Glasgow, drawn from its own streets.

Glasgow on paper

The grid is the first thing you see. The commercial centre was laid out in straight blocks up and over a hill, so on paper it is a rectangle of regular streets sitting inside a city that is anything but regular — and because the print draws the network rather than the contours, you cannot tell from the paper how steep those blocks are. The Clyde runs west to east under the grid, wide and deliberate, with the bridges crossing it at even intervals and the old dock basins notching the banks at Govan and Partick.

The M8 is the other line that dominates. It comes down from the north, swings around the western edge of the centre, and crosses the river — a single continuous curve with slip roads peeling off it, drawn at the weight of a motorway, and it separates the grid from the West End as cleanly on the sheet as it does on the ground. West of it the pattern changes to long tenement terraces with lanes behind them, threaded by the Kelvin, and Kelvingrove Park prints as one of the few large pale blocks in the frame. South of the river the pattern repeats at a different angle through Govan and out towards Shawlands, and Glasgow Green sits east of the grid as a plain rectangle of park against the tightest streets in the city.

The eight-kilometre frame this page opens on holds all of that. Tighten it and the tenement blocks separate into individual streets with their own back courts, which is the frame most people want if they are printing the flat they lived in. Widen it and the river takes over, running out towards the estuary with the yards along it.