The aims of the plan to increase value are to encourage people to stay for longer and the city will target markets where people spend more cash.
To do this it is recognised that Glasgow will have to be easily reachable from those markets.
Target foreign markets are apparently USA, Canada, Germany and France. It's likely to be an uphill battle with no direct flights to the USA and having lost destinations in the other 3 in recent years, with no replacements.
I would've thought visitors from Scandinavia would be high value and iirc market research I saw a while ago said they placed high value on shopping and food and drink opportunities. Unfortunately the less said the better wrt GLA's failure to land Scandinavian routes.
And then they demolish Buchanan Galleries. Turn it into Vegan woffy tufu diners and Meditation spaces.
Lets guess how much the focus group who came up with this joined up belter got...
I really don't get why anyone would want to visit Glasgow these days. It's a horror show. Everyone around the four Central Station streets look like they want to kill you. Sh*t everywhere and it's not all animal excrement. Junkies, jakies and neds ruling the streets now. 7.30 tonight looked like a war zone or the film set for some sort of apocalypse movie. Awful. It's maybe a blessing in disguise that nobody can fly here direct.
Apologies for the thread drift by the way.
bill wrote: ↑Wed Sep 27, 2023 11:00 pm
I really don't get why anyone would want to visit Glasgow these days. It's a horror show. Everyone around the four Central Station streets look like they want to kill you. Sh*t everywhere and it's not all animal excrement. Junkies, jakies and neds ruling the streets now. 7.30 tonight looked like a war zone or the film set for some sort of apocalypse movie. Awful. It's maybe a blessing in disguise that nobody can fly here direct.
Apologies for the thread drift by the way.
I agree the city centre badly needs cleaned up, the streets are filthy and "to let" signs are everywhere, with many closed shops and offices. The streets around Central and Queen Street stations are particularly untidy, which are unfortunately where a lot of tourists will get their first experience of the city.
On the flip side, the open top tour buses seem well patronised, at least at weekends, and the Riverside Museum car park is always busy when I pass on the train, and tour coaches are regularly present.
So, all is not lost, but a fair bit of civic effort required to make the place more attractive, and then maintained. Once the house is in order then the undoubted positives of the city and the wider Clydeside area can be promoted at travel and tourism events in Europe, and beyond.
Great optimisim. But this has all been implemented previously. We have lost 20 years of money and hard graft .
Glasgow really upped the game in early 2000 s. Was great. Lively. Now its a wasteland. Horrible to live here and witness it.
Yes the city centre is looking very tired and grubby and that’s where tourists have to be. But on the plus side the rest of the city has never been better IMO, with modern housing and retail/leisure replacing what those of us old enough to remember were slum housing and disused ex heavy industry sites.
But agree - the walk from Central Station to Trongate is particularly grim and the pedestrian part of Sauchiehall Street is no better. I guess this is all predominantly due to the changes in retail where online and out of town shopping has killed the shops in town.
I think people in Glasgow too often seem to fall into the trap of thinking that urban issues like homelessness, drug addiction, poverty and decaying buildings are unique to Glasgow and barely present anywhere else. Look at the pictures and reports of the fentanyl and homelessness crisis in many North American cities and you'll see worse than anything most of us have seen in Glasgow - and that's before you look at their crime, violent crime and murder stats, which frankly make Glasgow look like an oasis of tranquility. Many of these cities are popular with tourists too.
Theres no question that significant improvements need to be made in cleansing and tackling homelessness and drug addiction, particularly in the city centre, but I'd suggest we should avoid overstating things or implying the whole city is some endless sea of junkies and litter. I was at the Kelvingrove with my nephews last week, and the Burrell a couple of weeks ago with German friends who were visiting. I never saw any junkies or heaps of rubbish. What I did see was lots of visitors (including many foreign ones! ) who were enjoying top class cultural attractions.
In reading this thread, I went and spent a while reading recent TripAdvisor rewiews from tourists for Glasgow visitor attractions and hotels. The vast majority were very positive and out of the many I read only 2 made any mention of the issues mentioned here. Not a scientific survey of course, but somewhat incongruous with any ideas the city is an apocalyptic wasteland which nobody in their right mind should visit. Similarly, how does the city continue to attract large international events and conferences if its so awful?
