Sometimes you wonder if we’re all living in an artisan theme park, visible only to those who don’t live here. Hardly a month passes without yet another travel survey or tourist website proclaiming that Scotland is the coolest destination on the planet.

A cursory glance at cuttings gathered over the last few years alone suggests that Scotland in its entirety should be designated a UNESCO world heritage site. No matter that child poverty, urban deprivation and drug-related deaths are running at worst-in-Europe levels. This is the coolest country on earth and we all need to calm down. Everyone says so.  

The editorial team at Time Out should be awarded the freedom of the city. Glasgow features annually in their best-of lists. Earlier this year, the city was number four on the magazine’s list of the world’s best cities.

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Last year, they said that Great Western Road was the third coolest street in the world. Last December, Finnieston got a wee turn for being a “go-to hipster hub”.

And then last week, another bauble. Glasgow’s West End is now 20th overall in its list of the world’s 40 coolest neighbourhoods. They repeat an old legend. “Glasgow has changed,” says Time Out. Really?

Who knew? And then they trot out the stuff about our previous “bad rep”, which is now about 40 years old. 

And so, last week I embarked on my own mini-urban peregrination around the West End of Glasgow, to check out what I’ve been missing. I had to start at Glasgow University, of course.  

Every time I walk through this community, it seems to have sprouted another few acres of buildings. You might be forgiven for thinking that the West End has merely become an extension of Glasgow University’s sprawling campus, an area so big it will soon be printing its own currency.  

You simply can’t escape the University, whose £1 billion campus development is currently spreading out over University Avenue and Byres Road towards Kelvingrove Park.

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It’s now this old neighbourhood’s chief defining characteristic. A walk through these buildings, though, is a depressing experience. I count nine featureless, rectangular chrome and concrete  boxes bearing no discernible relationship to each other. 

They seem shiftless and impermanent, giving little reason to pause. Much of this space has replaced the old and unlovely Western Infirmary and many of us thought that, at the very least, there might be an improvement. This space though, shuts out the views in every direction. A functional, anywheresville with no connection whatsoever to the built environment around it or the community that live there. They’re utility buildings.  

Perhaps though, I’m being unfair. Perhaps I need to revisit this place in a year’s time. Who better to talk about this place than Zara Gladman, whose short videos featuring her West End mum character are the funniest offerings on all social media platforms.  

You must have seen her inspired West End Mums pastiche of the Pet Shop Boys’  West End Girls. “I’m a West End mum in Glasgow City; Chairwoman of Dowanhill Tennis Committee. I’m a West End mum with an eye for décor; from the Ruthven Lanes to the Oran Mor.” 

I’m interviewing her for a feature on her burgeoning comedy career, but I feel moved to tell her about my tour of the university. We’re in Partick, another neighbourhood once considered insalubrious but now deemed fit and smart. Not for the first time, I clumsily stick my size 11s right in it. In her day job,

Ms Gladman is a scientist and Public and Community Engagement manager at Glasgow University. She gently reproves me.

“It was my job last year to organise a community festival to celebrate the opening of one of those buildings,” she tells me.  

“That’s so West End,” I say. “A community festival to celebrate the opening of a university building.” 

But she’s having none of my nonsense. “Well, to be fair, part of the agreement for the university getting to build that was that it would be a public resource. Much of it will be open to the public with cafés and exhibition spaces. These new developments are meant to be seamlessly part of the local community.”  

She talks about St Mungo’s Square in the middle of these buildings. “It’s actually very rare to find such a large public space in the West End. I had to engage with several local community groups.”  

She tells me how the organisers of the old West End festival – now called Westfest – had told her that it’s now prohibitively expensive to stage their street parades owing to council charges for shutting off roads.  

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“They’re now looking to use that space, so there’s an opportunity for that to become a civic space. You could have rallies, festivals, stages. Young skateboarders and dog walkers are already using it. It’s really too early to cast judgment on it.” 

Her views are endorsed by Cat McFarlane who has been in the West End for 12 years, after 30 living in London. She’s one of several who hailed the opening of the Partick-Govan Bridge as a game-changer for both Govan and the West End.  

“My hope is that when the bridge opens, we’ll get the Govan attitude flowing this way and some of the money from here flowing the other way and that it will create a great wee micro-hub, like Govanhill x 10. 

“Architecturally, Govan’s way better than the West End. If I had the money, I’d get a big flat there, do it up and go and move there. It’s dead cool. It’s Glaswegian cool, whereas the West End is more European cool, but that’s OK. 

“I like to host many of my old friends from London. People like you and me can tend to look at the West End through jaded eyes, but Londoners come here, fatigued by the sheer size and volume of their home city, and absolutely love it.  

“By square foot, we’ve got more theatre, stand-up, music and edgy stuff like slam poetry than in any part of London. We should celebrate it more. Just because we’re a bit jaded and middle-aged and not accessing it, doesn’t mean it’s not shimmying. Culturally, it’s got everything.  

“Over two days last week, I took my friends to Glengoyne distillery. We were there in 20 minutes. We were at the Lake of Menteith in about an hour. And then back for a curry at Mother India the same day. That’s why it’s cool.” 

Perhaps some of us come at it from a nostalgic and very sentimental point of view that wants to preserve what we once knew and loved in a jar of aspic: comfortable, familiar, never changing. Ms McFarlane also dismisses my criticism of the new university campus development.   

“I don’t think you can put the boot in when it’s not yet been fully developed,” she says. “It’s a development in a development. It’s not been planted out. It’s not yet got lots of people using it. There’s no buskers yet, but we’ll see them. It’s like looking at an empty flat. When people get in, they make it a home. Re-visit this place in a year.  

“It’s a great link to the park without meeting any traffic. So there’ll be prams, bicycles, monocycles. And it’s all fully wheelchair accessible. It might look like s*** at the moment but architecture doesn’t bring a place to life: it is people who do that. And they will, believe me.” 

Now, if only the council officials could revoke some of the most punitive parking rates in the west of Scotland. Since I was last here, two cafes on Queen Margaret Drive have shut. One of the contributory factors is the massive hikes in parking rates since the pandemic.  

“The people who ran those cafes told me that people just stopped popping in because the parking charges were so prohibitive,” says Cat McFarlane.

“It’s an unfair tax on what they consider the wealthy. I’m not wealthy. Nor are most people who live here. There’s a still a lot of social housing over here. The art gallery is supposed to be free, but if a young family comes over from East Kilbride, they’re looking at upwards of £12 just to park.”