and, by extension, of her own very being. Accent is the least of it. What she was really saying is ‘this place and these people are ugly’. Sad then that this year Bainbridge died ignorant of the fact that as an influential medium TV is deader than disco.

On the matter of the Glasgow accent, Mitchison concedes nothing -

They do not speak any real variety of Scots, but a blurred, debased English, or – since 1942 – American.“

No other UK city is caricatured quite as negatively in the nation’s collective psyche on quite so many levels as The Dear Green Place. On Radio 4′s Today programme, in an ill-judged statement by NATO’s man in Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill, Glasgow is listed as a worse place to raise children than Kabul. In the 21st century the very mention of the city conjures social services worst nightmare: casual violence, alcoholism, poverty, drug addiction, slum dwelling, unemployment, bad diet, chronic poor health, low life expectancy, benefit-sponging and murder. Glasgow’s ‘No Mean City’ notoriety endures.

Arguably the most famous work of fiction set in the city, the title is borrowed from the Bible, in Acts 21:19, where Paul introduces himself:

“I am a Jew of Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city…”

No Mean City: A Story of the Glasgow Slums was published in 1935 and written by Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long, respectively an “unemployed alcoholic” Glaswegian slum dweller and a London journalist. How this unlikely collaboration came to exist is lost knowledge. Where a generous soul might imagine a well-intentioned Orwellian stranger burning with righteous anger to document the unfavourable conditions of North Britain, a cynic might compare NMC with the ethos of Murdoch’s empire and the rest of the dirt-raking rags that sensationalise misery and deprivation in the guise of human interest.

Either view does the book a disservice. On publication, NMC was banned by Glasgow’s libraries for its realist depiction of razor-gang violence while attracting favourable reviews from the Times Literary Supplement. The narrative centres on two brothers, Johnnie and Peter Stark, the former a twin-bladed wrong ‘un to his sibling’s political idealist and is as much about a social awakening than a sensational slash-fest. I first read the book as a teenager living in the war zone of Pollok in the early 1970s, where gang culture had transported itself from the inner city to the post WW2 schemes and where pitched battles, often staged at the Braidcraft Road roundabout, were frequent events, at least until hashish and harder drugs neutered the schemes.

If the statistics are to be believed, according to a recent Evening Times campaign, the city’s violent crime rate is down 23% on previous years, with the murder rate reduced to 20 in 2009-10. Perhaps more revealing are the levels of attempted murder and serious assault which, though greater in volume, are also reported as in decline. Topping the tables, however, is common assault – although I’m unsure of the distinction – with Central Station cited as the most dangerous location with 319 reported incidents.

Such negative reckoning, of what it means to be Glaswegian, shored up by the media for the best part of three centuries, has resulted in little short of hate crime, a kind of casual racism that goes unchallenged in multi-culti Britain. Yet since the Irish famine of the 1840s, Glasgow has embraced more refugees and asylum seekers than the majority of UK cities. Meanwhile The Scotsman relishes in its coverage of City Council corruption and, during the Edinburgh Festival, radio panel shows abuse Glasgow, a soft target for material-poor stand-ups – ‘at least I have a flush toilet in my digs, not like Glasgow, where they call it a sink’. And when BBC Drama, devoid of irony, calls a city-set love story Glasgow Kiss, I carry what the media would doubtless call ‘the full fish supper’ on my shoulder.

The carapace of the average Glaswegian is, in some measure, justified, but bearing so heavy a burden makes it hard to move with the times. During the 1980s, the Council’s attempt to improve the city’s image was necessary when Glasgow was failing, thanks mainly to Thatcherite policies, though the use of Roger Hargreaves’ character, Mr Happy, in the Glasgow’s Smiles Better campaign, devised by ex-Lord Provost, Michael Kelly’s PR company, met with more bemusement than approval.

Today Glasgow’s image is in the hands of the publicly-funded City Marketing Bureau which employs 43 staff and whose recent Glasgow: Scotland with Style rebranding exercise commits crimes against Mackintosh’s typography. Judging by their board membership, at least there’s a measure of continuity in the greasing of palms of local politicians, as meticulously researched in an incisive piece, The New Bohemia, by Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt whose commentary on the stealth privatisation of the city’s Culture and Leisure Services (Culture and Sport Glasgow, now known as Glasgow Life) earned the journal, Variant, a gagging order and a ban in all CSG premises.

