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To compare Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, seen above, with the ancient city of Petra in Jordan may seem a leap into the surreal but both use a common building material that was readily available in the vicinity. Red Sandstone.
Handily, this could be found within Glasgow itself, when digging out some of the underground train stations, the circular subway line and sandstone quarries around the Clyde Coast and the Central Belt.
Renowned for its sandy beaches today, obviously at some point in the geological past, real desert conditions must have existed here as compacted beds of sandstone are found all over the central belt coastline, especially in the west, as seen here.
Unlike granite it is easily carved and Victorian Stone masons took full advantage of this fact.
When you wander round the Glasgow of today it pays to look up.
Baltic Chambers. Red sandstone in all its glory. Although the modern buildings of glass and steel are exciting to see, the first few visits, the real architectural jewels in Glasgow's crown are its older buildings. The 1800's to the 1930s basically. The Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian eras cover that.
The 'lost city' of Petra was rediscovered in the early 1800s, Major discoveries of Egyptian relics and tombs mid 1800s to 1930s (Tutankhamun, 'the boy king' was an early 1900s discovery) The British in India, 1760s to 1940s so it's no wonder many of the period buildings in Glasgow reflect these influences. New, mysterious, thrillingly exotic and huge deals at that time, even more than they are today. 'Holiday snaps set in stone'.... for those that could not afford to travel there.... and as an visual advertisement of what was on offer... for those bold enough to go... or join up.
None more so than Kelvingrove Art Gallery and museum sitting in the grounds of Kelvingrove Park, which itself boasts many monuments to the days of empire.
While The Indian Subcontinent has many 'British style' buildings it was a two way street with exotic ideas and architectural styles being transported here as well.
The Beresford Hotel, built in 1938 in art deco style to take advantage of well heeled tourists flocking to Glasgow's Empire Exhibition held in Bellahouston Park in that year which also boasted the Tait Tower or Tower of Empire, a 300 foot plank of vertical smooth sided soaring steel with three high dive horizontal viewing balconies placed near the top. As this stood on the central wooded hill within the park it was almost 500 foot high in total verticality and could be seen on a clear day as a gleaming spike almost 100 miles away from the city. Not even the 30 storey Red Road Flats, just under 300 feet or the modern Glasgow Tower, less than 400 feet high if you subtract the thin needle stuck on top match than today. Sadly it only lasted a short while before being dismantled as too visible a target with the advent of the Second World War in 1939. A real shame.
A side view of the Beresford- now converted into residential flats... I think. Over 12 million people attended the 1938 Empire Exhibition so it was a great success. This was taken during our city centre walkabout from Anderston Train Station (Anne and myself) as we were also photographing older buildings as well as brand new ones along our route.
Another good starting point for discovering old Glasgow is from here, Glasgow Central Station. You can also get guided tours within the station to access the below ground substructure and arched tunnels holding up this massive building. Think of the total tonnage in all that stonework... then multiply it across the city. Nearby Bothwell Street, Waterloo Street, Hope Street and Renfield Street hold some of the best examples of red sandstone masterpieces, although many others are scattered around. The Merchant City is another area worth visiting ten minutes walk to the east from here.
Bothwell Street not far from Glasgow Central Train Station. The back sandstone tenement in the photo rising to 10 floors high.
Same area at night with the nearby glass and steel towers of the financial district. Many cities all over the UK and the world have similar modern glass structures, many of them higher and more impressive than these examples so I hope we hang on to our period buildings as well. I mention this as most of the older sandstone buildings have To Let signs up and with modern Wi-Fi, continuously updated technology etc.. I don't know if they will continue to attract future tenants. It's all very well being a fabulous listed building with ornate carvings and thick stone walls but if you are lying empty and costing money to maintain every year it's not a sustainable outcome in the long run.
What looks like an empty sandstone building in the city centre, one of several appearing slightly unloved and forgotten. As I mentioned in my other city centre post two weeks ago, (featuring the modern side of Glasgow), plans did get to the stage where a scale model of a future 3D Glasgow lay before the public's scrutiny on a very large table. Most of the old buildings, (featured in this post) would be flattened and a very modern Glasgow, with fashionable 1960s style concrete cubes, would rise in their place. Thank God that never happened. Inconceivable now. They discovered sandblasting instead to bring the buildings back to their original colour, washing off 100 years of soot and grime.
