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. Even today, 8 per cent of inner-city Glasgow lies derelict. But the prospect of redeveloping acres of cheap brownfield land along the Clyde — 25 miles of it on each bank — has recently triggered a property investment bonanza. Some £6.5 billion is being ploughed into new projects. Dilapidated warehouses, empty for decades, are disappearing. In their place are expensive waterside condos for incomers and offices for Glasgow’s booming financial sector, which has seen an increase of 34 per cent in employment since 1995. Hence the ‘Squinty Bridge’.

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Any self-respecting property boom breeds art. There’s going to be the Glasgow equivalent of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum — a riverside style icon costing £60 million. It is being designed by the irascible, Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid. I once met Ms Hadid for breakfast but she did not pause long enough in her harangue about the demerits of British clients to enjoy her croissant.