Sadly I see no end to the ‘problem’ of being Glaswegian any time soon. To illustrate the point, recently I was approached by Peter Ross, a staff writer on Scotland on Sunday who like most, arrived at this website by chance. Together with photographer, Robert Perry, last week we travelled to the Humbie Mound – the Devil’s Plantation – to take pictures and to try to rekindle the spirit of Harry Bell.

Ross’ praise for The Devil’s Plantation is gratifyingly fulsome but his initial take on me – someone he had never met before – gave me pause. Depicted as tough, my voice throaty, a proper Glaswegian speaking proper Glaswegian, had I hailed from, say, Perth, London or Milan, I doubt my mode of speech would matter more than what I have to say. Few other artists, writers or filmmakers are subject to this kind of categorisation, where one’s origins overshadow one’s work, just as the ghost of the late Mark McManus still stalks the city and the cop show bearing his character’s name.

Until recent times the Glasgow Fair Fortnight meant an enforced two-week break in mid-July, when most of the city’s workforce departed to points south and west, known colloquially as going doon the watter. Rothesay on the Isle of Bute was the resort of choice within our family, having rejected Dunoon after a miserable holiday spent in quarantine when my siblings and me went down with rubella and when on another occasion I almost drowned, fully clothed, in the town’s outdoor swimming pool. Oh, happy days…

Today that same journey is not the odyssey recalled from childhood, one requiring a train from Central Station to Wemyss Bay or by the longer, more exotic route by boat all the way from Broomielaw, navigating the Firth of Clyde to Bute. In under an hour, the sat nav guides me from the city centre to the westbound M8, passing Paisley, Port Glasgow and Greenock to the rail and ferry terminal at Wemyss Bay, a mere 26 miles.

There’s time to explore the railway station before crossing the Firth of Clyde. I’ve always been fond of railway stations and the interior of Wemyss Bay is a thing of beauty. Designed in 1903 by James Miller, it is a Grade A listed building with an elegant circular central hub built of glass and cast iron, the type of public building that inspires and elevates the user, a place that could never be built today.

On the snaking timber boardwalk, once the pathway for foot passengers, immediately I’m transported to those distant Fair holidays, recalling the thrill of the journey for me and the tens of thousands who trod these boards for the best part of a century.

On this sunny summer Sunday, the peak of the high season, most passengers board the M.V. Bute by car. Given the short duration of the crossing and the monopoly held by operators, Caledonian McBrayne, it’s an expensive 45-minute trip, so no surprise that the ferry’s barely a third full. For this reason – and the advent of cheap package holidays – by the 1970s Rothesay’s status as a holiday resort declined, a fact all too apparent as I disembark and drive round town to get my bearings.

Such nostalgia is flawed, of course. For the women of Glasgow, the Fair Fortnight had little fair to commend it. During the countdown to Fair Friday, the day closest to July 14, when men laid down their tools, the women, most of whom worked in factories, shops and offices (in addition to housework and child rearing) had already toiled for weeks. Their task – to pack large wicker hampers with bed linen, towels and clothes – items to be sent ahead to the chosen destination since by necessity most families could only swap their rented city slums for rented coastal slums, hotels and B&Bs reserved for their affluent betters.

Accommodation, obtained through small ads in the Daily Record, was generally limited to a few damp, barely furnished rooms and an outside toilet. Like home, gas and electricity came attached to a coin meter. From the minute families stepped off the boat, the women were left to drudge domestic chores while their men ambled to the nearest betting shop or bar. Depending on the weather, we kids were either packed off to the amusements or the promenade. To diehard urbanites, outdoor pursuits were alien. Few Glaswegians arrived in Rothesay with walking boots and knapsacks, preferring familiar attractions: dances at the Pavilion, variety acts at the Winter Garden and double features at the Regal Cinema on rainy afternoons.

In 1887, John Bartholomew’s Gazetteer of the British Isles described Rothesay thus:

Rothesay, watering-place, royal and police burgh… town of Buteshire, on E. side of Bute island, Firth of Clyde, 19 miles SW. of Greenock… 3 Banks, 5 newspapers. Market-day Wednesday. The town is finely situated at the head of Rothesay Bay, enjoys a mild climate, and is a favourite watering-place and a centre for visiting places on the Clyde. There is a good harbour. There are also fine esplanades, an aquarium, and a hydropathic establishment. Rothesay Castle, founded about 1098, and once a royal residence, stands near the centre of the town. Rothesay gives the title of duke to the heir-apparent of the British throne.

