Hansard

Thank you for that unsurprisingly compelling advocacy in support of the aims of the petition. I am old enough to remember the era before multiplex cinemas when the ABC cinema—the Regal—in Sauchiehall Street was a regular place to go. I can recall Charlton Heston going there for the premiere of “Earthquake”, with surround sound, when we were shaken in our seats during the earthquake. It seems that the cinema survived that, but is not surviving the calumnies that have been visited on it by Glasgow City Council’s planning process. The argument that you make is an interesting one. Most of us are aware of buildings that are being lost without necessarily having fully understood what processes have led to their demolition. Sometimes that will, of course, have been completely necessary and unavoidable, but there is sometimes a suggestion that there is a shiny new model that might better suit the owners and they are keen to pursue it. I am minded, in relation to Glasgow, of the Odeon cinema on Renfield Street, where the magnificent façade was preserved and has been incorporated into the much newer building structure that was allowed to be developed on what had been the site of the auditoria of that cinema complex. There are solutions that can be found if people want to find the imagination to take them forward. I am quite interested in the petition, and I think that the public is generally interested in it. I do not know whether we have a room in Parliament big enough for all the people whom Mr Sweeney was suggesting, but I am minded to conduct an informed round-table discussion on what is happening with the process and whether legislation might not be more appropriately drafted to give a little bit of weight to the idea of conservation-accredited engineers having a say on this. I think that those arguments were quite interesting. I wonder whether there is anything that we might do to inform that panel. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what we might do in the first instance?