Local folk passing the unloved and empty Poundworld shopfront on Kilmarnock Rd may not know of its colourful past and the contribution it made to the Scottish music scene in the 1970s and 1980s.

Some key and influential names in Scottish, UK and global rock and pop plied their musical skills and mingled in their early days in the compact surrounds of this now vacant retail unit, which has gone through a number of changes…

The Kilmarnock Rd site began life as a F.W. Woolworth & Co Ltd store in 1936.

In the 1960s, Woolworths (as it became known as) relocated to bigger premises on the opposite side of the road, in the newly built Shawlands Arcade.

The old Woolworths building became a pub called Doune Castle, and sadly they plastered over the unlisted Art Deco stone facade, making it more fashionable but a somewhat less timeless building.

The Doune Castle was part of the Rio Stakis group of hotels and restaurants. Upstairs was a bar and restaurant and downstairs was a beer cellar. It was here that many upcoming musicians got an early experience of playing live.

Simple Minds, Horse McDonald, Ian Donaldson of H20, Tom Rafferty of the Primevals, Brian McNeill of China Crisis and James Grant of Love and Money all played the gloomy beer cellar along with many others.

Tom Rafferty recalls the early days of the Doune Castle and its role in the Glasgow music scene:

“My earliest public gigs were at the Doune Castle. I now realise that the room was a challenging space for bands to perform in, with stone walls, a fairly low ceiling and the stage set up so bands played across the narrowest part of the cellar. But the venue was a chance for pretty much anyone to ask for a gig and get what was usually a Tuesday night slot for a small fee.”

The venue was where many musicians started out sometimes working with others that would become successful in their own right. Tom Rafferty’s first gig was in 1979 in a band called Kashmir whose personnel also included James Grant, who went on to have chart success with Friends Again, Love and Money and is now a popular solo artist.

Simple Minds played the Doune Castle in their early days. The Herald Diary on the 11th Feb 2004 carried this memory from the band-

“The original line-up of Scots group Simple Minds was reunited this week for the first time in 20 years at the 60th birthday party of their manager, Bruce Findlay.

Guests naturally reminisced about the good old days like the time in 1978 when the Minds gigged at the Doune Castle pub in Shawlands, Glasgow, for a fee of (pounds) 25 plus a tray of filled rolls.

Sadly, the band’s performance was repeatedly interrupted by the pub’s management, asking them to turn the volume down as they were playing loudly enough to cause peas to leap off diners’ plates in the steakhouse upstairs.”

Young musicians would cut their teeth in this venue and move on to other bands, and many have crossed paths later in their career.

Brian McNeill, who went on to play keyboards with China Crisis, the Silencers, the Proclaimers, and now is Belle and Sebastian’s music producer, started out playing at the Doune around the same time as Horse McDonald was playing gigs in an earlier band. Their paths crossed again later when Brian played keyboards for Horse on their successful 1990 album ‘The Same Sky’.

Members of what would become Primal Scream also had some of their earliest live experiences in this Southside venue. Tom Rafferty recalls selling a bass amplifier to Robert Young of the band, and of meeting Robert years later at the height of their Screamadelica fame.

“I went over to say hello at a gig in Glasgow, not expecting him to remember me. He did and said ‘that Marshall amp is why I’m still doing this’.”

The Doune Castle’s legacy is more about the community that it helped to create. It gave many young musicians a chance to play live and to watch and meet other aspiring musicians, share experiences and learn their craft.

So, next time you walk past the empty shopfront on Kilmarnock Road, remember how many famous musicians that shaped Scottish music played this tiny venue before they were famous and how lucky Glasgow was to have this local music venue.

Did you ever frequent Doune Castle… what bands did you see, or did you play there? Do you have any photos from back then? Let us know in the comments.

By Dougie McLellan

Published: 1st December 2022

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Image credits:

Kilmarnock Road, Shawlands (colour and black & white photos), circa 1969-70 – copyright of Colin Duncan.

Woolworth, Kilmarnock Rd, 1939 – copyright of Glasgow City Archives, Virtual Mitchell website.

Present day closed-down Poundworld & Kilmarnock Rd photos, 27 November 2022 – Deirdre Molloy, SGHET.

The post Doune Castle – Shawlands’ forgotten music venue appeared first on SGHET.