I stop at The Pavilion. Designed by J. & J.A. Carrick and opened in July 1938, its grey exterior intact if grizzled, no match for the restored splendour of its celebrated cousin, the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea. As with most cash-strapped public venues, a closer look reveals The Pavilion’s antithetical add-ons: garish posters for non-events, bits of brewery detritus, stick-on signage, light fittings and furnishings commissioned by the lowest tender bid. So it’s encouraging to learn that a long-awaited refurb for this grade A listed building, quoted as ‘one of Scotland’s best example of 1930s Art Deco architecture’ is to be undertaken by architects, Elder and Cannon, that is, if the Argyll and Bute Council’s ambition can be realised at a time of deep public sector cuts.

The neglect of The Pavilion, like other Deco gems (see above) is neither wilful nor malign, more the cumulative effect of an identity crisis, a loss of civic faith exacerbated by council cutbacks and over-regulation. If the Pavilion’s refurb does go ahead, those involved would do well to remember that at its peak of popularity Rothesay never aspired to attract the affluent, aesthetically literate tourist. Today the town has enough trouble attracting anybody.

The demolition in 1976 of the Regal Cinema, another notable example of provincial 1930s Deco, was arguably shortsighted since no replacement was ever built. Reports of redevelopment in the late 1970s and 80s – a marina complex, a heliport – came to nothing. At best, new attractions were created out of the old, such as the Victorian Toilets. At worst, the closure of the Royal Hotel, situated prominently opposite the ferry terminal, is a depressing introduction for any visitor to the island.

On my way to the Winter Gardens on Victoria Street, I’m reacquainted with the concrete fountain, predictably no longer functioning, where at some point in the mid 1960s, my sister and I, wearing identical clothes, posed for a snapshot. The nearby rose garden, well tended, is still in bloom, but the floral clock, an exotic feature etched deep in my memory, is missing.

In the absence of attractions, like so many British seaside resorts, how can Rothesay hope to draw visitors? Perhaps the answer lies in the Winter Garden, built in a quasi-Chinese style in 1924 to enclose an existing open-air amphitheatre. Following refurbishment in the 1990s, today the Garden operates as a small cinema and tourist centre, boasting the type of multi-media exhibition to be found wherever real regenerative measures are lacking. Disappointingly, the interactive map is out of order.

Here are telling clues to Rothesay’s current predicament. Retrospective, backward glancing, on the one hand visitors are offered a version of the ‘past’ – the salad days of a bustling resort and industrialist’s playground – most of the handsome villas and hotels here date from the mid 19th century. On the other is the fallback of the island’s wildlife and much extolling of Bute’s gentle landscape, natural assets that always existed. The obvious question – how to create a profit centre when market forces are so fiercely resistant – goes unanswered. Any attempts to construct a brand out of Bute seem futile when a walk down Victoria and Montague Streets, with many shops and bars permanently shuttered, tells a different story.

Rothesay’s narrative – from old market town to thriving resort – is told through artefacts and photographs. Adorning one wall are theatrical posters and handbills, a wall of fame dedicated to variety hall acts who during the 1950s and 60s played the summer season: Lex McLean, Johnny Beattie, Chic Murray, Jimmy Logan, The Alexander Brothers. Popular locally, these entertainers, despite the vast TV viewing figures of the times, remained obscure because few ever penetrated the medium.

One entertainer did. Greenock-born and Rothesay-raised, child star Lena Zavaroni’s appearance on ITV’s Opportunity Knocks in 1974 led to a successful singing career, which at its peak included numerous prime time TV slots. Sharing the bill alongside Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball, at her peak, Lena sang at The White House for Gerald Ford and was briefly signed to Stax Records. She also hosted her own TV series.

For years, Lena Zavaroni’s short life and tragic death provided the base metal for TV and literary gold. The eating disorder that killed the singer at the age of 35 is well documented in both fiction and fact, notably in Andrew O’Hagan’s Personality. Tucked in a corner, I encounter a shrine, a statue of a girl child surrounded by handwritten greetings cards. Beneath a plaque reads – Lena Zavaroni – So Loved. On a nearby wall is a photograph of the singer, alongside an incongruous CCTV notice and a letter from an eating disorder charity. As tributes go, it’s heartbreakingly poignant.

Bute is an island of rolling hills and secluded beaches. Passing the picturesque town of Port Bannatyne, I arrive at Ettrick Bay, a wide stretch of blonde beach which on this sunniest of June Sundays is almost deserted, the few visitors sticking mainly to the shoreside cafe. While eating my picnic lunch on a bench, I reflect on the only other occasion I visited this place, an impromptu outing during my family’s last holiday to Rothesay in the early 1970s. On the cusp of puberty – I was about 12 at the time – I felt a crippling self-consciousness as I entered the water, fully clothed, while a strange man leered at me before casually remarking, to my parents’ horror, on my jailbait allure.

