The Glasgow vape-shop fire speaks to the hellscape of modern Britain

A fire that began in a vape shop has destroyed one of Glasgow’s most recognisable and beloved architectural façades and caused days of disruption to Scotland’s busiest train station. The story behind last Sunday’s blaze is not fully out yet, but what is already known is wearyingly predictable and familiar. A company called Junaid Retail Limited, trading in Glasgow as ‘Scot’s World’, had sold the business two weeks previously, having already accrued a year’s worth of unpaid business rates. Naturally, no license was held by either party for the sale of vapes or tobacco products.

Photographs of the shop prior to the fire suggest that, while mainly trading in vapes, it was also offering a selection of cheap duvets, luggage, hand puppets and soft toys. Even without the benefit of hindsight, the first word that springs to mind, perhaps the only unifying principle in an image otherwise suggestive of post-stroke visual aphasia, is ‘flammable’. The whole scenario could hardly have been more on the nose as a symbol of the decline of British retail, not to mention the vanished prosperity to which the tobacco trade contributed so much in Glasgow in the mid-19th century.

The premises on Union Street were first constructed in 1851 for Orr and Sons, a thriving stationery business. History does not record whether they also offered a range of random knick-knacks, bed linen and other kindling. Images from Union Street’s first hundred years show a street life teeming with energy and purpose, if suggestive of easily recognisable Glaswegian weather. Indeed, despite fears of climate change, that would appear to be the one thing that has remained grimly constant over time. What has changed, or rather vanished, is the kind of formal attire everywhere visible, nowadays associated mainly with funerals and court appearances, if that. One could easily repurpose Philip Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’ to eulogise the scene.

Vape shops are among the least appealing businesses to have moved into the defenceless hollows that disfigure once-thriving high streets up and down the country. They are perhaps the most familiar icon of the emergent, dominant aesthetic often characterised, after an X account of that name, as ‘Yookay’.

Horrible enough in themselves, vape shops look especially jarring when housed like commercial hermit crabs, behind heritage façades such as that in Union Street. It is unclear whether they and their invariable co-habitees, the Turkish barbers, are even viable in conventional terms or are merely maintained as part of some money-laundering racket. And even when they don’t burst into flames, the suspicion of low-level criminality clings to them like the aroma of sickly steam substrate to a dead-eyed teenager’s synthetic outer shell.

The interiors are generally a combination of the sort of sinister glass apothecary cabinets that Damien Hirst explored in his 1992 installation, Pharmacy, and a sweet shop that turns out to be run by a witch.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the relentless cheerfulness of the packaging and the promised ‘flavours’, the juxtaposition of words like ‘Cherry’ and ‘Mint Julep’ with bold, black sans-serif health warnings, very few people deny that there is something dispiriting about vaping itself or the ambience the product creates in bulk. Which makes it all the more humiliating to have to confess that I did recently experiment with them myself, as a nicotine-delivery system, despite not having smoked since 1992.

I count myself lucky as having been one of those people into whom nicotine does not sink its teeth and claws quite as deeply as some. I started smoking while hitch-hiking in Europe in the summer of 1983, before going to university. I stopped after an epiphany that occurred in a cheap guest house in Spain, while skinning up the first smoke of the day from half-inch butts left in the ashtray from the night before. I suddenly saw myself as a stranger might and thought, correctly, ‘That is disgusting’. And I quit. Simple as that.

Recently, though, I decided to give the vapes a go. Partly to try to punctuate long drives without the need to pay for service-station coffee, both financially and with age-related bladder discomfort. And partly because all my favourite dead authors seem to have been photographed either with a woodbine in the ashtray or ideally, for the really contemplative geniuses like Tolkien and CS Lewis, a pipe stem clamped between their teeth as they savour the completion of another paragraph of archival quality.

Needless to say, it was a failure. On the road, rather than breaking up the monotony, the vape quickly became part of it. There were no measurable breaks between inhalations. Whatever else is wrong with it, traditional smoking does at least introduce a kind of ebb and flow into one’s subjective experience of the world. It gives one a sense of having completed a cycle of some sort, and ready to go again. Vaping doesn’t do this. Instead it becomes part of the autonomic nervous system, as unthinkingly adopted as breathing itself. Instead of being a welcome paragraph or page break, vaping becomes at once as urgent and unsatisfying as an infant failing to get a latch.

All the while, the stylistic aspect, the undeniable cool that still attaches to the Bogarts, Delons and Deans when pictured getting their fix the old-fashioned way, is not only missing when you are seen suckling on one of these plastic teats. The exact opposite is instead suggested: you look like a small boy who is struggling with his first day at school and really wishes someone would come and get him, ideally his mum.

This might all have stayed unaddressed at the back of my mind, had not several valued friends and one valued wife explicitly told me that they think vaping diminishes me and makes me look like an outpatient. And so, the very day before the Glasgow fire, I quit. Thankfully, as before, the nicotine is not really missed. What is, I think, is the sugary tang, the deep breath and the physical twitch. I realise I’m actually addicted to vaporised boiled sweets.

Perhaps none of this really addresses the dire state of the British high street, as exposed by that fire. But somehow, it does seem to echo it, to me at least. Vape shops are to real shops what vaping is to smoking. And lunging at cheap gimmicks that promise to deliver the benefits of an earlier, abandoned practice, without embracing the whole organic truth, might be exactly what is going on in the pestilence that is visibly parasitic on our once thriving hubs of retail activity.

I tried to address some of the issues in an episode of my Radio 4 show, Simon Evans Goes to Market, after the pandemic. And while I’m not generally an advocate for council meddling and command economies, it does seem to me that we need to have a long hard think about what we want our high streets to be, and maybe favour some kinds of business over others – and not only in terms of their likelihood to burn the place down.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Staring at the Sun, are on sale here.