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A question I’ve been asked many times on here is what demolished buildings do I consider Glasgow’s greatest loss?
It’s a question I really struggle to give an answer, with such an embarrassment of demolished riches just where do you start… 🥴
It’s a question I really struggle to give an answer, with such an embarrassment of demolished riches just where do you start… 🥴
This thread would run into hundreds of tweets were I to list all the individual buildings that have been demolished and that I think were significant in their way, and not all were recent casualties. Nevertheless, here goes an attempt to give an answer… *gulp
The Bishop’s palace/castle had gradually fallen out of use after the reformation, as it decayed it was quarried for building stone (some went to St Andrew’s in the Square) &was removed for Adams’ Royal Infirmary in 1794. The St Mungo Museum now stands on part of the site
You might have noticed Glasgow Cathedral’s west towers in the previous images, they were removed separately by “improvers” in the middle of the 19th century when they tarted up the neglected auld kirk a wee bit for Victoria’s fleeting visit. Plans for rebuilding came to nothing.
Here’s a wee sketch perspective of the old town showing some of these details
The old Royal was demolished in the 20th century having grown from its original building overlooking the cathedral to encompass the parts of the current hospital we consider the auld bit. Amongst many notable advances made there, its where Lister pioneered his work on antisepsis.
There were other castles too, such as Cathcart Castle, a seat of the Wallace’s, demolished in 1980. Farme Castle just outside of Glasgow in Rutherglen, demolished in the 1960s for an aluminium factory, also now long since demolished. Castlmilk House, succumbed to fire.
Or dipping into the ancient past, Govan’s Moot or Doomster Hill. A huge terraced mound surrounded by a ditch and bank, turned into a reservoir by a dye works, and later obliterated by a ship yard
The Old College started life in the Cathedral before taking up home in a tenement on High St, fronting the land where the Blackfriars monastery stood previously. It was expanded in phases to encompass several courts before being demolished for a railway yard, that lasted ~60years
More on the Old College here
Then there was Stark’s Lunatic Asylum (later City Poorhouse) on Parliamentary Rd, a street utterly obliterated from the map along with the rest of Townhead and Cowcaddens. It was removed for extension of Buchanan St rail station in 1908
This one isn’t a single building, or even a whole building, instead it’s the arcades fronted the city’s main streets. We have no relics of the oldest of them, the few that do survive are of the late 18th/early 19th century and since been filled in by shopfronts.
On the subject of shops, Pettigrew & Stephen’s department store was replaced by the glorified multi-storey car park that is the Sauchiehall Centre. It grew to encompass the whole block in a spectacular array of buildings.
All the goods coming in and out of the city had to be stored somewhere, and this city has lost more warehouses than it kept. So what, just warehouses weren’t they? No, not *just* warehouses… buildings like JJ Burnet’s McGeoch & Co were palaces of commerce
An expression of confidence, success and respect for the city, if not necessarily those whose backs the profits were made off. The Co-operative societies of Glasgow tried to redress that last point, and gave these fine edifices to the city, of which a couple remain
Tillie Henderson, garment maker, commissioned Alexander Kirkland to build this Venetian Palazzo in Miller St for them. Arguably one of the city’s greatest, & least known, losses. It succumbed after all the sinks got blocked and taps accidentally turned on
Templeton wasn’t the only one made to present something special to Glasgow Green, the UCBS Bakery in the Gorbals also had to comply and gave us this polychrome wonder of turrets and onion domes. The site is now some flats and wee commercial units.
Palaces of industry were something Glasgow was in no short supply of, and even those that weren’t palaces still had gravitas, like D.Thomson’s warehouse for William Graham & Co on the corner of Cathedral & North Hanover Streets, looming down the steep approach from George Sq
Sometimes they even took on the form of ancient tombs or forts, like William Spence’s 1854 Egyptian temple pylon, come mastaba, come fortalice for Randolph & Elder in Tradeston. Alexander Thomson might never have left the island, but then he didn’t have to look far really...
Style had moved on from Egyptomania when the Lancefield Engine Works were built 50 years later, though it was no less monumental. There are few building left in Glasgow that leave you with that sort of feeling.
Some of these factories may not have been beautiful, and their products perhaps questionable in cases, but places like Beardmore’s Forge complex in Parkhead represent something altogether more valuable – skills, knowledge, enterprise, jobs.
