Traders and residents warned not to breach the Glasgow School of Art cordon

Residents and traders desperate to get back into their properties following the blaze at the Glasgow School of Art, face being arrested if they breach a safety cordon.

Glasgow City Council has issued the warning after some of them threatened to breach the exclusion zone, that was put in place on the 16th of June, to retrieve their property.

The residents and traders have been unable to access their homes and businesses for over five weeks, with many people fleeing in just the clothes they were wearing.

A brick-by-brick dismantling of unsafe sections of the Mackintosh building is expected to take several more weeks.

Around 70 people will take part in protest at the cordon to challenge it's legality on Sunday and police say they will increase their presence, and arrest anyone attempting to breach it.

Adrian Nairn, Chair of the GDRG, says: ''Glasgow City Council’s response to this disaster has been badly managed. The council seems to think that all it needs to do is wait for the ruins of the Glasgow School of Art to be made safe and then everything can get back to normal.

The council has totally failed to grasp the impact of what is happening on the ground to real people. We have been out of our homes for five weeks with the prospect of potentially another two months sleeping on couches and floors or in the unsuitable accommodation that the council has been able to find since hiving off all its homes to the Glasgow Housing Association.

We are constantly directed to the incident response email box so that the council can collate all the issues surrounding the fire. We have had enough.''

But, Colin Edgar from Glasgow City Council, says ''We have to remember why the cordon is there. It is there because the engineers are telling us there is a risk the building will suddenly collapse and do so without any warning. So there is a very real risk that people inside that cordon could be killed. So for people to put themselves at serious risk of being harmed is irrisponsible.''

The Garnethill Displaced Residents’ Group (GDRG) and the Sauchiehall Street Inner Cordon Businesses recently wrote an open letter to the First Minister criticising the council's response.

Nicola Sturgeon tweeted to say ''Hello - the issues raised in your letter are being properly and thoroughly considered (which does take a bit of time) before a full response is sent, hopefully early next week.'