Moving on, I follow the road to nowhere in particular and, by chance, arrive at a path leading to an even less populated beach at Scalpsie. It’s hard to grasp that so secluded a spot is within reach in only 90 minutes of leaving the city. It occurs to me that the local council and tourist agencies are missing a trick. Surely the selling point of Bute is escape, freedom even. Under glorious blue skies, the dreamscape of Scalpsie feels like a thousand miles from Glasgow.

Back in Rothesay, I wander round the town, searching for traces of old haunts. What am I looking for? At home, in a drawer somewhere is a reel of S8mm film shot by my maternal grandfather in the 1960s, of my six-year-old self running down Bishop Street. Pausing at an estate agents’ window, I note that the upper part of a house where we once stayed is for sale but ‘requires some interior upgrading’ – agent-speak for dilapidated dump. Virtually everything is closed for the day – the gift shops and cafes – or for good – mainly bars and one-man businesses. On the esplanade I note the splendid Victorian facades, mostly converted to small hotels and B&Bs – and mostly vacant.

But my mission isn’t complete, not without a look at one of my favourite places, The Electric Bakery. On the way, I pass a barber’s shop, its window display unchanged since the 70s. The bakery, where as a kid I would wait late into the night for well-fired rolls and iced buns, still exists and I take some comfort from this crumb of continuity.

Leaving the island, I’m reminded of a quote by Joan Didion:

A place belongs to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

If love could bring about a change of fortune for Rothesay, then I’m certain thousands of Glaswegians would gladly give it. Just don’t ask them to give up their fortnight in Majorca.

As Jason Bourne hits 95kph on the M10 from Sheremetyevo Airport to Central Moscow, I’m on the back seat of his VW Passat wondering if I’ll reach my destination in one piece. This is stunt driving like I’ve never known in a city that already feels familiar. Under heavy skies, wide highways are fringed with tower blocks, toothstumps in the mouth of the Moscow suburbs, all the more prominent on this vast, flat terrain. This is cityscape on a scale hard to fathom, in spite of the taxi driver’s efforts to compress time and space as he swerves and weaves across lanes onto the M9, the main drag into town. Any faster and I’ll either be dead or by some process of divine will and magic, find myself back on the M8 and home in time for dinner.

Out of the blue, six weeks ago, I received an email from the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, inviting me to talk about The Devil’s Plantation. Not only is this unexpected, I couldn’t quite believe the offer was genuine. An exchange of emails soon confirmed it was. Strelka’s summer programme is based on the theme of cities and for reasons unclear, my work was identified as somehow relevant. How could I refuse?

Several weeks pass. Language and communication issues stall the process, leaving me baffled. Questions arise. What do they want from me? Who do they want me to talk to? What can I add to what is already available online, for free, at any time? If the work is to make any sense to a Russian audience, then a translation is needed. On this score, my attempts to solicit advice and support from the British Council (unhelpful), the Scottish Arts Council (unacknowledged) and the Russian Consulate in Edinburgh (unanswered) do not inspire confidence. In the same week the new chief of Creative Scotland, Andrew Dixon, proposes the export of Scottish culture as a priority, I’m on the verge of saying no and staying put.

Eventually I get some answers. The Strelka Institute is a new venture, based in what was previously the garage space of a pre-Soviet manufacturing base in Central Moscow which post-revolution was rebranded as the famous Red October Chocolate Factory. It appears one of their curators is aware of my previous work, hence the invite.

In 21st century Moscow, a city shapeshifting at taxi driver’s pace, Strelka’s aim is ambitious – to create awareness of and foster debate on how cities must change when existing models no longer work. With new developments springing up all over the city, Strelka’s inquiry into architectural aesthetics and its attempt to address alternative modes of urban living that puts people at the centre is both timely and laudable.

Whether such a dialogue can be created, let alone implemented in any meaningful way remains an open question. Perhaps the organisers should be inviting Moscow’s developers round for a cosy chat instead of yours truly.

Today Moscow’s population numbers over 10 million, whose inhabitants, not wishing to be glib, all seem to possess cars for want of a coherent public transport system. No wonder. Not when the average cost of unleaded fuel is roughly 50p per litre, compared to the UK’s current pump price of £1.15. And not, I suspect, with winters as hard and long as Moscow’s, winters beyond comparison to those in Blighty, where a few inches of snow threatens to disrupt civilisation, never mind the train timetables.

