Glasgow Buchanan Street Photo Gallery

A half mile section of Buchanan Street is pedestrianized from near the waterfront to almost the bus station. Named after Andrew Buchanan, who was one of the first Scots to have New World tobacco plantations, it was named as the UK's most expensive shopping street outside London in 2014 by Cushman & Wakefield.

Starting from St. Enoch's Shopping Centre, I headed north towards the Buchanan Galleries.

Once the subway's ticketing building and headquarters, this short historic structure in St. Enoch Square is now a coffee shop. The building was designed by Scottish architect James Miller in the Flemish Renaissance style, his typical style during Victorian Glasgow. Opened in 1896, the ticket station moved underground in the late 1970s, but the building served as a travel information centre until 2008 when it also moved underground.

The Argyll Arcade opened in 1827 in an L shape that empties into Buchanan Street. It was Scotland's first indoor shopping mall with a glass roof and cast iron construction, and now is home to many luxury jewellery shops.

On one side of Nelson Mandela Place is the former Stock Exchange. The 5-storey building was completed in 1877. Scotland's 4 local stock exchanges merged into Glasgow in 1964, whose headquarters was located here. However, in 1973, it merged into the London Stock Exchange and plans to revive the market in Scotland have not taken off since.

Next door, St. George's Tron was on the news in 2012 when its 500-strong congregation voted to leave the Church of Scotland because of disagreements over accepting gay ministers. It was an ugly separation, with officers sent to serve court papers to enforce its building ownership.

The pedestrian zone ends near Buchanan Galleries, a modern shopping mall just across the street from the city's main bus station.

There is an ongoing debate across the UK on how to deal with its historic role in the slave trade, such as whether to remove and rename these traces. For example, many streets are named after residents who made a lot of money from slaves.

British slave ships travelled to western Africa to trade goods in exchange for slaves, who were then sent to work at plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas. Goods from those areas were then shipped back to Europe for sale. More than 12 million Africans are believed to have been captured and sold into slavery.

Glasgow was the biggest tobacco importer in the country. Several streets in the city centre are named after these 18th century Scottish tobacco tycoons.