IT is a story that artist and writer Alasdair Gray delighted in retelling around the time of the publication of his A Life In Pictures book.

Back in Glasgow's annus mirabilis, one of the showpieces of the year as City of Culture was intended to be an exhibition of the history of the Dear Green Place in the arches beneath Glasgow Central Station. Launched with much fanfare, and with reams of ruched silky fabric cladding down-at-heel Midland Street, Glasgow's Glasgow was not by any measure one of the successes of 1990, and lost a deal of money.

The detail that Gray loves is that the show's original title, preserved in the accompanying catalogue, was The Words And The Stones, ditched only when someone eventually realised that it made a less-than-flattering acronym. I thought of it again when the demolition of the Red Road flats was proposed as a Commonwealth Games curtain-raiser.

When Glasgow's Glasgow closed, the Arches declined to. The best thing about the show had been the small, highly mobile troupe of players, directed by Andy Arnold, who animated the city's history with performances amidst the static exhibits. Arnold loved the space and found it even more inspiring without the clutter of an uninspired social history exhibition. British Rail had no alternative tenant so he took his time handing back the keys as he developed a business model that combined experimental, but far from inaccessible, theatre-making supported by the box office from late-night club events, which themselves often incorporated an element of performance art.

For many years The Arches received absolutely no subsidy from anywhere, but it worked, and had a quite unique atmosphere. I can testify because the band I played with was one of its regular acts in the early days. Sometimes we even got paid.

Since those more rough-and-ready days, the Arches operation has professionalised, and the business model it pioneered has been aped elsewhere. Arnold moved on to the Tron, but succession planning was seamless. Considerable Lottery money had been invested in the development of unusable areas of the building and making the whole place more habitable. The style of work that the venue fosters has changed with the times, but if anything it is more crucial to Glasgow and Scotland than at any time in its history. The Arches is a laboratory for cutting-edge work and inventive shows originated there have gone on to take the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and then the global theatre circuit, by storm. A new generation of Scottish theatre-makers has been nurtured at the Arches.

Sustaining that work, the club nights continue alongside the art. The raw feel of the railway arches has never gone out of fashion, no matter what changed in musical tastes - and that is not me bemoaning the lack of a recent gig. I don't know whether there is more drug-taking by people on a night out now than there was in the 1990s, but I do recall the strict enforcement of anti-drug measures back then, when a chap who removed his shirt was deemed to be likely to have ingested something suspect and summarily dispatched, topless, into Midland Street. I suspect processes are subtler these days, but the Arches' rigorous reporting policy has meant that the police are in a dialogue with the venue that they enjoy with few other city nightclubs under less enlightened management. For Police Scotland and the City Council to scapegoat the Arches for a problem they are failing to get to grips with city-wide is reprehensible in the extreme.