Buchanan Galleries Plan is an Excessive Reaction to Glasgow’s Slippage in the Retail Hierarchy

AM I alone in hating the city planners’ default route for anyone arriving in Glasgow at the bus station and wishing to reach the Buchanan Street shops?

Out along Killermont Street to the corner of West Nile Street, crossing the dangerously short-phase (and much abused – ask any bus driver) pedestrian lights, down the side of the Concert Hall, and then doubling back along Sauchiehall Street to Donald Dewar at the top of Buchanan Street.

There are more direct (and sheltered) alternatives – maybe not envisaged by the planners – crossing Killermont Street directly outside the bus station and either diving through the Concert Hall foyer and out down the steps at the top of Buchanan Street, or sampling the delights of John Lewis’s perfumes department en route to Buchanan Galleries.

The new, and even bigger, citycentre car-parking megastructure will presumably incorporate escalators up from the bus station cavern into an enclosed and traffic-free entry to the wondrous retail experience of the newly expanded Buchanan Galleries – thereby ensuring that practically everyone will walk through Land Securities’ development whether or not they wish to shop there.

And all this, so you report, because Glasgow is slipping down the retail hierarchy – losing out to the likes of Birmingham, Cardiff and Bristol.

I have to confess that it had never occurred to me that – if I couldn’t find it in Glasgow (as if! ) – I would just nip down the M6/ M5 to Birmingham, Bristol or Cardiff.

It’s as if our shopping culture is in a different universe to our professed recycling/wind-farming/low-energy/ zero-carbon save-our- planet lifestyle of the future – and your report made no mention of the sustainability issues of demolishing the existing massive and almost new parking building.

This development is directly above the Queen Street Station mainline railway tunnel – note to the planners: here’s your opportunity to de-bottleneck the railway by putting in the badly needed third track, and prepare for Crossrail, to help redress the nonsense of attracting even more cars into the city centre. How about it?

At least that would make some sense of flattening such recent buildings, or are we just interested in civic pride and retail overkill, with real city-scale planning trailing along a very poor third?

Robert Wakeham, Tigh Mor na-h-aird, Castleton, by Lochgilphead.

AFTER less than 10 years – yesterday in construction terms – Buchanan Galleries want to demolish their car park and build more shops, bringing more years of noise, dirt and disruption to the city centre.

Perhaps the city planners and Buchanan Galleries’ owners should just have got it right first time rather than indulging in this bungling, piecemeal development.

The lack of bigger shops doesn’t discourage shoppers; a city centre that is a perpetual building site does.

Stuart Neville, 23 Lilac Avenue, Clydebank.

(c) 2007 Herald, The; Glasgow (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.