The other G20

World leaders are preparing to discuss a way out of the global recession at the G20 summit in London. But there's another G20 that doesn't just melt away after a few days - in Glasgow. Meet the residents of an unlikely postcode lottery.

There are no TV crews assembling in Glasgow's Maryhill district, no hushed security sweeps for international dignitaries.

The bakeries, tanning salons and bookmakers which pepper the area's main drag are not about to host any discussions which could transform the world-wide economy.

But it is not just the G20 abbreviation that this traditionally working class corner of inner-city Glasgow shares with the gathering of the planet's top heads of government.

Here, too, the talk is of little else besides the economic slowdown. Except that in places like Maryhill, unemployment, poverty and the credit crunch are more than just abstract terms.

An ominously high number of shopfronts are boarded up. The busiest premises on the Maryhill Road is easily the Job Centre Plus. Next door to the local police station - the setting for ITV's long-running detective drama Taggart - is a pub called The Politician. Its shutters are pulled firmly closed.

Maryhill, like much of west-central Scotland, knows all about recession and hardship. During the 1980s, the region underwent the trauma of rapid deindustrialisation and soaring joblessness that was termed "shock therapy" when it was repeated in Eastern Europe a decade later.
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