They don’t come much tougher than the streets of Glasgow. But Chief Sports Writer Scott Wilson discovers they have been engulfed by a wave of feel-good factor

THE jokes started almost as soon as Glasgow was awarded the 2014 Commonwealth Games. ‘The shooting will probably be in the Gorbals, the fencing will involve moving on stolen tellies and the wrestling will be outside any city centre pub just before midnight on a Saturday night’.

Age-old clichés can prove extremely difficult to shake.

For most of the last century, popular consensus had Glasgow pinned as a hard-edged city hewn from the heavy industry that supported shipbuilding on the Clyde. Its inhabitants were tough, uncompromising and fiercely parochial, its streets grey, rain-lashed and edgy. It was hardly out of keeping that Sir Alex Ferguson hailed from Govan.

Yet as time moves on, so cities and societies change accordingly, and as is the case with so many of the United Kingdom’s major regional centres, the long-standing stereotypes no longer ring true.

The Glasgow that is welcoming the Commonwealth Games is a vibrant, multicultural, outward-looking place, full of sparkling new architecture, cutting-edge culture and economic confidence.

The rebirth of the UK’s great cities has been something of an unheralded success story in the last decade or so. Immerse yourself in the London cultural bubble, and you could be forgiven for assuming that anywhere north of Primrose Hill is a savage, untamed wasteland.

Those of us who live in the north know better of course, and despite a lack of meaningful support from governments of a variety of different hues, so many of our cities have successfully reinvented themselves.

Leeds, with its vibrant financial district and top-end shopping and leisure, is unrecognisable from a decade or so ago. Manchester has been completely redeveloped, with the ongoing transformation of Salford Quays the latest step in a process that was also assisted by the Commonwealth Games. Liverpool’s docks area is a world away from what it was as recently as five or six years ago, while Newcastle’s Quayside now boasts a vista to rival anywhere in the world.

Glasgow’s name can be added to that list, with the spotlight afforded by the Commonwealth Games revealing a city that can justifiably claim to be the equal of just about any in the country.

The thriving Merchant City quarter has been transformed into a somewhat bohemian shopping, business and leisure area that bears comparison to London’s Covent Garden. The Clyde riverside, which is dominated by the ‘Armadillo’, as the iconic Clyde Auditorium is affectionately known, is a buzzing cluster that is still undergoing extensive redevelopment. And even previously impoverished parts of town like the Gorbals or the Barras in the East End are showing signs of gentrification with many of the old tenements having been blasted to the ground.

That is not to say that problems do not remain. A 2013 study claimed that Glasgow was the third most impoverished city in the whole of the UK, with more than 36,000 of its children living below the poverty line. A 2008 World Health Organisation report noted that in Glasgow’s Calton district, the average life expectancy for men was only 54 years old. The city’s suicide rate is also the highest in the UK.

There is still a long way to go before the benefits of the city’s repositioning spread to everyone, but on the evidence of the last few days, there is a strong sense of civic pride at the way in which the modern Glasgow is presenting itself to the world.

It helps that the sun has been beating down – something that even the most optimistic of Glaswegians were not expecting – and that Scottish athletes have performed strongly in the first couple of days, fostering a feel-good factor akin to the one that swept across London in 2012.

You still hear the odd grumble about the cost of the Games, and plenty of visitors I’ve spoken to have been surprised by the difficulty of getting through the Glasgow traffic, which tends to cluster around two central motorways that have proved just about impassable at certain times during the last few days.

On the whole though, most outsiders appear to have been pleasantly surprised by what they have seen. London might have had the Olympics, but it isn’t the be all and end all when it comes to the UK. It’s just a shame more of our national powerbrokers weren’t willing to acknowledge and celebrate that truism.