In the weeks leading up to my talk, however, I’m met with more confusion. There’s a suggestion that I screen the project before an audience in their outdoor arena – which they can’t, since as an online project it’s not designed for a big screen. The organisers then suggest a retrospective of my other films, which I nix as inappropriate and off topic. With Mercury in retrograde, in despair I decline, only to be met with a renewed appeal. My travel and accommodation needs will be met, and yes, I can bring along my partner, who helped design and who coded the site. But can we arrange visas through the Consulate in Edinburgh? Two trips later and at considerable expense, visas are glued into our passports, flights arranged, hotel booked and – fingers crossed – I’m on my way.

Having worked on my talk for over a week, I’m still unsure if I’m just imagining all of this. After an eleventh hour scramble, I work through the night before my departure, choosing images to illustrate my talk, uncertain of my target audience – ironic, since Strelka translated means ‘arrow’ or ‘little arrow’.

So here I am with Jason Bourne at the wheel, still flooring it, ducking and diving through traffic at breakneck speed, competing in the inner Moscow rally. Not in Los Angeles, not in New York, Berlin or Paris have I witnessed such traffic insanity so I take my hat off to Paul Greengrass and his crew. Approaching the city centre, as I try to grab frames in my head that match my long-conditioned perception of the city – Cold War, the era of the Iron Curtain, at the wheel, Jason Bourne, in broken English, offers only two pointers – the Moscow Dynamo Stadium and the notorious Lublianka.

Even at this pace, it still takes the best part of two hours in manic traffic – and jams – to reach my destination, the Aquamarine Hotel, situated south of the Moskva River, a part of town equivalent to say, London’s Southwark. The hotel – new, aspirational, of the type favoured by businessmen striking deals – is situated in a complex of homogenous corporate development not, I suspect, the model of urban construction favoured by my hosts.

By map, never forgetting Harry Bell’s mode of navigation, I walk with Owen to the venue shortly after arriving since I feel the need to announce myself prior to the event. Public transport beyond our reckoning, we go by foot, tentatively feeling our way down a set of offshoot roads leading towards the city’s core. On the map, inner Moscow is divided by circular water passages, mirroring its ring roads. The place I’m staying in is located in the Garden District, close to a canal.

On the way, the feel of the place – the buildings, the people – is not exactly exhilarating, but still uplifting, exotic even, in spite of illuminated signs for both Pizza Hut and McDonalds

Still, I’m glad to see kiosks, small shops and cafes operating. When the UK government denounces outdoor alcohol consumption, in Moscow I side with the people who see it as perfectly normal to pass round a bottle of voddy or down a couple of beers. In a city where a small glass of wine in an upmarket bar costs a tenner, who can blame them? As social intercourse goes, arguably the streets are preferable to being chained to a plasma screen. In the hotel, the only TV on offer, apart from pay-as-you-go porn, is the usual: CNN, Bloomberg and BBC World, a travesty of TV news reporting.

The current, irreversible laws in Western Europe regarding smoking and alcohol don’t yet apply here. Smoking is still permitted in certain indoor venues, with cheap fags imported directly from the US.

Opened only three weeks ago, The Strelka Institute sits on the Bersenevskaya embankment, a narrow road where cars nudge each other in both directions. Passing up a concrete slope, I enter a courtyard with a wooden amphitheatre facing a stage area, behind which is a yet-to-be-finished block designated as office space. As yet there’s no defined gallery but a couple of rooms function as lecture venues. The main attraction, however, is the bar which, judging by the prices, is aimed at a moneyed, upmarket clientele.

I deliver my talk on the evening of June 9th and despite the late slot, attract a reasonable audience, most of whom appear to have a good grasp of English, while a simultaneous translation is provided. Juggling my notes, I soon discard them, preferring spontaneity and direct eye contact, while pushing aside the dread realisation of how long it’s been since I last spoke in public.

By this point backing out is not an option, so I tell the story of Glasgow’s Secret Geometry, of Harry Bell and Mary Ross, of the city and its architecture, of murder and remanence and my own compulsion to solve the mystery. Are the Russians getting it, I wonder? At one point I raise a laugh by revealing how Glasgow stood in for Moscow in a film. By the end, I win a round of applause and note how the post-gig reaction is being recorded on camera. Later in the bar, I learn that attending lectures is currently a hip pastime among Muscovites – and much to my relief, those I spoke to said they enjoyed my tale.

