STOCKWELL Street, just off Glasgow’s Trongate, has changed considerably in the 45 years since this photograph was taken. Part of the street,” the Evening Times wrote in May 1973, “is covered by the old railway bridge along which trains to and from St Enoch station trundled. Now modern cars use the bridge which leads to the massive car-park at the old station.” Those shopkeepers whose properties were under the old bridge were, almost literally, in the dark.

The street was home to a cluster of retail names, some old, some new. Henry Healy’s latest grocery shop had opened a few months earlier, the only one in the Healy chain with a snack-bar. The House of Brahms, a furniture store, had opened at roughly the same time. “Continental furniture is all the rage at the moment, with French and Swedish furniture to the fore,” the paper said. At number 8 was Latters, a department store. Its female fashions included short tie-belt jackets, which many young women favoured at the time. Its budget wedding dresses retailed for between £16 and £40.

At number 43 was Jackson’s Fur Shop, which had relocated there from Langside in 1962. Nearby, Granite House was enjoying the fruits of a year-long exercise in which its store had been modernised. It specialised in furniture and it now devoted some 10,000 square feet of what it termed “a most impressive Exhibition of 1973 Furniture. What a show it is ...”