However they did demolish a long corridor of buildings in the Kinning Park, Anderston, Charing Cross and Cowcaddens districts to build the M8 Motorway through this part of the city so hopefully not too much of significant architectural value disappeared at that time. Certainly the two remaining tenement buildings on either side of this now infamous sunken trench and noisy traffic corridor at Charing Cross are very special. No idea if the lost tenements demolished were equally fine or just dilapidated run of the mill slums. I certainly can't complain as I swapped an inner city existence of squalid, crowded and semi industrial 1950s Kinning Park (flattened to make way for this same motorway in the late 1950s/ early 1960s) for the green, sylvan, and altogether wonderful rural outskirts of Nitshill and a childhood of farms, dairy cows, woods, water-world magnificence, streams, small rolling hills, and meadows stretching to the far horizon. A very lucky escape and something which I will always be grateful for. I may not have discovered my lifelong love of nature otherwise, stuck in hectic Kinning Park. The name is misleading. It's not a park in that sense, rather a plot of built up inner city land without trees or grass, much like neighbouring Plantation. Only on old maps, going back 200 years, before the industrial revolution and Glasgow's gradual expansion to over a million residents by the 1930s was it ever green, flat and farmed.
Glasgow City Chambers in George Square. Would they really have cleared all this away for a concrete cube landscape? Madness!
Clydeport Building. Another standout icon for its detailed carving.
Artwork around the roof of Clydeport.
Pediment detail. Clydeport Building. King Neptune looks down.
Also on the roof of the Clydeport Building. An older form of Trident warfare.
Merchant City District in Glasgow.
As is this building near the Trongate.
Renfield Street. Something of a lesser shopping street now yet boasting some of the finest period architecture in Glasgow.
Glasgow's High Street. Quite a few modern TV and film productions have used Glasgow and its outlying districts as locations. Outlander, Trainspotting, World War Z, Under the Skin, Cloud Atlas... to name a few recent ones. The latest is a Batman or Batgirl film using the area around Glasgow Cross as Gotham City.
Britannia music hall in that area. Stan Laurel, the silent comedian, learned his craft as a teenager in the Glasgow vaudeville circuit of that era, performing short comic routines and sketches.
Glasgow Cross. Merchant City District.
Period buildings looking down towards Nelson Mandela Square.
A mix of different building styles.
Glasgow is also a city of white and cream. An elegant corner here looking up towards Blythswood Square.
Blythswood Street buildings and a different period style.
Eight floor tenement.
Another white/cream building on Bothwell Street.
Liverpool, London, and Globe Insurance Buildings.... or they were when first constructed as it's carved into the stonework.
Same building at night.
Trongate view. Merchant City District in Glasgow... or Gotham City... when the film comes out.
10 floor period building in Glasgow. An early Scottish Skyscraper. Most of City Centre Glasgow is either ten or twenty floors high with nothing above that height... as yet.
Splintering City Mural.
GOMA Artwork from a few years ago.
Tobacco Warehouse built 1854, making it one of the last built in the city and the last gasp of the tobacco lords whose tall masted sailing ships brought the initial wealth to develop that early 1700s version of Glasgow.
7 comments:
We, too, are a sandstone area and we have some lovely old buildings in Wigton and Carlisle. But your old buildings in Glasgow are really beautiful - I personally hate the new ones though...
We have magnificent buildings! I learned on Twitter (not always a hell-hole) that blond sandstone buildings are usually pre-1890 from local quarries, but red sandstone is post-1890 when railways connected Glasgow to quarries in Dumfries.
Cheers Carol,
I do like the mix of old and new buildings but I wish they would break the 20 storey rule with at least one 40 or 50 floor spectacular city centre building,on a hilltop Drumlin, which if successful and iconic would put us on the international map even more as a tourist attraction than we are today.
Hi Anabel,
I did read that about the later buildings coming from quarries in Dumfriesshire as well, which surprised me, but with 40 different photos to upload and loads of other facts to get in that was one I forgot about after 4 hours of sorting and preparation. Having taken around 500 photos of the city centre my ambition to put out a comprehensive post was flagging a bit by then as I could have easily added another 40 photos of red sandstone outlying districts and other relevant facts that did not make the final cut. One of my main reasons for doing so is that there's not that many photos online in one single place of older period sandstone buildings that I could see, which also surprised me.
This is a great post honouring some of the magnificent buildings to be seen in Glasgow. I would never have thought of calling it a 'Rose Red City' but it actually is, and that is how I shall think of it in the future. Imagine how beautiful all of that fine stonework would look if it was given a really good clean.
Thanks Rosemary,
One of the reasons, thinking back, for knocking the old buildings down is that they were almost jet black with 100 years of coal fires, chimney soot, factory smoke, and starling droppings as I always remember Glasgow City Centre streets as being very dark as a child. It was only in the 1980s that they thought of stone-cleaning them with power-washers and were amazed at the range of colours beneath all the grime and they have stayed clean as no more coal fires or tall chimneys and no more starlings winter roosting in the city centre after they were all chased away to the countryside.
Doh! You can plainly see the colour difference in that first photo of the carved lion with the left side stone untouched and still black although being semi sheltered in there and an upright side panel it is not as soot stained as many buildings once were. Glasgow's Royal Infirmary is a remaining example of the original colour most of the older buildings appeared back then.
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