Small is beautiful too though, and even the loss of a part of a building is worthy of mourning. The ranges of the old clay pipe factory at the Barras were originally connected via a single storey section on Bain St. Replacing that is an easy win…
Even the plethora of wee incidental details like the fountains that were dotted all over the city, from busy junctions and major thoroughfares to big parks and wee gardens. Here’s one that used to be in Strathbungo
A lot of which were made by Walter MacFarlane, whose ironwork can still be found all over the world. If an historic building is made of iron there’s a good chance its made by him, and came from Glasgow. Below are his Washington Street and Possil foundries
On iron… Jamaica Street was laboratory of construction techniques and materials that resulted in a collection of iron buildings that were the technological prototypes of our modern highrise. Small mercy the most significant of them survives, but several others were lost.
Glasgow wasn’t shy of an early high-rise. Nor a late one for that matter… Can you imagine the furore in the Evening Times (and on here tbh) if the old Exhibition Hotel on $%$^ St were proposed today in a similar setting…
Or how about this mix of industry, exhibition and health with Yorkhill looming over the Regent Mills on the Kelvin. Not an interplay of architectural expressions we could ever hope to replicate in an urban setting today…
This thread has already gotten out of hand, and I could be here all weekend if I keep going. Also don’t want to take any more liberties with Canmore! (*ducks…)
And I haven’t even touched on churches...
And I haven’t even touched on churches...
Or halls...
Or Railway Stations
Or the docks
Or the exhibitions (even though they were only ever intended to be temporary)
Or any of the other buildings that had a short existence in Glasgow, like this relic shipped up from Wembley to Riddrie
All this, I suppose, brings me to what I mourn most of the city I never knew. There is no one building, one place, one person, one thing that defines Glasgow. The lost city I catch glimpses of in old accounts, in sepia toned photos, and blistered old film reels.
A place that grew organically from all directions. The old Cathedral town at the centre of a growing network of ancient (some probably more so than Glasgow itself) and new towns, villages and suburbs which grew on Glasgow’s industry.
A city of villages, of people with egos and money, of congregations and communities passing a collections basket round each other. All competing to outdo each other, to get the best site for their development. To show the growing city what they were made of.
That’s what results in that gushet site having that amazing church on it, why that tenement turned that corner so spectacularly, why that mile-long vista down a residential palazzo lined street was framed so beautifully at the end.
The sort of thing you can’t just masterplan for. It takes time, the will, the competition. It needs the buzz of a place of possibilities, where you need to speculate to accumulate. No private company ever built something beautiful as an act of altruism…
So… what is Glasgow’s greatest loss?
I think you know where I’m going with this…
It isn’t one building, place, or thing. It’s that organic, almost incidental nature of those un-special wee corners of the city that meant something to you, or yer maw, or yer granny
I think you know where I’m going with this…
It isn’t one building, place, or thing. It’s that organic, almost incidental nature of those un-special wee corners of the city that meant something to you, or yer maw, or yer granny
The spaces that told the stories of how Glasgow was made. The places where people lived out their lives. The ghost addresses on the birth, marriage and death records. The breid n butter of Glasgow.
People *do* make Glasgow, but buildings, and the spaces they create, help too… 🌳🐟🐦🔔
Still working on updating this and producing a visual or two. Grows another arms and two more legs each time I open it though, so... 😬
Some thoughts on repairing Glasgow and laying the groundwork for creating real places again
Some thoughts on repairing Glasgow and laying the groundwork for creating real places again
I made a number of omissions, and a few wee typo-illogical errors </i>... so here's a couple of fixes.
Arcades - the original tweet described an older style of arcade than those pictured. Below are what that tweet was actually talking about
Arcades - the original tweet described an older style of arcade than those pictured. Below are what that tweet was actually talking about
Gushets and unspecial wee corners, the crossroads with no names, just a confluence of streets on a map, but on the street they were an opportunity for expression, rather than a blank gable to stick some bits n bobs onto later...
The special corner, like Glasgow Cross, that were treated to the grandest of tenements to mark the eastern gateways to the city centre. Here Haussman met Haw Jim...
The humblest of humble looking tenements, slightly alien to what we're used to seeing in a close arrangement. A special wee tenement with no name that marks an turning point in the development of a form that seems handed down from the gods
The mansions of the "Virginia Dons", built on the back of the whole of human misery. Oh but you shouldn't judge them by our standards... Of course we should. Bastards.
Think McCall was 'avin a larf with his Black House, or just taking advantage of a fluke of geology?
A recent loss here in the former Elgin Place Congregational Church, summarily demolished after a fire destabilised its rear wall and it was deemed necessary to get in through the pillars. All went to rubble.
What I'd give for a day at this circus. Bothwell Circus, where the M8 now ramps off to Bothwell St. Note the Alexander Thomson tenements (and sign) adjoining his St Vincent St Church in the second image
This incredible mish-mash of gothic was actually three connected buildings formed by the Bible Training College, Christian Institute and YMCA
Some things we still have a piece of, such as the old Assembly Rooms, removed to make way for the GPO to complete its takeover of the block
