You've heard of the G20, now hear the G20 of Glasgow

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.

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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.

There were, undoubtedly, many winners here. Glasgow's transformation from a manufacturing heartland to a service economy saw its spruced-up city centre transformed into a Mecca of boutiques and style bars. The handsome Victorian sandstone apartments of Maryhill, too, drew some middle-class gentrifiers, attracted by the area's proximity to Glasgow University and the fashionable West End.

But the dilapidated 1960s high rises which loom over the landscape are a stark visualisation of those who have not prospered.

Sitting by the Forth and Clyde canal, groundwork labourer John Torrance, 31, has been waiting hours for his foreman to pick him up. However frustrating he finds hanging around, John cannot afford to walk away from a potential pay packet.

Rising bills have hit his wallet hard. He wants to sell the two-bedroom flat he shares with his wife and three children, but the depressed housing market is against him.

John admits he knows little about the agenda for the G20 beyond what he has read in the papers. But he knows what he wants it to achieve.