At the end of the evening, Strelka’s Press Officer, the delightful Konstantin, leads us over the bridge spanning the river and passing the Church of Christ the Saviour, faithfully reconstructed after the end of Communism. Waving down a passing car and as is customary in Moscow, Konstantin strikes a deal with the driver to deliver us back to the hotel.

The following day is reserved for sightseeing. Fortunately the sun’s out as we – me, Owen and a fellow guest speaker, Dr Heyden Lorimer, Senior Lecturer at Glasgow University’s Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, do our own drift in the city. Entering a church, we witness a service, complete with a trio of singers and a gold-robed Orthodox priest. Heading towards Red Square, St Basil’s and the Kremlin – must-sees on this briefest of visits – en route, at a small bridge, we witness a sight apparently common in Eastern Europe: a metal tree festooned in padlocks, signifying lover’s vows.

Later, Owen and I venture into GUM, Moscow’s legendary department store, under whose elegant arches upmarket concessions today replace what was once a vast, if poorly stocked shop, the butt of Western jokes during the Cold War. Moving on, we pass the Duma, noting how the trappings of Communism prevail – the old insignia still evident.

Today the flag of the Russian Federation is usually accompanied by the old Czarist crest of the double-headed eagle. The Red Flag, appropriated post-revolution, erased the Imperial emblem, replacing it with hammer and sickle. Twenty years on, the eagles have returned.

Later that afternoon, having reunited with Heyden, we enter The Most, a bar and restaurant situated close to the Bolshoi Ballet and owned by Strelka’s main benefactor. The interior, got up in the French Rococo manner, looks authentic enough, the service as exquisite as the deserts on offer but whose prices, I suspect, are unaffordable to the majority of Moscow’s citizens.

The following day, while walking in a more workaday district, I note a man sitting on the pavement. He is wearing army uniform, a small rucksack at his side, his face, the face of a young man completely traumatised, his stare blank. He has a cardboard sign, presumably a plea. It then dawns on me that in my brief exposure to Moscow, he is a rare sight, an active beggar. After walking 50 yards or so, I suddenly stop and, retracing my steps, I offer him money. He refuses, but I insist. Spasiba, spasiba – thank you – he replies.

The circle is complete. I recall my first trip to Glasgow in pursuit of Harry Bell’s theory when I encountered Chris, the ex-soldier I met outside Buchanan Street bus station, another abandoned soul who, having served his country, was left on the street, physically scarred and post-traumatic, dispossessed and lonely. No words can convey the anguish of these men, or the impotent rage I feel when confronted with the lies of governments that deem them so expendable.

The ride back to the airport is less exhilarating. Back in Glasgow, the following day I read a piece in The Guardian about the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, who by all accounts – mainly tales of corruption – is about to be deposed after 18 years, a story not dissimilar to that of our own recently departed Council Leader, Steven Purcell. It would seem the two cities have a lot in common. As the song goes, there’s no place like home – that is, apart from Moscow.

As a postscript, I note in today’s Herald a piece relating to another Russian story – the recent Red Road flats suicides and the difficulties faced by the relatives in having the remains repatriated. Words fail me.

After a long cold winter, I return to my shedquarters. On the desk sits a forlorn catalogue – Witness to Mortality, published in 1997 to coincide with an exhibition by Joseph McKenzie, a photographer famed for his iconic Gorbals Children. On the cover is a bleak landscape titled The New Lifestyle 2 (Red Road Flats Newly Opened). Shot in 1968, the black and white image shows a long, empty road, slick with rain, where a solitary vehicle drives towards the vanishing point. Centre frame, a black telegraph pole divides the image, beneath which a woman in a winter coat faces the camera. On the right, startling and mysterious in the fog are two tower blocks. For me, this one picture sums up Glasgow, a heartrending sign of things to come, but somehow not the future.

In 2006 Andrea Arnold made the admirable film, Red Road, set in the Barmulloch towerblocks. My memory of the area goes back to the 1970s, visiting schoolfriends, where one day I stood on the 31st storey of one of the blocks, reputedly the tallest domestic dwellings in Europe, looking out from a landing window across the city. It was a far more disorientating experience than I recall from my childhood, visiting Auntie Mary in her Castlemilk high-rise.

In 2002-3, during my second feature, Solid Air, I shot several scenes in tower blocks, in both Sighthill and in the Gorbals. Securing the latter location was tainted with tragedy, since the previous occupant, recently deceased, left the flat more or less intact. Whether it was relatives, neighbours or council employees who plundered the dead woman’s effects prior to our arrival, I’ll never know, but during the recce the smell was so bad some of the crew refused to enter.

