During a recent walk from Camphill Earthwork to the Necropolis with the esteemed Dr Ronnie Scott, we paused at the vast gapsite off Cathcart Road/Aikenhead Road to watch the foundations being laid for what’s known as the M74 completion. The road will plough through several communities in the city’s south east – Dalmarnock, Rutherglen, Polmadie and Govanhill – before joining the M8 at Kingston Bridge. Like its predecessor, the M77, the M74 extension is controversial. A public inquiry, started…

I’m in King Street framing up the clock tower at the back of Rutherglen Old Parish Church when Tommy sidles up, an Olympus compact in his hand, eyeing up my tripod and camera. You’re a photographer? It’s 7 o’clock on a Friday night and I’m here because the Glasgow weather doesn’t stick to timetables. Not really, I reply as I take the shot. Tommy, short, wiry, probably in his late 50s, shifts from foot to foot, eager for more…

My trip to Castlemilk feels like visiting a distant relative: familiar, friendly but not something you choose to do often. Several of my relatives live – or used to live in the scheme, one of Glasgow’s four major peripheral post-WW2 sprawls designed for the fleeing slum-dwellers of the 1950s and 60s, built on the city’s greenbelt in response to a desperate need for housing. The word adequate comes to mind – if having a flush toilet in your house…

While growing up it seemed to me that Paisley was more enlightened than its bigger, brasher neighbour. That, and its proximity to Pollok made it my playground. As a kid, on Saturday mornings I’d catch the red bus from Paisley Road West to the East Lane Ice Rink. Less than a decade later, as an art student I’d pose at punk gigs in the town’s Bungalow Bar or go to movies such as Ken Russell’s The Devils, banned by…

Cradle of the Stewarts says the sign on the A8. I’m surrounded by patches of fenced-off land primed for retail development, no doubt designed to avoid Glasgow’s crippling business rates, reputed to be the world’s seventh most expensive. At Renfrewshire’s border, a spit from the M8 motorway and Glasgow International Airport, things are looking up. According to its website, Braehead Shopping Centre is the Scottish Retail Excellence Awards Shopping Destination of the Year 2007-8.

For almost a year now I’ve travelled by bus, car, underground and on foot, cataloguing the oddest corners of Glasgow. I’ve climbed barbed wire fences, walked along the edges of motorways, staggered up hills with my camera kit and sheltered from the rain in more cemeteries than I care to remember. I’ve walked around housing schemes, visited parks and shopping malls, peed on sacred ground, in fields and in woods. I’ve set up my camera in places where murders…

In my Quixotic pursuit of Harry Bell’s Glasgow’s Secret Geometry, I’m searching for the end of a line, in this case a line that leads from the Necropolis, through Ross Hall to Stanely (aka Stanlie) Castle. But according to the rules laid down by Alfred Watkins, he of The Old Straight Track, this line’s not even a true leyline, i.e. passing through at least four sites. In fact, I’m unsure of why I’m even making this trip, since Harry…

As someone who got early release from Edinburgh – *rubs wrists* – after four years – I knew immediately I was firmly back on terra cognita when I spotted a few familiar signs, typically screenprinted on corrugated plastic. These signs are a prominent fixture in any city, but in Edinburgh – at least in the genteel district I was privileged enough to live in – they were invisible. Stepping off the bus, train or car within a mile or…

The City of Glasgow has a film charter and apparently I’m in breach of it by not notifying the Film Office or providing them with a script. Not that I have one. And since I have no crew, actors, car chases and pyrotechnics either, I hardly qualify as a legitimate production – just a shambling, slightly lunatic presence loose on the streets. I can’t afford to declare myself. To shoot here, according to the council’s rate card,…

Now that the clocks have moved forward, the days are lighter and the air sweeter. No better time for me to make the third and final set of trips if I’m ever to complete this project. It’s fitting then that the first of these requires me to attend to unfinished business – Carmyle Fords, a place of some significance to my inspiration, Harry Bell, on his quest to find a fording point across the River Clyde. The location is…