When Stuart Gulliver arrived in Glasgow in 1978 to work as an economic development strategist, the city was desperately in need of a plan. Its population had crashed by almost 25% in the previous 20 years. Its swagger as the empire’s second city, with a Manhattan-style grid and a wealth of grandiloquent but by then decaying architecture, had evaporated. Its factories, shipyards and steelworks were closing.
The people of Glasgow were getting steadily poorer and sicker. And as one wit suggested at the time, its only tourists were people who had got lost trying to go somewhere else.
