Glasgow's Holland Street steps up a level
June 13 2025
Glasgow's Avenues programme has taken a significant step forward with the completion of public realm works to Holland and Pitt Street.
4,000sq/m of new public space along both routes include tree lined streets, widened pavements with a Caithness stone finish, segregated cycle lanes and green landscaping.
Councillor Angus Millar commented: “Right now, our city centre is going through its biggest transition in half a century. The population is increasing, new sectors are emerging, investment is flowing in and infrastructure put in place. With the Holland and Pitt Avenue, we’re beginning to see how that’s shaping up.”
The City Deal initiative forms part of a broader effort centred on George Square to spruce up the city, creating a more pedestrian focussed environment in the process.
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14 Comments
Alas Sauchiehall St is something of an embarrassment. It really does appear like it will have a life of about 5 years before it will look out-moded and in need of further renewal. A 'refresh' for the street was simply not what was required and it doesn't reach the threshold of quality that was promised at consultation (I was there). At the very last consultation exercise, I implored that whatever the design, please, please don't make it cluttered, think about an arts strategy (ie embedding art in the fabric of the street) and make it people-centred. So much for it being a listening exercise. Those lights - that they used on the upper section of the street - like d*ldoes on sticks - are among the worst I've seen anywhere. Please do not, I repeat do not use them anywhere else.
The design was dreich but the workmanship and working practices were also crap - mortar smears everywhere and if you monitored the street when it was a building site - you'd have seen the unplanted root-ball trees lying with the roots drying out and on their side in mortar dust and mortar snots. I reckon there will be quite a few that don't make it through the winter and some look poorly already . A landscape architect friend of mine concurs. We shall see. If they had even followed the paradigm of Buchanan St, now 25 years old, they'd have gotten away with it but this was done on the cheap, was badly designed from the off and the contractor didn't do a good job. A sort of perfect storm alongside the manufactured consent of multiple public consultations. I'm trying really hard to see any positives in it but I can't. Not good.
Either that or have taken their Stockholm syndrome to a totally new level of worshipful unquestioning subservience to poor design.
These little cabbage patches on a city street will soon be muddy bare earth holes full of wind blown litter.
Original 'avenues' failings all still unfixed too but lazily being repeated across the city at vast expense.
We are capable of doing much better than this, especially with £4.8m to burn through on a relatively small area like this.
Am not really seeing a good return on my £1200 per sqm investment here....
Bunch of Rev I M Jolly's when anything Glasgow related is mentioned.
Lots of good stuff going on in the city over the past wee while and at present. Some of the student box design is pish and should not be allowed to the see the light of day but at the same time, I'm particularly pleased to see so many brownfield sites repurposed after decades of neglect and being a major blight on the city.
Stockholm syndrome indeed.
So much more could be done, we can do MUCH better than this, think positive, act positive, make a better city together and do not accept poor design like this wasting your money!
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