Alasdair Gray (1934–2019)'s 1981 novel, Lanark contains the following much-quoted passage:

Thaw is both right and wrong. He is right to emphasise art as a key domain within which sense of place is articulated, but wrong to limit this process solely to artists. Gray implicitly recognises this by including history books in Thaw's list, but this is undermined once more by his insisting that the artist is the sole operational figure in the process. The key missing concept is, of course, discourse, a concept which, as well as including works of art, would also encompass more obviously ‘factual’ productions such as official reports, newspaper accounts, photographs, anecdotes and jokes. This is not to argue that there are no pertinent differences between works of art and these other sites, but simply that they might all be considered under the rubric of discourse. From this point of view, and as Thaw puts it, Glasgow has a substantial discursive presence which has been influential in determining popular attitudes to that city and shaping subsequent narratives about it.

It is perhaps surprising that in eighteenth-century travellers’ accounts Glasgow is most often compared with Oxford for the beauty of its prospect and the excellence of its ambience. It was post-Industrial Revolution accounts of the city that began to articulate the ‘Glasgow discourse’ which was to become hegemonic. Initially signalled in urban planning and public health reports of the nineteenth century, this discourse was powerfully accelerated by tabloid journalistic accounts of gang warfare in interwar Glasgow and by folkloric embellishments of these. The result was (and, arguably, still is) that a monstrous Ur-Narrative comes into play when anyone (not least, it should be said, Glaswegians themselves) seeks to describe or deal imaginatively with that city. In this archetypal narrative, Glasgow is the City of Dreadful Night with the worst slums in Europe, its citizens living out lives which are nasty, brutish and short.