As Clive mentions, large parts of the city are very clearly and undeniably improved compared to their historical state. The truth is that many billions of pounds of both private and public money has been invested into things like improving the cities housing stock and remediating derelict industrial land and this has made a significant positive change. Whilst I can somewhat understand comparisons to 20 years ago, I'd suggest if you look at objective city wide stats on a number of measures (including foreign visitor numbers), you'd probably find that in many cases the numbers are actually a good bit better in 2023 than 2003. That doesn't mean they're necessarily great, or that huge work isn't still needed, of course.
Lastly, we should take into account that administrative and financial problems are not unique to Glasgow, Scotland (or certain political parties). After all, only last week we found out that Birmingham City Council is bankrupt.
Iain wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2023 2:40 pm
I think people in Glasgow too often seem to fall into the trap of thinking that urban issues like homelessness, drug addiction, poverty and decaying buildings are unique to Glasgow and barely present anywhere else. Look at the pictures and reports of the fentanyl and homelessness crisis in many North American cities and you'll see worse than anything most of us have seen in Glasgow - and that's before you look at their crime, violent crime and murder stats, which frankly make Glasgow look like an oasis of tranquility. Many of these cities are popular with tourists too.
Theres no question that significant improvements need to be made in cleansing and tackling homelessness and drug addiction, particularly in the city centre, but I'd suggest we should avoid overstating things or implying the whole city is some endless sea of junkies and litter. I was at the Kelvingrove with my nephews last week, and the Burrell a couple of weeks ago with German friends who were visiting. I never saw any junkies or heaps of rubbish. What I did see was lots of visitors (including many foreign ones! ) who were enjoying top class cultural attractions.
In reading this thread, I went and spent a while reading recent TripAdvisor rewiews from tourists for Glasgow visitor attractions and hotels. The vast majority were very positive and out of the many I read only 2 made any mention of the issues mentioned here. Not a scientific survey of course, but somewhat incongruous with any ideas the city is an apocalyptic wasteland which nobody in their right mind should visit. Similarly, how does the city continue to attract large international events and conferences if its so awful?
As Clive mentions, large parts of the city are very clearly and undeniably improved compared to their historical state. The truth is that many billions of pounds of both private and public money has been invested into things like improving the cities housing stock and remediating derelict industrial land and this has made a significant positive change. Whilst I can somewhat understand comparisons to 20 years ago, I'd suggest if you look at objective city wide stats on a number of measures (including foreign visitor numbers), you'd probably find that in many cases the numbers are actually a good bit better in 2023 than 2003. That doesn't mean they're necessarily great, or that huge work isn't still needed, of course.
Lastly, we should take into account that administrative and financial problems are not unique to Glasgow, Scotland (or certain political parties). After all, only last week we found out that Birmingham City Council is bankrupt.
Brilliant post, Iain. Agree with every word.
FWIW the area around the main station is often a magnet for the issues mentioned. I’ve seen it in Naples for example which was piled high with rotting rubbish, full of hawkers selling fake cigarettes and various vices going on in the streets of an evening. And even in Frankfurt which is a rich and modern city with junkies shooting up in shop doorways at the side of the station. Driving in Tampa, Florida I took a wrong turn and was suddenly in the badlands. Couldn’t get back on the freeway quickly enough. Paris - a bit edgy walking through some of the Arabic neighbourhoods at night. Berlin - gritty but cool. Pisa - motorway underpass on the way from hotel to Leaning Tower - junkies needles and urine all the way. We knew we wanted to get back that evening before dark as we’d have to go that way again. Then there’s Gibraltar - grimy, stinking and quite unpleasant.
All major cities have homeless people and drug addicts. Glasgow is far from unique as a major shopping city is affected by the changes in the retail sector more visibly than cities which were not so big for retail.
And to me Glasgow’s crowning glory is the famous music scene which brings in millions in economic input.
Also - Los Angeles is like tent city with homeless people having to live under highway bridges at all opportunity and begging at cars stuck at the lights. Nor their fault - they have no help at all from the state. And the amount of mentally ill people ranting and gesticulating out in the streets or on the subway, who in civilised society would be in hospital, is shameful. Same in New York but without the tents in freezing winter when I was there. The land of the free and the land of despair. The juxtaposition was stark seeing a homeless veteran with Parkinson’s shaking to what will be his death in minus 15 degrees on the sidewalk propped up on Trump Tower. This was before the Fentanyl craze swept America.
I could go on but yes, Glasgow has it bad and homeless people from all over Scotland with all of their addictions head there for reasons of their own, but all major cities worth their salt do too. It’s how society deals with these things that counts.
