09 Jul 2019
Celebrating the opening of a new commercial property investment in Glasgow is guaranteed to lift my spirits and there was one from last week that I feel compelled to mention.
South Lanarkshire Council Leader John Ross officially opened Clyde Gateway’s Red Tree Magenta business centre in Shawfield on the Lanarkshire side of the border with the City of Glasgow.
I have the privilege of sitting on the Board of Clyde Gateway as the business representative for Glasgow, and Red Tree Magenta shows the sheer dogged determination of the Gateway team and their funders not to let the momentum created in the East End by the Commonwealth Games fade away.
Getting new jobs into the East End always looked like a really challenging task when the Gateway project was launched on its 20-year journey back in 2008. But that was before the M74 extension opened access, the investment in sports facilities and housing that came with the Commonwealth Games and the wholly unglamorous but essential land preparation work that Clyde Gateway has been doing over the last 10 years.
Red Tree Magenta is a £9m investment creating 40,000 square feet of high-quality office accommodation and is the third Red Tree business centre Clyde Gateway has opened.
The investment publicity stating that the development WILL bring 170 jobs into the area is not strictly accurate. The fact is it already HAS attracted 170 new jobs, for on its official day of opening the centre was full. The jobs are all there.
The investment proves that if the quality of the product is good enough the East End is a perfectly feasible choice. Have a look here at the comments made by Lorraine MacDonald who moved her company Spiers Gumley into Red Tree Magenta.
Glasgow needs all its neighbourhoods to flourish and share in the city’s economic growth and it especially needs the legacy of vacant and derelict land from the sites of old heavy engineering to be overcome.
Looking out the window of Red Tree Magenta you can see all around the 27-hectare site on which it sits. The land has been decontaminated from its industrial past and prepared for new investment.
Just across the road is one of, if not the, most contaminated sites in the country - that of the former White’s chemical company which attracted attention recently because of chromium leakage from the site into the nearby Polmadie burn, turning the water green.
No one should underestimate the costs involved in tackling that kind of contamination but if Red Tree Magenta proves one thing its that the costs can be worthwhile.