In one scene shot in the flat (which I later reluctantly cut) a young woman gazes wistfully out of the window to an identical tower block –

“The kids wrote it on the pavement. Big white letters. Jump”.

The line I wrote was based on a true account I heard in 2000. It was an old story then. The scene wasn’t cut for reasons of content. It was simply to shorten the film.

What conclusions about high-rise living can anyone make? We hear the stories, the urban myths, but until you’ve lived in one of Glasgow’s towers, all bets are off. It’s rare for Guardian journalists to get as roused by events in Glasgow as they did on March 13th, when they reported on the multiple suicide of three asylum seekers who jumped from the 15th floor of their Red Road block on March 6th, their due-date for eviction.

Yet an earlier Guardian article published on March 7 identified the dead as ‘said to be of Kosovan origin’. The phrase used – ‘close to the ground’ – struck me as wholly inappropriate in the context, a reminder that at times like these the cracks in the cutbacks facing journalism start to show. For want of a sub…

What’s at stake here is not the truth but how all the instant comment on this tragedy is rendered meaningless and devoid of inquiry. Nobody living in Petershill Drive that morning was twittering about three dead bodies lying on a grass verge. Nobody heard a thing.

As it turned out the corpses were not of Kosovan origin, but Russian: Serge Serykh, his wife, Tatiana, and – sadly – an unnamed stepson, three people who only days earlier shared a lift with their neighbours, carrying their messages, going about their business. Who knew about their eviction notice? Or the journey that led them to the Red Road flats?

Local reporting held its own, albeit reduced to a mixed and predictable blow-by-blow reckoning of events, none of which countered the line put out by the Border Control Agency, that Serykh suffered from paranoia and was deemed mentally defect, an attempt to deflect heat from their own actions. No one questioned the extent to which Serykh and his family felt the threat of the authorities.

Instead we read how the concierge on duty discovered the bodies, how the immediate neighbours weren’t aware of the incident until hours later and how they held a candlelit vigil on the grass verge where the victims fell. Depending on which paper you subscribe to, reader’s comments were on a par with the worst of East Londoner’s BNP rants about sponging asylum seekers, how they get their houses furnished, while we live in shitsville.

Last week I took a walk to Red Road to see for myself. Several blocks are due for demolition, the usual footpaths barricaded, much to the inconvenience of the locals warned off the territory by security firm notices. Such warnings would be useful if they also stated the date of the scheduled blowdown and the potential dangers of asbestos poisoning since, as many a monkey-dunger will testify – the moniker given to the men who sprayed the interiors of the Red Road flats with the stuff in the late 60s. Assuming they’re still alive.

Thankfully the weather is on my side today. Walking around the Red Road/Petershill Drive blocks, it’s hard to believe you’re in a European city. The dereliction – a film set cliché of modern slums – is almost unfathomable. The Brig Bar, located in a rubble-strewn basement, is long gone. Above, a row of shops is mostly closed and shuttered, apart from a Costcutters, a pharmacy and a fast food outlet. The scene reminds me of a trip to Tblisi I made more than a decade ago in the aftermath of the civil war in Georgia.

A guy comes out of the Red Road Pharmacy and approaches, as they always do when they see a camera. A Glasgow native, he’s friendly enough, his face sunken, yellowed, with a pronounced scar on his left cheek. I ask his opinion of the imminent demolition. Should’ve done it years ago, man, he replies, adding, I used to live in these flats and they were shit even then.

Next I see three young black boys heading home from school, running the gauntlet of a group of local white lads I spotted earlier outside Costcutters. How does this work, I wonder? What exactly is the ethnic makeup of the schools round here and how do already hard-pressed teachers negotiate their way around the prejudices and sensitivities of such a mixed group?

Rounding the corner, I watch as people come and go. Out of four blocks, I note there’s only one concierge station. But at least the kids are playing on the street and the local play park, a rare sight in any city these days. The ethnic mix is pretty evident, as Somalians, Chinese, Bangladeshis, Romanians and other nationalities I can only guess at come and go.

Like most outlying schemes in this city, it’s striking how few cars there are, as is parking provision – another oversight by the architects and planners who conceived of Red Road. I count twenty spaces per block, when each block houses roughly 240 adults, probably more. Plainly social engineering on this scale failed to factor-in aspiration, the notion that a working class wage could ever stretch to a Ford Cortina, Escort, Capri, Mondeo or Focus. The architects certainly didn’t futureproof their creation in terms of technology. Only one of the blocks boasts a mobile phone mast, those puny antlers that adorn most of the city’s high rises, once a source of militancy among the concerned middle classes, an issue now abated.

