School of Social & Political Sciences

BBC Disclosure’s recent Welcome to Glasgow spent a week filming around Glasgow city centre. The resulting documentary makes for uncomfortable viewing. It depicts drug dealing and use, theft, violence and intimidation, alongside accounts from people who live and work in the area about feeling unsafe. Much of this takes place around the Four Corners, the busy junction of Argyle Street and Union Street beside Central Station.

The programme has attracted criticism, particularly for the way it brings crime and disorder together with homelessness, migration and race, and for the prominence given to far-right accounts of what has gone wrong in the city. There is also an imbalance in whose fear and victimisation are foregrounded; for example, the programme gives considerable attention to white victims of violence and intimidation, but much less to violence directed at people of colour. These representations matter. They shape how problems are understood, who becomes associated with them and what kinds of response appear necessary.

There are some familiar sociological questions here. How does somewhere come to be defined as a ‘problem’ place? How do particular groups become associated with that problem? And what might be missing from the resulting account?

Making a ‘problem’ place.

These questions are ones that Glasgow sociologists have asked for a long time. In the 1970s and 80s, Seán Damer wrote about the social construction of ‘problem’ places and ‘problem’ people, and the changing ways in which Glasgow itself has been represented as a city of violence, crime and disorder.

Damer began researching Moorepark, a council housing scheme in Govan, in the 1970s. Built in the 1930s to accommodate families displaced through Glasgow’s slum-clearance programme, Moorepark had by then become much better known as ‘Wine Alley’, with a city-wide reputation for violence, drunkenness and other social problems. Drawing on interviews and historical records, Damer reconstructed how Moorepark acquired its reputation, and showed how problems associated with housing conditions and management, poverty and inequality were increasingly attached to particular people and places. Over time, the people and the place appeared to explain one another: ‘problem tenants’ inhabited a ‘problem estate’, while the reputation of the estate confirmed what was already believed about its residents.

Through this meticulous research, Damer demonstrated that contemporary representations are not recent developments, but contemporary manifestations of historical processes. His approach asks us to look beyond the people and behaviours most readily associated with a ‘problem’ place such as Glasgow’s Four Corners, to ask how those problems came to be concentrated there, how the place acquired its reputation, and how that reputation shaped understandings of the people associated with it.

The Four Corners has long been a place of movement, meeting and congregation. Argyle Street forms part of one of Glasgow’s oldest east–west routes and became an important commercial thoroughfare as the city expanded westwards. The opening of the Argyll Arcade in 1827 reinforced its growing importance as a shopping destination, while Central Station, opened in 1879 and substantially expanded around the turn of the twentieth century, brought growing numbers of travellers and commuters into the surrounding streets. Early photographs and later street footage show crowded pavements, filled with shoppers and street vendors; today, fast-food outlets, shops, and the night-time economy continue to attract large numbers of people.

The Four Corners’ history as a place of congregation is therefore bound up with Glasgow’s industrialisation, migration and urban growth. The sheltered space beneath the railway bridge over Argyle Street, affectionately known as the Hielanman’s Umbrella, became a weekly mass meeting place for Gaelic-speaking migrants to the city, who would gather to meet, exchange news and maintain social ties well into the twentieth century. The city centre also has a long history of accommodating people without secure housing. From the late nineteenth century, Glasgow’s model lodging houses provided cheap accommodation for migrant and itinerant workers and others with no settled home. As patterns of employment and housing changed during the twentieth century, some of the large city-centre hostels increasingly accommodated people experiencing long-term unemployment and homelessness. By the 1980s, deindustrialisation, mass unemployment and changing patterns of drug use were reshaping homelessness in the city, with growing numbers of younger single people experiencing homelessness and drug-related harms.

By the 1990s and 2000s, the Four Corners was firmly embedded in Glasgow’s night-time economy. Nearby clubs and music venues, late-opening fast-food outlets and transport links brought different groups of young people into the area, and the junction acquired a reputation for periodic fighting and clashes between youth subcultures. In the decades that followed, these gatherings increasingly became the focus of organised intervention by police, local government and other agencies. By 2013, Glasgow City Council was describing the Four Corners as a ‘known hotspot’ requiring additional policing, and by the early 2020s police and partner agencies were identifying it as a focal point for ‘antisocial behaviour’, violence, weapons, drug use and concerns about the exploitation of young people.

