It was meant to be a pleasant stroll along the River Clyde. Little did the couple know they had meandered into the underbelly of Scotland’s largest city—public enemy territory. Still haunted by the city centre Clydeside two weeks on, Councillor James Scanlon demanded action.

“Two weeks ago my wife and I walked around that stretch and the smell of hash was unbelievable. I had a sore head for 24 hours,” he told the most recent full council meeting.

The stretch of the Clyde he encountered was “ghetto like”. What was being done to remedy this blight?

Other pearl-clutching residents agreed. The graffiti was “hideous, tasteless, provocative and frightening,” they told him.

The Glasgow stretch of the River Clyde gets a bad rap. The city and the country have turned their backs on it. The very resource the city was built on, that made Glasgow the Second City of the Empire, has been reduced to a watery grave for nextbikes and shopping carts. Privatisation, lack of investment, neglect, deindustrialization. Good old Milk Snatcher Margaret Thatcher stole the thing right out from under Glaswegians and sold it piecemeal to private companies. The infuriating and depressing legacy lives on.

In a recent podcast series called Who Owns The Clyde?, architect Jude Barber and crime writer Louise Welsh unpack the complicated nature of its current patchwork of ownership. Presented by The Empire Café, the project originally sought to map the ownership of the Clyde: its banks, riverbed, sky above, the land on either side. But what they stumbled into was an opaque web of ownership that became near impossible to untangle. The derelict gap sites dotted........

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