ABANDONED buildings can be objects of eerie, faded beauty.

James Glasgow, the man who owned Glasgow's Pavilion Theatre, became enmeshed in debt, and his home in Bridge of Weir was boarded up for two decades with his Rolls-Royce slowly rusting in the garage. It became a magnet for those who like exploring abandoned sites - it's not every day you can sit in a Rolls-Royce for free. Might still be there if the argument over who owns the house is still undecided.

Exploring derelict buildings is a right of passage of the young, their hearts pounding while climbing in an open window, fear fuelled by tales of ghosts, usually told by older children who copied them from the cartoon tales of Scooby Doo. In Scotstounhill where I grew up there were few buildings old enough to be abandoned as most of the land had been recent fields, although there were the pre-fabs - pre-fabricated houses hastily thrown up which were only expected to be used for a few years. You could climb in them when they were originally abandoned, but as they were all uniformly the same, exploring them quickly grew tiresome. Hopefully the fibre stuffing coming out the walls wasn't asbestos.

Joe Shaldon is also an explorer of abandoned buildings in Glasgow, and photographs of his work, taken from his Derelict Glasgow website, are on display at the Lighthouse design centre in Mitchell Lane. Joe though is not simply a collector of old buildings, drawn to them by the poignancy and beauty of decay. He is a building surveyor with a degree in architecture who poses the simple question - what should be done with the abandoned buildings in Glasgow?

And there are lots of them. Some 150 listed buildings in the city are at risk, with thousands of others, unlisted, whose future is slowly disappearing as the wet, cold weather of Glasgow begins inevitably to pull the fabric of the buildings apart.

It is strange, says Joe, that while you have to put your car through an MoT to ensure it is roadworthy, no such obligatory test exists for your house. Yes, there are Dangerous Building Notices, which councils can use, but they are not forced to do so. Often a building might be abandoned because the owner owes money, so the building is then owned by a bank. It can then be bundled up in the bank's toxic debt and sold on to another financial instution which is barely aware it owns it, and is certainly not going to spend any money on it.

A community organisation might contact the owners and offer a token pound to buy it and spend money on converting it into somethig useful. The owner won't sell however, believing the land alone must be worth more than that. Meanwhile, the groping fingers of decay continue to tear at the building, paying no heed to delays while ownership disputes are sorted out.

The knee-jerk reaction that "the council should do something about it" is often misdirected as the council may have no say in the matter.

Some buildings are lost entirely. Springburn Halls in the north of the city, one of the few landmarks in an otherwise scenically-challenged area, was recently bulldozed as no rescue plan that gave the building a secure financial future could be worked out.

It often takes an outsider to point out the deficiences in Glasgow. If you come out of Zaha Hadid's multimillion-pound award-winning transport museum in Glasgow, what you see across the road is the brick-built Scotway House, an impressive old shipyard drawing office, a Category B listed building, windows boarded over, doors covered in steel plate, and slates missing from the roof. There are the usual perfunctory notices about security firms being used but who are never seen. The press carried jaunty stories some years ago that Scotway House would become Scotland's rock'n'roll hall of fame. Other less credible stories told of it being taken down brick by brick and rebuilt elsewhere. We're still waiting to hear the music.

Glaswegians coming out of the transport museum barely notice it as boarded up windows lack novelty value. But an American visitor looked over and asked: "Why would you abandon a beautiful old building like that?" Why indeed.

Joe Shaldon though, despite his love of Glasgow architecture, is no idealist. "You can't indulge a heritage fantasy of saving all the buildings. Glasgow is a city of much social deprivation, and decisions on how much money should be diverted to buildings have to be taken," he says.

Nor are all the buildings things of beauty, or at least beauty as most of us see it. Joe's Derelict Glasgow website also details a McDonald's drive through in Govan which lay abandoned for many years before being demolished recently. But who are we to say that our children in decades to come will not be nostalgic for such buildings from their youth.

Simple changes, says Joe, could help old buildings such as the fact that new build is zero-rated for VAT, but refurbishing old buildings carries VAT of 20%. Changing that would help. After all, abandoned buildings attract vandalism, can be unsightly, and one study suggests can depress house prices surrounding it by up to 18%.

However, saving older buildings has dropped down the political agenda. The great days of tenement refurbishment have stopped in Glasgow. With a crisis developing in factoring tenements, many are now falling into a poor state of repair.

If the political will to do something is not rediscovered then the state of Glasgow's buildings may eventually became scarier than any Scooby Doo cartoon.