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The Glasgow Road that Vanished

Glasgow, once the Second City of the great British Empire; now a city in flux and constant upheaval as it tries to reinvent itself. Perhaps 'reinvent' isn't quite the right word, but in trying to improve the look of the city and the lives of its inhabitants, Glasgow has at times turned its back on the past and destroyed its stone-built heritage. Too many architecturally stunning buildings have seen the wrecker's ball to make room for motorways or high-rise flats - concrete cliffs with windows, as someone described them. No wonder seagulls love the place. Parliamentary Road is but one example of a city that has lost its way, a city whose striving for betterment involves the adorning of blinkers and the turning of backs to its past. Often, there are no blinkers involved, and the city's fine buildings have been knowingly demolished. Parliamentary Road first appeared around the middle of the 19th century. One of the first major structures to be built on it was the Glasgow Lunatic Asylum, later to become the Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum. Gradually more buildings appeared along the length of the road, from the eastern end of Sauchiehall Street, at what is now the steps of the Concert Hall, all the way to the Monklands Canal basin at Townhead, now sitting under a spaghetti junction of motorways and flyovers. It was a major road in Glasgow, lined with tenements and churches and businesses. It had a bus station ... ... oh, that was before Buchanan Bus Station, which took away part of Parliamentary Road. That was the problem, you see, every Tom, Dick and Harry was wanting to take a bit away from Parliamentary Road. So now there's absolutely nothing left of it. Everything - the tenements, shops, pubs, churches ... everything, was quite simply swept away and buried under either the Townhead Interchange and M8 motorway, that huge housing estate at Townhead, Buchanan Bus Station, and Buchanan Galleries and Concert Hall. I mean, even the old toll house has gone. It was there in the early 19th century, sitting on Dobbies Loan on the banks of the St Enoch Burn, before Parliamentary Road was even imagined. And when the road was built it became part of it, sitting at 255 Parliamentary Road. Gone. Everything. The stone-built history of the whole area has quite simply been blitzed. And to make way for what? Modernity, that's what; high-rise flats and shopping malls where you can keep dry while shopping but have to think long and hard about what city you're in. Because these malls all look the same, don't they? Parliamentary Road looked a bit like other Glasgow streets, but its individuality lay in its people, and the lives they lived. They stayed in the tenements; they drank in the pubs, shopped in the shops, and ran to catch buses in the Dundas Street Bus Station, whose remnants now lie under Buchanan Galleries. This is a story about losses: the loss of the past, and a city that has lost its way.