It’s surprising what you can buy from an ice-cream van in Scotland’s Manhattan

Glaswegians are secretly proud of their new, four-lane bridge across the River Clyde, the first crossing to be built in over 30 years. Seen from either end, it looks like half of a McDonald’s ‘Golden Arches’ sign. The city’s spin-doctors insist on calling it the ‘Clyde Arc’ but locals have christened it the ‘Squinty Bridge’, because of the dizzying way the steel support crosses from one side of the road to the other. The Squinty Bridge is important because it marks a return to the city’s Clydeside roots. ‘The Clyde made Glasgow and Glasgow made the Clyde’, runs the old saying. But the city turned its back on the Clyde 50 years ago. Stalinist post-war planners decanted half the population into new towns in the green belt, and the economy naturally imploded. The Labour council then raised taxes and the middle classes fled, turning the city into a vast wasteland.