Glasgow. A city that needs no explanation to those who feel its excitement, history and promise run them.

I fell in love with it as a student, and there has been no turning back on this great place that has shaped my life. There is nowhere like Glasgow and nobody like Glaswegians.

This week, there was a lot of talk about the city in our office as the closure of the hugely popular Le Chardon d’Or restaurant, on West Regent Street, led to an emotional piece from writer Alison Rowat which topped our digital charts for days.

“Our poor, dear, once beautiful city is in a bad way,” wrote Rowat, “and it is going to get worse if something is not done.”

Readers heard her cry as she declared the state of Glasgow a ‘national emergency’, using the closure of Le Chardon d’Or as an example of decline – and the need for action.

“The closure of one restaurant, much loved as it was, might not seem to amount to much in the greater sweep of things, but it does,” she wrote. “Like any city, Glasgow is an ecosystem. It needs careful monitoring to see what’s going right and wrong. The litter and the empty shops should have been enough on their own to ring alarm bells but apparently not.”

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So, what is to be done about Glasgow? How does it recover fully from the pandemic? The challenges of hybrid working? How does it reinvent itself in 2023? How does it solve the problem of its empty shops and struggling businesses?

Rowat’s piece is just one we have covered this week on the topic – and there are many more to come as we examine the issues facing Glasgow, but also look for solutions to its problems. On Wednesday, our deputy business editor, Scott Wright, echoed Rowat’s views that there is more to this story ‘than the failure of this single restaurant, painful though it is for everyone involved’.

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Recognising all the problems facing Glasgow, and the severity of them, he called on the ‘powers that be’ to seize the initiative with a ‘grand vision that we can all get behind’. We are all surely desperate for this. Our loyal readers have their views on the subject too, many getting in touch in response to our coverage.

“I wish to commend Rowat on her detailed, intelligent, angry and total summation of the state of our Dear Green Place. This is writing of the highest standard,” wrote Walter Paul, from the city.

What I loved about this letter, was not only the passion for Glasgow (noting its friendly people in particular) but recognising the collective responsibility all Glaswegians have for their city.

“I know it is easy to blame those in charge – in this case the SNP-led Glasgow City Council – for the demise of a once-wonderful city,” Paul wrote. “But we must also remember it is us who live and work in and use a city's amenities; it is us (or at least some of us) who throw litter wherever and whenever, it is us who damage walls, windows, building, statues with paint, crayons, hammers, whatever.”

We all do indeed have a responsibility to shape the future of Glasgow. The Herald recognises its role in that. This is not a topic we will be letting go.

Catherine Salmond
Editor