I walked a few doors up to the Corinthian Club, a giant bar and club housed in the old Paisley Union Bank. Entering this Ingram Street fun house, under crouching statues and classical columns, I found myself in a defiant, Swarovski-crystal universe of Glaswegians dressed to the nines. “Champagne all round,” said a young, slick-haired gentleman. “Only the best for the likes of us.” Standing at the bar, talking to these tarted-up patrons, I wondered how much they would know of the old Glasgow ways of self-making. Perhaps their grandparents’ grandparents would still have talked of the infamous bank robbery that took place in this building in 1811. Like all working-class cities, like Chicago, like Manchester, like Naples or Marseille, Glasgow loves the story of a major heist, and the men who robbed this Ingram Street institution were respectively executed, transported to Australia, with a third dying in prison. As Glasgow was becoming Glasgow, the trial of these men became a cautionary tale on the wiles of capitalism. “We may say with great truth,” wrote an anonymous pamphleteer in 1822, “that no civil trial, by jury, in Scotland, ever excited so much interest, nor was there ever a decision given which afforded more general satisfaction.”

Ingram Street is all about the ironies of self-improvement. For anyone interested in elegance and its discontents, it is a place to be. On your average evening, the street swarms with the beautiful and the damned, the boutiques lit with industrial lighting; the bars offer cocktails that use kumquat and Turkish bitters; the restaurants hide under beautiful sandstone tenements. On that recent evening walk, after a few drinks, I stopped at 213 Ingram Street, looking into a fiery run of shops, including Agent Provocateur. Stores tell their own stories, about desire and denial and everything in between. But once upon a time, this was the exact spot of the Ingram Street Tearooms, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1900. With its high-backed chairs and white wooden panels, its Art Nouveau ironwork and stained glass, the tearoom became famous, as the street itself now is, exemplifying the art of making everyday life more interesting than it might be. The secret of the tearoom was the secret of Glasgow — that ordinary people have a right to elegance — and the secret of every place where life can thrive on transformation. When the original tearooms closed in 1954, city officials preserved the interior in a dark store.

I remember being a child, with my mother, climbing those buildings in the cage of a lift. On some of the floors, they had warehouses where you could buy clothes, paying for them with a special credit note that was then paid back in weekly installments. One day, we went to the top of a beautiful Victorian brownstone on Ingram Street. The lift was broken that day, so we climbed the stairs and stopped on a landing — the stairs were marble and the walls were covered in green Art Deco tiles — and I recall my mother and me looking through a large window over the rooftops of the city. “I think I can see all the way to Paris and New York,” I said.

“You can see George Square,” she said. “And that’s just as good.”

“Can I have some shoes?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go in. You can be proud walking anywhere in the world wearing the shoes they sell up here.”