June 1966: “Call to Save Glasgow Buildings” – Warning from The Victorian Society

 

Following the fire and loss of the Union Corner building, which was located next to Central Station,

I decided to have a look into comments made about Glasgow Corporation’s apparent indifference

towards the city’s architectural heritage, in 1966.

 

 

An article on page six of The Scotsman, on Saturday the 4th of June, 1966, reads:

 

“CALL TO SAVE

GLASGOW

BUILDINGS

 

Glasgow Corporation’s apparent indifference threatens the city’s architectural heritage,

warns the Victorian Society. In their report for 1965 the society list Glasgow cases and

suggest ways to restore some of the buildings.

 

The problem must be seen against the background of Glasgow’s ‘appalling problems of

urban renewal.’ But when Glasgow’s new housing is made worthy of its heritage, the society

ask, what will there be left of that heritage?

 

Worst of all, Alexander Thomson’s famous Caledonia Road Free Church (1856-57) still lies

derelict. The city should restore it, perhaps as a small concert hall, they urge.

 

The society praise Glasgow’s £40,000 grant to Thomson’s surviving church in St Vincent Street

(1859), but they deplore that St Andrew’s Hall (James Sellars 1873-7) is still in ruins, that Rochead’s

Park Church of 1858 is threatened by an office block and that Mackintosh’s Ingram Street tearooms

remain ‘shoddily dismembered.’ ”

 

 

 

The British Newspaper Archive.

 

 

 

George Fairfull-Smith, March 2026.