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The population shot from under 100,000 in 1800 to more than a million in 1900.In a way, it still hasn’t recovered from this accelerated history (the decline of manufacturing was as swift as its rise, with only 15 per cent of the population now working in that sector) and it has the same bewildering multitudinousness as New York: grief and optimism, self-inventiveness versus the blackest economic fatalism.It is not an accident that it is one of the most creative places on earth. For whatever else is crushed, language is a free space, a vibrant democratic right “I write jingles fer the BBC,” says a cabbie. “Div ye want to hear one?” And he sets off, bright as a button, as we rumble along the cobbles of Grand Central in our “fast black” (Glaswegian for cab):”Gin [if] I had the wings o’ a sparrowGin I had the airse of a crowI’d fly over the hooses of parliamentAnd drop a big shite on the Tories below.”"They took if aff air,” he tells me with surprise and indignation of his BBC2 bosses. “And they said they wanted the voice of Glasgow.”"The nearest thing we had to a Tory in power was when Roy Jenkins won Hillhead by-election in 1982,” goes the deadpan patter of a security guard at City Chambers, the enormous late Victorian edifice that houses the city council and often serves as a film set for the Vatican and Kremlin. “And that’s a bit o’ a slur on Roy Jenkins.”He is a little paranoid about showing me the chandeliers in the Banqueting Hall because last week a 2,000-strong crowd led by Tommy Sheridan (“Sheridan the Charlatan”), who founded the Anti-PollTax-League and spent time in Barlinnie, locked the councillors out of their building in protest at the pounds 80m cuts which the council is having to administer. The councillors had to hold their “Fiddler’s Rally” (Glaswegian for council meeting) elsewhere. Generally, it is hard to imagine a city less available for urban anomie.

You feel that if you went to throw yourself in the dark wastes of the Clyde one night, someone would pop out from under a pier and say: “Hae ye heard the one aboot … ?”The city is said to have been founded by St Mungo (Beloved One) in the sixth century. He came north from Stirlingshire in the funeral procession of a holy man and stayed to found a diocese in what were then wild and pagan lands. Like many great benefactors and malefactors of human history, St Mungo had a strong mother.

Her name was St Terow, daughter of Loth, King of Lothians, and in the middle ages she was worshipped as fervently as her son.Her story is strangely reminiscent of modern tales of female suffering at the hands of the legendary “Glasgow hard man”. At any rate, she was supposed to have been a beautiful and intelligent woman who converted, against her father’s wishes, to Christianity. When he tried to marry her to a pagan, she was cast out of her father’s house to become a swineherd But the pagan suitor followed and raped her. When the wicked Loth found she was pregnant he ordered her to be thrown from the top of a cliff Magically, she survived Then he ordered her to be stoned Again she survived. Finally, he ordered his now heavily pregnant daughter to be set adrift in mid-winter in the Firth of Forth in a boat with no oars and no rudder. But a shoal of fish took pity on her and guided the boat to shore at the site of Culross Abbey.

Here, in the snow, she gave birth to St Mungo, whose missions were later to spread Christianity through the Clyde Valley and up into the Picts’ land of the north-east.There is not much left of St Mungo now. The Reformation, in a great storm of rage led by John Knox, who still stands atop his pillar in the magnificent and sinister Necropolis nearby, destroyed any altarpieces that might have borne his image. But his shade may still be sensed in a few broken lintels and acanthus leaves in the vaulted crypt of the cathedral, of which otherwise one might say with Harriet Beecher Stowe who visited it in 1853: “I could scarcely walk the whole length of it … There is nothing more hazardous to a person’s strength than looking at cathedrals.”Little remains of the medieval city except a few street names: Trongate was the weighing station and Gallowgate the site of public hangings. But down the old High Street, past St Mungo’s Museum of Religion (“Fort Weetabix” as it is known, after its rusticated blonde sandstone) you come to the 18th-century heart of the city: the Merchant Town. It is so called after the entrepreneurs who opened up the tobacco trade with the New World. At its height, 50 per cent of Europe’s tobacco went through the city’s warehouses, and on the profits the merchants built great exchanges, hospitals, churches and grandiloquent mansions.In the wake of the American War of Independence, which punched a hole in trade, the area fell into decline, and until recently was a badlands of decay Now it is buzzing and a testament to Glasgow’s regeneration.