IF you ask a Glaswegian to define Glasgow you had better cancel all your engagements for the rest of the day, perhaps the week. We are fond of our city, us citizens of Glasgow, and we are just as fond of talking about it. If you choose to take a journey by taxi and would rather not become involved in a stilted conversation with your driver’s back just ask him to tell you what makes Glasgow special and why we regard our city as the business; the berries; the jinkies; the most refined of the cat’s whiskers.

In an arboreal little embankment set back from Woodlands Road, the esoteric thoroughfare that connects the city centre to its polished West End, is a modest construction that defines this city like little else. It is the world’s only two-legged equestrian statue that pays homage to the great cartoonist and poet, Bud Neill. This wee bronze treasure depicts the three main characters of Neill’s Lobey Dosser cartoon strip which ran for decades in the Evening Times from 1949. It chronicled the happenings in an imaginary Glasgow township called Calton Creek which is somehow located in Arizona in the middle of America’s Wild West. The horse is called El Fideldo (Elfie) and she carries on her back Lobey, sheriff of Calton Creek as well as his arch-nemesis Rank Bajin. In the strip the residents of Calton Creek all enjoyed a polite relationship with the local Native Americans whose leader Big Chief Toffy Teeth is often received with polite hospitality and offered fish and chips.

I was delighted that the Bud Neill memorial has been included in a book entitled 111 places in Glasgow That You Shouldn’t Miss. Yet how could it not have been? The author is Tom Shields, one of the best journalists to have written for The Herald and whose Diary columns and those of his friend Jack McLean inspired a generation of young Glaswegians to join the newspaper game.

Tom was too modest to record his own part in making the Bud Neill memorial happen, so I shall. Having floated the idea of a statue in his Diary column, his army of readers duly took up the cause and the sculpture and design was paid for out of their subscriptions, for which they were all sworn in as honorary deputy sheriffs of Calton Creek.

“It’s difficult to convey just how successful Bud Neill’s cartoon stretch became,” said Shields. “At the end of the working day, people formed queues at newsagents to wait on his latest offering in that day’s Evening Times. He had a forensic wit that seemed to capture Glasgow life and culture and the humour of its people.”

Shields’ Diary column in The Herald made it the best-read feature in the paper and it often bore the imprint of Neill. It too chronicled the people and events of Glasgow and it was peppered with a quiet wit that seemed almost subversive. If Bud Neill could have written a newspaper column he would have made it look like Tom’s.

I MEET Tom on a glorious Glasgow day where the temperature has long ago climbed beyond the critical ‘taps-aff’ mark in Cathedral Square at the top of the High Street. It’s here too that I encounter one of the many surprises in his book. “I was once told that many of Glasgow’s treasures are hidden in plain sight. I’m not sure exactly what that means but I think that they have been airbrushed out of the history of our city and that often we walk past them or through them or above them not knowing of their presence or the stories that they carry.”

I’ve arranged to meet him at the old Police Box that sits towards the front of Cathedral Square and which has metamorphosed into the Empire Coffee Shop. It is run by barristo and chef Rocco Conforti and the following conversation takes place.

“Do you take a card as I’ve only a couple of quid of change.”

“It’s not working today, but not to worry you can hand it in any time.”

“Well, I’m meeting my friend here so he can cough up the extra 20p for your cappuccino. I used to look after his expenses, so he owes me a few.”

“Ah, so what do you do? I work in newspapers and …”

“Ah, you’re here to meet Tom … I am in his book.”

And Rocco then brandishes a copy of it and it’s clear that he’s as happy as Luigi to be included in it. “I am selling them here.”

The coffee is brand new, by the way, but there’s a reason why an apparently historically and culturally unremarkable place such as this appears in a book about places in Glasgow you shouldn’t miss. It tells a story of a time when the city had more than 300 of these and how a smart idea followed by hard graft and a little tenderness has resurrected them. It begins a theme running through this book which is much, much more than a quaint travel guide. “We all have our own ideas of Glasgow; you know it when you see it sometimes,” says Tom. This was one of those times and one of those places,” said Tom.

Behind Rocco’s Police Coffee Box is a statue whose existence until last week was unknown to me. It sits in its own grove, sheltering under trees and fenced off with iron railings. It’s as if it is here only on sufferance, yet it is a high and handsome thing: a bronze equestrian sculpture and a rider brandishing a sword and clad in the style of a Roman General. It’s none other than King Billy himself or “Glasgow’s favourite Orangeman” as Tom has described it. “This one’s a bit of an enigma,” says Tom. “It also might be deemed to be curiously Vaticanesque by some of the Order’s present-day adherents. It began life near the foot of the street on which he is currently perched in 1735 at Glasgow Cross.”

Across the road behind Provand’s Lordship there’s another hidden delight. This is beginning to get embarrassing. In the space of half an hour at the top of Glasgow’s most historic street (still beautiful despite the wrecking ball that Glasgow City Council and Strathclyde University have taken to it) I have been introduced to three landmarks previously unknown to me.

