Commonplace | Top Deck

Issue Six | Top Deck

Glasgow Car Parks

By Joanna Heath

Winter arrives early in Glasgow: shorter days, low sun, and long stretches of rain. Living in a first-floor flat, I receive little direct sunlight from October to April, and with a 9–5 routine, access to daylight is fleeting. When the sun does appear, the city offers few places to pause and enjoy it. Glasgow’s grid, narrow streets and tall buildings, favours movement over stillness. 

My attention turns to multi-storey car parks. Their upper decks are accessible, often empty, and unexpectedly sunlit. Designed for transience, they offer height, openness, and a quiet sense of calm. Above the city, noise softens, the sky expands, and Glasgow briefly feels generous.

These spaces feel underused: vast concrete planes, public in access but not in intent. Places we can enter, but not inhabit. They carry a subtle unease, requiring a moment of adjustment before settling. Yet they offer compelling qualities: familiar views reconfigured, bold graphic markings, raw concrete forms, and striking winter light. Here, infrastructure becomes stillness. Accidental architecture shaped by neglect, offering fleeting moments of calm in spaces never meant for occupation. Joanna Heath

Commonplace is a photographic magazine celebrating modernist buildings and places across Britain and Ireland.

Born from a collaboration between the modernist and Uhm! Publishing, it explores the in-between places and small sites that lie beyond the mainstream modernist canon—those commonplaces that deserve a second look.

32 pages colour

A5 Staple bound

ISSN 2978-5200

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