Garnethill, in the centre of Glasgow, has a commanding view of the conurbation around and is one of the city's most interesting neighbourhoods. These days it is mostly known as the home of the city's Chinese community, to the north, and for Glasgow School of Art and especially Charles Rennie Mackintosh's remarkable building, but its fringes also include some of the last remnants of old Charing Cross, Glasgow Film Theatre, formerly the Cosmo cinema, and the Beresford building, previously Strathclyde University halls of residence.

It has also long been a favourite residence of the city's artistic community, and members of the current population of artists on the hill have now banded together in a bid to ensure that its heritage is remembered in a current development.

At the end of Hill Street, where the hill itself ends in a view across the motorway to Park Circus, Glasgow University and the west end, Charing Cross Housing Association and developer Ogilvie of Stirling are building three new blocks of apartments of a potential five, with the properties split 60/40 between those for private sale and those for the housing association.

The development went ahead despite some objections to the proposed building design and it was a condition of planning permission that some artwork be incorporated into the development. The artist residents recently discovered that it is planned to meet this requirement with the cost-free commissioning of work from the local primary school, whose poetry would be engraved in flagstones and plaques at a viewpoint with seating.

Garnethill has a history of public artworks, only some of which have survived changes in the area. Perched on lamposts are Shona Kinloch's "chookie burdies", installed in the 1990s, when the small park next to St Aloysius Church was also redeveloped with sculpture and mosaic work. Amid dark murmurings of "emotional blackmail" inherent in the approach to the young people at Garnetbank Primary, the artists who met this week are now lobbying the developers to rethink the plan and celebrate the area's historic link with Glasgow's artists. Painters Julie Robertson and Todd Garner and sculptors John Kraska and Mhairi Corr were among those who attended the meeting and community councillor Emmanuelle Guibe has been asked to take their concerns to the developers. Guibe has monthly liaison meetings with the development partners and today will ask them to halt current plans for the art at the viewpoint, pending consultation with the community.

Guibe, who is a French lawyer and urbanist, says that the developers are under no obligation to consult under Scots planning law, but Robin Hamilton, partnership manager at Ogilvie, told The Herald that the builders were open to the possibility of changes as the viewpoint would not be completed until the end of the project.