At Large: Flying high in the west end

I'm talking here about the horseshoe bar that was in The Halt pub in Glasgow's Woodlands Road. It is no more, as Petra, boss of the West Brewery on Glasgow Green, has indeed gone west by taking over The Halt, spending £350,000 on it, and reopened it as the very cool, sunny, and food-serving West on the Corner.

But there is no horseshoe bar. I used to stand there in that gloomy bar, watching the dust play on the muted sunbeams forcing their way through the clouds of fag smoke, with one foot on the brass rail at the bottom of the bar. It was never a beautiful pub The Halt. It was so named as there was a tram terminus outside called The Halt. Imagination was never a required skill in naming pubs in those days. Food consisted then of small packets of peanuts pulled from a cardboard sheet pinned to the wall on which was printed a fetching young woman in a bikini. It must have been the slowest strip-tease in history as she was leisurely revealed over many weeks as packets were purchased.

Pubs were for standing in then. Somehow the bar staff had more space than the customers who simply lined up at the bar, with the only convenience being a brass hook to hang your jacket on when those rare warm days permeated Glasgow. The Horse Shoe Bar in Drury Street is of course still of that traditional design. It was in the Guinness Book of Records for having the longest continuous bar in Europe. I once asked the late Dave Smith who ran The Horse Shoe how they knew it was the longest. "We didn't." he told me. "But no one ever came forward to say their's was longer, so the Guinness folk were happy to put it in the book."

So I'm in the former Halt, trying to get my bearings. There is a kitchen now at the back of one of the bars. There are tables where folk are chatting, eating, drinking, with light streaming in from new windows. No longer is pub-going a pursuit that has to be undertaken behind walls of concrete and wainscotting as if you were doing something you ought to be ashamed of, and you had to be hidden away from the public.

"So what happened to the horse shoe bar?" I persist in asking Petra as I cling to the memory of the centrepiece of the old Halt. "No one wanted it," says Petra. "We advertised it, but no one came forward. Eventually we sold it to a joiner who has cut it up for his kitchen in his flat. I was told there would be an outcry, but if people had supported The Halt it wouldn't have gone bust."

The money paid for the wooden bar has gone to a homeless charity. Indeed the profits from the first Thursday every month at West at Glasgow Green goes to such a charity. So some good has come out of its disappearance.

But should we yearn for our past and wish that such bars remain as they are for ever? Perhaps not. For while we have good memories of the serendipitous conversations we would have with the strangers that we would chance upon in such pubs, there were darker overtones of drunks allowed to prop up bars who really should have been sent home hours earlier to waiting families.

My other memory of The Halt is of course the statue of cartoon character Lobey Dosser, built by funds raised from Herald Diary readers, which sits opposite the bar. It was the quixotic idea of my former colleague Tom Shields who rather liked the idea of a statue of a cartoon individual, although the actual process from drawing board to unveiling was a tortuous one.

So the bars of Glasgow are changing. The west end around Byres Road was always popular, but the streets leading to the west end from the city centre were neglected thoroughfares, full of bars like The Halt, a bit cheaper but also a bit down at heel. Then came the rejuvenation of Finnieston and its Argyle Street passage to the west end. Now Woodlands Road, another artery to the west, is becoming more attractive with redevelopments such as West on the Corner.

Petra, a blonde, ideas-fizzing Bavarian who came to Glasgow as a student and never left, opened the West brewery at Glasgow Green after her dad visited, tried a local lager and declared it was "scheisse" - no, I'm not sure myself, presumably it is German for "inferior quality" - and wondered why Scots, who drank so much beer, didn't worry more about its quality.

So Petra was inspired to open the micro-brewery West, and among its beers is the truly remarkable St Mungo's lager which is now even sold at a trendy harbour bar in Hong Kong where it is the only draught lager. While Petra has been opening West on the Corner she has also been developing an even larger brewery inside the old Templeton's carpet factory at Glasgow Green which will increase production tenfold.

On the walls of the new pub are pictures of the loves of Petra's life - her nine-year-old son Noah and their golden retriever Heidi. But there is also a photograph of Amelia Earhart the flying pioneer. Amelia once said: "There is more to life than being a passenger." It's because of people such as Petra not wanting to be a passenger that Glasgow, one feels, is changing for the better.