| Comment | > For a city so proud of its river and the heritage within it, they really do feck all to utilise it.
The wider issue with that is that much of the riverside is privately owned, greatly limiting how it has been used up to now. But that's a separate point for another discussion maybe.
It's also true that our habit of plonking single use megastructures along the length of the river - The St Enoch Centre being a great example - greatly limits how active or appealing the riverside could ever be.
You could talk about and critique the St Enoch Centre from many angles, but just sticking with the one you raise, there's a lot to be said for its barrier effect and lack of interactivity with the river, specifically how it limits the rest of the city centre from engaging with the riverside too.
It has no active frontage along the entire southern stretch, acting like a 400m barrier between the busiest section of the centre (Buchanan Street, Argyle Street, Queen Street, etc) and the Clydeside. The same is true to a slightly lesser extent on its west side facing St Enoch Square and it's eastern end facing Stockwell Street. Granted these ends do have entrances, but that's all. There's zero street frontage to entice people to those areas. In effect the bulk of the centres activity faces just one direction: north, onto Argyle Street. This barrier effect is the most basic problem the shopping centre causes. |
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