Last week I spied a reader’s letter in the Herald’s sister paper, the Evening Times, headed City in Turmoil.

The author was bothered about the number of building sites and associated road closures in Glasgow city centre and asked: “When is this ever going to end?”

My answer to that would be hopefully never.

I remember at a very early stage in my career being tasked with climbing one of the city’s tall buildings to count cranes. 

Not the ones at the Govan shipyard - although they remain an important symbol of a lively shipbuilding industry on the Clyde - but rather those on construction sites working on development of new buildings across the city.

My job was to find more cranes in Glasgow than you could in Edinburgh and, with a little judicious squinting in the right directions, it was just about possible.

The point of this task was to reiterate that Glasgow was a city heading in the right direction, no longer a victim of steady decline but one that was an attractive centre of investment.

The crane count is, of course, a rather crude assessment of investment levels, but I was prompted to revisit the thinking behind it after noting the arrival of a new crane on the site of Scottish Opera’s expansion of the Theatre Royal. It is just down the road from another two cranes that have been ushering into existence the new Glasgow School of Art facilities at Garnethill. 

And every time I drive to Glasgow Airport, I pass the massive emerging structure that is the new campus for South Glasgow Hospitals.

But instead of simply counting cranes - this time with no competitive Glasgow-Edinburgh instincts since our days of having to do that are over - I started totting up the investments already started or those that have been announced with a firm intention to begin in the near future.

 So far, without trying too hard, I’ve been able to find more than £4bn worth.  The South Glasgow Hospitals campus is certainly the largest on the go at the moment, with a contract value of £842m, and it’s not difficult to see why when you get up close.

But there are a number of others in the £100m-plus category. Some have a touch of glamour, like The Hydro arena at the SECC, being built by the Scottish operation of infrastructure company Lend Lease. Others are perhaps a little less sparkly, but no less important, such as the £250m Scottish Water is investing in the management of Glasgow’s waste water and flood prevention provision, and the £145m being devoted to the Polmadie waste recycling and renewable energy plant.

We also have £200m of new campus about to begin for the City of Glasgow College on Cathedral Street, and a £300m refurbishment of our Subway system already well under way. 

Both the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow are planning expansions of their campuses into the hundreds of millions, with Strathclyde’s £89m Technology and Innovation Centre (TIC), also being built by Lend Lease, already coming out of the ground on George Street.  And the city council has committed to more than £250m over the next four years for the refurbishment of our primary schools, following on from the previous programme to improve secondary schools. 

Glasgow Housing Association continues its extensive investment in the city’s housing stock with more than £240m from 2011 to 2014. For the Commonwealth Games we have a further £245m going into the athletes village, with the Emirates Arena next door already finished and opened for business. Aiming at the 2018 Youth Olympics bid, the £250m regeneration of Sighthill will follow a similar pattern in bringing regeneration to parts of the city where it’s most needed.

The list of developments valued under £100m is just as varied and just as heartening - £50m at Glasgow School of Art, a £70m development involving BAM at 110 Queen Street and £60m from Mountgrange at the former Odeon cinema in Renfield Street - and provides much needed Grade A office space.

Clyde Gateway has another £24m going into offices on the banks of the Clyde at Dalmarnock, and we hope soon to see ScottishPower’s HQ going up next to the M8 on St Vincent Street.

Land Securities recently opened its £70m retail development at the top of Buchanan Street and is now seeking permission for a further £350m to expand the Galleries in a joint investment with Henderson Global.

Glasgow Airport is investing a total of £17m in the terminal in time to welcome visitors to the Commonwealth Games, and £40m is committed by Strathclyde Partnership for Transport to the delivery of the Fastlink scheme.

Scottish Water is spending £3.5m on the upgrading of water mains in the city centre, and £4.6m has gone into the new Park Inn by Radisson nearing completion on West George Street.

And all that is without asking for details of the spending of individual businesses whose capital investment is less physically obvious. 

National figures suggest that investment is slow, that government at all levels has slashed its capital budgets and large corporations are holding on to their cash.

But I certainly wasn’t able to find £4bn worth of investment as a youngster all those years back when I stood on the roof of a city car park counting cranes. It shows just how far we’ve come.

 

Stuart Patrick is the chief executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce