EARLIER this week I found myself standing on Victoria Park Drive in Whiteinch, looking up at the crumbling, moss-covered baronial red sandstone edifice of its once proud Burgh Hall.

It reminded me of a similar experience a decade before as I witnessed the appalling demolition of the beautiful Springburn Public Halls, a building I had long-admired growing up in the area but had only ever known as an abandoned, boarded-up remnant of a glorious past, with only a couple of the statues adorning its ornate facade salvaged from the wrecking ball after a last-minute intervention.

Both these buildings were not just intended to be useful public facilities for local functions and meetings, but were constructed with architectural panache, to reflect the palpable civic pride of these communities.

It is a civic pride that many of today’s Glaswegians still feel just as strongly, yet we can’t help but sense a searing despondency when we see these grand public buildings permitted to spiral into such a severe decline.

With so many sweeping changes to Glasgow’s built environment over the last century, it’s easy to forget that many parts of the city that we today might consider having always been synonymous with it actually originated as separate villages, with their own distinctive identities, but were eventually swallowed up by the rapidly sprawling industrial metropolis during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The looming expansion of Glasgow was not without controversy at the time, as several villages on its outskirts took advantage of the Police of Towns (Scotland) Act 1850 to hold local referendums that created ‘police burghs’ to avoid paying tax to the Glasgow Town Council, instead establishing their own local commissioners and civic administration to run their municipal services.

In 1852, Partick became the first such area around Glasgow to set itself up as a police burgh with Maryhill following in 1856 and Govan in 1864. But such parochial rear-guard actions could only delay the inevitable, and in 1891 Maryhill and Springburn were both annexed by Glasgow.

In Springburn, the prosperous community of locomotive builders only agreed to incorporation with Glasgow in return for an assurance that it would be furnished with a new public park and public halls.

Springburn Park was duly laid out during the following year to a design by the city engineer Alexander B McDonald on what was then the highest point in Glasgow, but it would be another decade before opposition from Glasgow Corporation councillors was overcome to finally commission the public halls, with a red sandstone Italian Renaissance-style building by William B Whitie winning the design competition in what was his first major project, launching a career that would culminate in the design of the Mitchell Library in 1911.

The next massive wave of expansion for Glasgow came in 1912, when Govan and Partick burghs were finally persuaded to join the city. Financial incentives were once again a large driver of the decision and it became a significant milestone for the city, as the population of Glasgow finally rose to more than a million, cementing its status as Britain’s Second City.

Partick had already built Whiteinch Burgh Hall in 1894 for the growing shipbuilding village, with its own police and fire station attached, but the corporation soon invested in complementing it with a public baths and library designed by city architect Thomas Gilchrist Gilmour in the 1920s.

Such coherently planned local town centres meant that areas like Springburn and Whiteinch retained their distinct identities despite being submerged into the city at large – indeed these were the original ‘15-minute cities’ – but the post-war wave of modernist highway construction and Comprehensive Development Areas would see it unravel.

Glasgow became one of the most rapidly depopulating cities in the world, only eclipsed by Detroit, falling back below a million inhabitants as people migrated to new towns and sprawling suburbs. There would be no further boundary extensions for Glasgow after the 1930s.

This huge displacement of Glaswegians meant that the infrastructure built to serve a much bigger population became chronically underutilised and, as the tax base of the city also declined, many of these once handsome public buildings slowly fell out of use and have steadily decayed ever since, with Springburn Public Halls falling out of use in 1985, and Whiteinch Burgh Halls following in 2002.

If we are to save Whiteinch from the same tragic fate of Springburn Public Halls a decade ago, then we must act with more urgency and lateral thinking than we have done previously. That is why I have teamed up with local councillor Eunis Jassemi in Victoria Park to press City Property to take proactive steps to prevent the building from falling into further dilapidation.

Relatively simple measures like repairing the guttering can prevent massive water damage and installing remote security beacons is a proven way to deter the notorious Glasgow firebugs that often target our derelict buildings.

This buys vital time to find a viable way to restore the building, such as reviving Page Park’s design for a residential conversion, which was scuppered by the 2008 financial crash but is more likely to be feasible now given the huge demand for homes in the area.

We will therefore press for the building to be marketed properly for the first time ever to see what potential interest there might be. If you have any ideas for reviving this once proud symbol of faded civic pride at the heart of Whiteinch, then please do get in touch.