Keith Bruce

On one of my all too infrequent visits to A Play A Pie and A Pint at Oran Mor this past year, I found myself sitting next to a young couple from North West England having a cultural break in Glasgow. I confess to being a little taken aback. There was nothing special going on in the city at the time. It was just before Easter and the comedy festival had recently ended. The chief topic on The Herald's arts pages the previous week had been news of the upcoming seasons from our national orchestras, and the summer programme of cultural events to accompany the Commonwealth Games was still (obsessively) under wraps. It struck me as even more bizarre that the main event of the visitors' weekend in the Dear Green Place had been the concert by the group Elbow the previous night. The couple had travelled up from Manchester to see a band from Bury in the Hydro. A band that was, of course, playing in Manchester on the same tour.

The confession I should make is that still seems unremarkable to me, an Edinburgh lad who has spent almost all of his working life in Glasgow, that tourists should flock to our picturesque capital at any time of year and perfectly understandable that they find it irresistible at Festivaltime and, more recently, Hogmanay. But the sprawl of Glasgow, although studded with buildings as fine as the capital can offer, and boasting a much fuller cultural calendar than Edinburgh can provide at any time outside August, I cannot help but view as being designed primarily for the citizenry of Scotland's largest conurbation, and perhaps people from the rest of Scotland who regularly travel to it to shop. I may have reported on the transformation of the reputation and image of the city though cultural spending since the idea was first thought of - by what was really no more than a coincidence I happened to be in the office where news of Glasgow's success in bidding for the title of European City of Culture 1990 was first received, 28 years ago now - but I still have difficulty seeing the city as a holiday destination. Much like Manchester really.

You would be entitled to bear all of that in mind when I express some cynicism about the claims being made for the Hydro as a venue that is drawing visitors to the city in their droves, and the economic spin-off to the city from its first year of existence valued at £130m according to a news report in this very journal at the start of the week. As arenas go, the venue is undoubtedly one of the better ones, particularly once you are inside. I'm not very enamoured of the front-of-house areas, but the auditorium itself can be made to feel surprisingly intimate by a performer as skilled as Prince, and the sound in the venue is as good as I have encountered in any vast acoustic of its ilk. And its waterfront architecture, particularly taken together with Norman Foster's other Broomielaw venue, the Clyde Auditorium, made a striking visual identity for Glasgow as the home of the Commonwealth Games this summer, although whether that was novelty at the expense of more valuable treasures of the city's built heritage is a debate that could doubtless exercise Herald letters page contributors for many weeks.

However, the claim in the same article that the Hydro is responsible for the success of Finnieston as the latest trendy barrio of Glasgow and that end of Argyle Street being a street of swanky new restaurants and hip drinking dens seems a little bold. It is very easy to date the start of the development of that street because Crabshakk, the first restaurant of the new eateries to open there, boasts about it on its website. It started serving its highly regarded fish dishes in February 2009, almost five years before Rod the Mod strutted out on to the Hydro stage. Obviously the thousands who attend gigs in the new venue have done trade in Finnieston no harm whatsoever, but its contribution to the fashionability of the area is debatable. If the Hydro is that keen on the Finnieston link, it might encourage the city to do something about the pedestrian assault course it currently is to get from the Argyle Street hostelries to the arena itself.

That fact that needs addressed is evidence that Glasgow, like any proper city, develops in an organic and unplanned way, whatever the city fathers and agencies try to do. Hence the stop/start growth of the Merchant City, the "Sauchiehall Street problem", and the sudden designation of Finnieston as a hip hangout. And it is not tourists who determine that at all, it is the people who live in the place and make a dependable lasting contribution to its infrastructure. By all means cite bed-nights as one measure of the Hydro's success, but it is native Glaswegians that the Hydro and its stars should cherish.