Making ‘problem’ populations.

Damer’s work also directs attention to the people who become associated with a problem place, who in turn become the objects of both welfare intervention and crime control. More recent Glasgow sociology has continued to question explanations that locate urban problems in the characteristics or behaviour of particular populations. Alistair Fraser’s research on youth gangs, for example, situates young people’s involvement in violence and street culture within the changing social and spatial conditions of post-industrial Glasgow, including transformations in work, leisure and the use of public space. Kirsteen Paton’s work on class, housing and territorial stigma shows how class inequalities become attached to particular places and populations and reproduced through wider processes of urban restructuring, while Gareth Mulvey’s research on asylum policy shows how policy and political rhetoric can present asylum seekers as a threat, with wider consequences for all migrant groups.

This concern with how structural conditions can be recast as characteristics of the people experiencing them is particularly relevant to Welcome to Glasgow, which opens with prominent footage of balaclava-clad boys and young men, including social media images of disorder and young people boasting on camera about offending while under the age of 18. The programme therefore introduces young people primarily through violence, offending and disorder. Yet young people gathering at the Four Corners have themselves become the focus of outreach and safeguarding interventions, alongside policing and dispersal. Their presence in public space cannot be understood simply as the source of an urban problem, without asking what social and spatial conditions shape young people’s lives and their use of the city.

Homelessness and drug use are brought together in the documentary in a different way. The documentary repeatedly places tents, people sleeping in doorways, visible drug use and dealing within the same account of city-centre disorder. There are important relationships between homelessness, housing insecurity and drug-related harms, but these experiences and activities are not interchangeable. People experiencing homelessness are also more exposed in public space because they have limited access to private space, while housing insecurity, poverty and reliance on services shape where people spend their time. Once homelessness and visible drug use become strongly associated with a ‘problem’ place, however, the people experiencing them can themselves appear to explain the problem. Wider questions about housing, inequality, drug markets and the organisation of services can then be displaced by concern with the behaviour of the people most visible in public space.

Migration and race enter the documentary differently again. Critics have objected to its incorporation of far-right talking points and its discussion of Glasgow’s role in the dispersal of asylum seekers, arguing that this gives undue prominence to anti-immigration explanations for problems in the city. Here, the presence of migrants and racialised minorities becomes part of an explanation for a place already represented as deteriorating or unsafe. This is especially striking in a part of Glasgow whose history has itself been shaped by successive movements of people into and through the city.

What is missing?

Welcome to Glasgow lacks a broader sociological understanding of violence. The documentary concentrates on visible incidents of interpersonal violence and disorder, while giving much less attention to the wider inequalities, institutions and relationships that shape how violence is produced and experienced.

My own research with Caitlin Gormley on repeat violence in Scotland starts from this wider perspective. Crucially, we argue that interpersonal violence cannot be understood without also attending to structural, symbolic and institutional violence: the inequalities that shape exposure to harm, the stigma through which some people and ways of life are devalued, and institutional practices that can misrecognise or disregard their experiences. These forms of violence are less immediately visible than the assaults and disorder captured in Welcome to Glasgow, but they shape both people’s exposure to interpersonal violence and how that violence is subsequently understood and responded to.

Our research also complicates the categories through which people appear in Welcome to Glasgow. Some participants had used violence themselves or had histories of offending, while also experiencing extensive cumulative victimisation. Homelessness and insecure accommodation could expose people to further violence and exploitation, while involvement in the informal drug economy generated particular risks. Much of this victimisation was never reported, because of fear of retaliation, distrust of the police or concern that seeking help would bring participants’ own behaviour under scrutiny.

A person can therefore be highly visible as a ‘problem’ while their victimisation remains much less visible. Someone known to the police through offending or public disorder, or visible because of homelessness, drug use or time spent in public space, may also have extensive experiences of violence that are never reported, recorded or recognised. The people who appear in Welcome to Glasgow principally as sources of disorder cannot therefore be understood only through what they are seen doing at the Four Corners. This does not make the violence and intimidation shown in the documentary any less important. It does, however, widen the questions we need to ask about it: who experiences violence as well as who uses it; how different experiences of violence are connected; and how historically produced inequalities and institutional responses shape those experiences.

Image credit: Andrei C on Pexels.

First published: 5 October 2026

<< Blog