This is St Nicholas Garden where Bishop Edward Muirhead set up St Nicholas Hospital to care for indigent, elderly men. The place exists only in its name and in this garden, landscaped in 1995, and which carries echoes of its original purpose. We’re both enchanted by it. “I like that some imagination and sensitivity to its original use has gone into its design. The gardens are full of medicinal herbs and spices which recall its origins. It’s beautifully landscaped and you can be peaceful here. If only the same care and attention had gone into that faux-baronial piece of kitsch across the road.” This is the only mention of the new and unlovely Museum of Religion in this book.

A pattern is stitched into the pages of this book and these places at the top of the High Street carry glimpses of it. The book will be marketed as a travel guide or a travel companion but this is no insipid selection of the usual Glasgow landmarks that appear in tourist brochures. Most Glaswegians who read this will be unfamiliar with more than half of these chosen places. Many of them have slowly been scrubbed out of the city’s narrative because they shine a torch on the rapacious vandalism and rank stupidity of planners and politicians who levelled some lovely old neighbourhoods and eviscerated others.

One of these districts is Anderston, a vibrant old working class neighbourhood which formed a gateway to the city centre on its western approach. But Glasgow’s civic vandals drove a motorway through the middle of it, cutting it off from the centre and then leaving it to twist in the wind as the families moved out and some beautiful tenements came down. “Why couldn’t they just have built it under this neighbourhood, or over it? Why did they take a wrecking ball to an entire community?” asks Tom.

And yet a remembrance of what this place once looked like lives in the stones of a remarkable building surrounded by dismal modern apartment blocks that possess all the charm and imagination of a port-a-cabin. This is the old Savings Bank, a gorgeous A-listed, red sandstone tenement inlaid with a craftsmanship and artistry you’ll travel far to match. Tom warms to its tale and the themes which suffuse the rest of his book. “I love the carving of that wised-looking chap, clutching a bag of money and lifting a finger as if to caution prudence in the ways of handling it. This is Henry Duncan, founder of the Savings Bank movement who studied at St Andrews University before being sent to Liverpool to work in a bank. But a life in the service of The Lord beckoned and as a minister he was able to combine his sacred calling with his practical training and the concept of bank to help ordinary people survive hard times.” What would old man Duncan have made of today’s banks which drive people and small firms into hardship and then feed off their carcasses?

And then there’s the tragedy of Springburn which seems to encapsulate how a working class community can be hollowed out and left to rot. In the book Tom takes us to Springburn Park set in the midst of a proud inner city neighbourhood to the north of the city centre. Here, his anger is barely concealed: “It its day it was home to the world’s biggest chemical works and Europe’s biggest manufacturer of railway engines. But instead of fixing its slum housing and attempting to manage industrial downturn, the decision was taken simply to doze 85 per cent of vibrant Springburn to the ground. The most vicious wound was a huge dual carriageway punched through its heart for the benefit of commuters from wealthier suburbs. Other cities protect and develop their old communities and help them in hard times; Glasgow builds concrete freeways like this and the M8 and the M77 (another road built through a working class community to accommodate the lifestyles of affluent people in the southern suburbs).

The book is infused with a gentle subversiveness and a whispered humour as though providing a voice for the Glaswegians who have gone and whose lives went uncelebrated and often disrupted by planners and politicians. Some time soon I will take a two-week vacation to my own city and discover it once more get to know the people who made it. This will be my guide.

111 Places in Glasgow That You Shouldn't Miss, by Tom Shields, is published by Emons, £12.99

TOM SHIELDS' HIDDEN GLASGOW GEMS

Wallace’s Well (Auchinleck Road)

The historic significance of this modest shrine to Scotland’s most famous freedom fighter cannot be over-stated. It was here in 1305 that William Wallace had his last sip of water as a free man.

The Berkeley Suite (North Street)

A bar and ballroom frozen in time and known only to Glasgow’s hip cognoscenti and demi-monde. The pawn shop façade is just that, a façade, to deter those who really ought to know. It carries echoes of swinging, 60s Glasgow.

Buffalo Bill statue (Whitehill Street)

This evocative sculpture holds a story that is at once tragic and hilarious, involving a native American called Kicking Bear, his belligerent chum Charging Thunder, an assault on a city impresario and allegations of spiked whisky in an east end pub.

The Cuningar Loop (Dalmarnock)

The site of the original Gorbals and a geographical curiosity on the Clyde it became a dumping ground for building rubble. Now it’s happily re-invented as a children’s adventure park hosting a vast assortment of wildlife, sculptures and activities.

Homeless Jesus (Nelson Mandela Place)

Perhaps only in Glasgow, this stunning bronze depicts Jesus curled up and lying on a bench. The wounds on the feet are the clue and it’s a stark reminder of Glasgow’s poor and downtrodden in the middle of its main palaces of consumption.

La Pasionara Memorial (Custom House Quay, Clyde Street)

This simple tribute to Dolores Ibarruri, the great Republican activist in the Spanish Civil War stands as a memorial to the Scots who joined the International brigade to fight against Franco and fascism. Its construction led to a small civil war in Glasgow’s City Chambers too.

The Women’s Library (Landressy Street)

The only accredited museum in the UK devoted to women’s lives, struggles and achievements. It’s also a lending library and is housed in an Edwardian architectural jewel funded by Carnegie in 1906.