It’s a chilly night in Glasgow, but the cobbled streets are busy with people in their Saturday-evening best. The working week’s behind them, and now it’s party time.

Image credit: Shining Darkness

In this city, once dismissed as dying, there’s a spirit that overrides anything the economy can throw at it. Once the engine-room of the Empire, ‘Clyde-built’ was the guarantee of quality; but a trip “doon the watter” to Braehead is a quiet journey these days, most of the shipyards now lying silent and still.

In the city itself, though, life buzzes, whether it’s a couple of young Goths jigging as they pass a busking bagpiper, or laughing banter between the stall-holders and customers at the bustling Barras, selling everything from a cell-phone to a sporran. Shoppers also throng at elegant old Princes Arcade and sleek modern Buchanan Galleries; while those looking for culture find it in spades throughout the city.

There’s art and history not only inside the grand stone buildings, but on their outsides too: ornate Victorian Gothic, built to impress, alongside the dainty Art Nouveau creations of Charles Rennie Macintosh. Common folk have their tributes too, and upstairs in Buccleugh Street the neat and comfortable home of Miss Agnes Toward has been preserved as she left it 100 years ago, complete with coal bunker in the kitchen and gas lamps keeping it warm.

She would have frequented the Willow Tea Rooms, where a full afternoon tea of scones, sandwiches and butter shortcake is served by waitresses in black uniforms with frilled white aprons.

It’s a world away from King Tut’s Wah Wah House and the other clubs down in the streets, where the traffic cone on the head of the Duke of Wellington’s statue is both a permanent fixture and a signal that this city is all about having fun.

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