The Glasgow private taxi of choice, a Skoda Octavia, draws up. In a slow-motion sequence, out comes a white guy, pulling on his fag. It takes him a good three minutes to find and open the rear door and even longer to persuade his fellow passenger, a female, presumably his girlfriend, to get out. By the way they cling to one another, the pair are either gouching, drunk or otherwise debilitated, as they weave their way up the path towards one of the blocks. At this point I wonder – what impression do the non-indigenous have of the locals? Every white person I’ve seen here today looks like an early Peter Howson drawing – rail-thin, wax-skinned, hollowed out humanity.

With the forthcoming election, I muse on how many people here have the right to vote and how many will bother to exercise that right. In the end, what does it matter which country you’re from – Scotland included – when what you’re living with is intolerable? Seeking asylum, or refuge from the root cause – poverty – is entirely legitimate. But with immigration the hot issue in the coming election and the indigenous poor set to suffer most from cuts to public services, the outcome bodes ill for all. That said, there are conspicuous community ventures in the Red Road area where good work happens against the odds. The local nursery school with its garden is an optimistic counter to the fort-like boarded-up pubs and bookies.

I note the pine trees, a plaintive stab at landscaping. Here rugged boulders conjure in miniature a Highland scene, a place of the imagination, of solace. Standing on a grass verge I look up at one of the blocks, counting to the fifteenth floor. I stop short of imagining the last words and thoughts of the three members of the Serykh family that March night as they stood together on their veranda before mounting the thin divide separating them from the void.

When the blocks do come down, I hope the trees don’t fall with them. The Serykhs were only one of the 670 families of similar status living in the blocks. As I leave, I’m chastened by the thought that we’re all only two paycheques away from the gutter, no matter where we come from.

Anyone entering by the front door may have noticed that The Devil’s Plantation recently won the BAFTA New Talent Award in the Interactive category, an unexpected but very welcome prize. But unlike the previous awards given that evening and prior to the announcement, this category prompted a long speech referring to new media and young talent. In a mix of elation and rare confidence I mounted the stage where during my fleeting moment of glory I delivered thank-yous and a reminder that ‘young’ ought not to be equated with ‘new’, all the while thinking but not stating my conviction that talent is talent regardless of age, gender, race or creed. I got a warm response – I think – not that I recall much, being whisked off for the obligatory photograph that in the way of these events I will probably never get to see.

The ceremony was staged at the Mitchell Theatre, formerly known as St. Andrew’s Halls, originally designed in 1873 by James Sellars, an acolyte of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, and built between 1873-1878 in the Greek Revivalist style. The exterior, with statuary by John Mossman, resembles a Hollywood silent-era extravaganza and thankfully is almost intact. Much has been said of the Grand Hall, with its capacity of 4000 and near-perfect acoustics.

Tragically in late October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile crisis, the Grand Hall staged a boxing tournament after which, according to Frank Wordsall, the building went down in flames, yet another fire in a long list of fires resulting in the loss of Glasgow’s most precious buildings. During refurbishment, St. Andrew’s Halls – the grand room in particular – was greatly reduced in scale. The main arena, renamed The Mitchell Theatre, now has a capacity of 418. Back then, with mutually-assured destruction occupying our minds, the fire only made it to page 2 of The Evening Times.

Apart from memories, all that remains of the Grand Hall is a photograph, a reminder of how small our ambitions and achievements are today. With this in mind, I note that the 2010 BAFTA New Talent Awards has not received any coverage. A sign of the Times?

Tonight it was announced that my love-labour, The Devil’s Plantation is nominated in the Interactive Category for the 2010 BAFTA New Talent Awards. Needless to say I’m delighted. But I’m also very pleased for my only competitor, a wonderful woman, Helen Jackson, from Binary Fiction whose website The Lost Book, I actually stumbled on last year. And a very good site it is too. I reckon she’ll win, and I mean it sincerely because her work is so lovely and accessible whereas mine may be perceived as a bit too leftfield/arty/whatever.

It’s odd for me to be in this place, not least because ten years ago, I pretty much swept the board at the 2000 BAFTA New Talent Awards with my first feature film, One Life Stand. Truth is, I’m just pleased that my peers, especially in the new media field, deemed my efforts worthy enough to be counted. The result will be announced on the 19th March but either way I’ll celebrate whoever wins because any recognition for the work we do – too often un/low paid – is still worth doing because you can’t do it unless you love it, which makes us all privileged.