If you think you know Byres Road, I recommend you do what I’ve just done and take a stroll along it with Barclay Price. Barclay is an author and historian who’s written a fine new book about the famous Glasgow street and as we walked down it the other day, he kept stopping every few yards to point out something I’d never seen before, or tell me something I didn’t know, some of it fascinating, some of it horrifying to be honest. I thought I knew this place, but didn’t.

The sometimes-violent history of the street was particularly interesting. Barclay told me how, back in the 1960s, a guy in the pub came at him with a hatchet. He also told me about the gangs with exuberant names – the Maryhill Fleet, the Partick Cross Boys – for whom Byres Road was the territorial border. And a little further back in history, he talked about the riots at Curlers pub in the 19th century and the murder in Ruthven Lane and the murder in Ashton Lane. It’s a colourful history, the history of Byres Road, and sometimes the colour is red.

But the more we walked and talked, the more I felt like there was a message to be picked up from the street for people, like me, like you probably, who are worried about the state of Glasgow: the big (suspicious) fires that have broken out, the bulldozers that have moved in, the shutters that have come down, the decay, the neglect, the rubble. I don’t want to exaggerate – there are huge parts of this extraordinary city that are still wonderful and beautiful and well-preserved – but you know what I’m talking about. You can see it.

What struck me about Byres Road in particular is that in some ways it’s been immune to the changes and in some ways it hasn’t. Down at the bottom of the road, I got talking to Elizabeth Graham who runs the barber shop........

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