Places have their own private and public life and can feel haunted in multiple ways: some because they’ve changed but remain familiar; others because they spark vivid personal memories difficult to express in words, embodying fragments of times past that we can’t – for better or for worse – return to.

They help define us – where we were then or are now, sometimes both – and convey how our predecessors lived. In our own lifetimes huge changes happen, but what often strikes us most is that jolt that comes when faced with sudden, drastic change in what we’ve only recently left behind us or have a meaningful connection to.

This could soon be the case with the (temporarily closed since 2020) Shawfield Stadium, which sits north east of Polmadie near the banks of the Clyde, as a planning application to demolish it and redevelop the site for residential and other uses has been lodged with South Lanarkshire Council by its owners.

Although just outside Glasgow’s present day borders, its history is entwined with that of the city. For a brief period from 1975-1996 it was even incorporated into Glasgow’s municipal district control within the larger Strathclyde Regional Council framework, after Rutherglen lost its own local council. Then in 1996, as part of Rutherglen, it was reallocated to South Lanarkshire council.

In line with its shared and shifting history, if we start to look even closer, we’ll discover not just connections to urban leisure in times past, but ghosts of multiple sorts still making their presence felt here, including ones that have survived from even further back than 1936 when the re-designed stadium opened…

The inner-city industrial landscape

By the 1930s, although the shipyards started to boom toward the decade’s end as the world re-armed in the run up to World War Two, Glasgow’s industrial might was already in decline. The tract of land on the east side of the Gorbals however – just grazing north eastern Govanhill to the south and stretching east into the fringes of Rutherglen – was still one of the most intensely industrialised areas of the city at the time.

This was Oatlands, Polmadie and Shawfield, home to such collosi as William Dixon’s Govan Iron Works (aka Dixon’s Blazes) and J & J White’s Chemical Works amongst many others.

But the workers and other residents locally needed some release from the industrial grind, and while factory owners, municipal bodies and civic and professional clubs provided much of these facilities in the form of parks, swimming baths, football grounds, tennis courts and bowling greens, in the post-war period innovative private enterprise focused on cinemas, from the first projection of moving pictures in 1895 to the arrival of sound in 1927.

By the time of cinema’s golden age of the 1930s picture houses had been joined in urban hubs by greyhound racing tracks, with the oval track and mechanical hare arrangement imported to Britain from the USA in 1926, as palaces of leisure and mass distraction.

While Shawfield was still heavily industrial, there were pockets of non-industrial space, and succumbing to the American trend, the stadium of financially struggling Clyde F.C. since 1898 next to Richmond Park agreed it could be used for greyhound racing while still also holding football matches.

The stadium was slightly altered to incorporate a greyhound track and re-opened to the public on 14th November 1932, eventually being sold outright to Shawfield Greyhound Racing Company Ltd (SGRC) in 1935, with a fully-transformed stadium boasting an American-style oval greyhound racetrack listed as having been completed in 1936.

When Shawfield part-shifted to racing track status in 1932, there were already four National Greyhound Racing Society tracks in Glasgow, plus three other independent tracks in the city, so Shawfield needed to stand out against its competitors. As an entertainment-cum-“sports” venue that was part of the gambling industry we shouldn’t be surprised then – in terms of the track’s defining features as it morphed further under full SGRC control – that the owners went for the style of the moment to lure folk in and add some swagger to proceedings: Art Deco.

This is where the iconic Shawfield Stadium gates come in and what drew your correspondent down there on a dry but typically cloudy July afternoon in 2021. Cyclling through the Gorbals, the contrast with other great enclosure of the area passed en route – the Southern Necropolis – couldn’t be starker.

One is a welcoming and tranquil green space, an oasis of biodiversity, history and sculpture amid the high-rise and mid-rise flats of Hutchesonstown and the warehouse district of Oatlands on its southern flank. The other is disjointed in feel and brutal in parts, a void encircled with hulking corrugated iron exteriors in places, clashing with earlier more delicate parts.

Shawfield is pervaded by a lifeless, unearthly air that permeates beyond the stadium…. people live nearby in sizeable numbers, it’s the streets that are devoid of life apart from traffic. What these enclosures have in common, however, is great entry points.

Gateways to escape: eternal and earthly

The Southern Necropolis gate lodge (1848) was designed by Charles Wilson (1810-1863), an architect with a huge output of work all over Scotland, famed for such other buildings as 1-16 Park Circus and 18-21 Park Terrace in Glasgow, Strathbungo Free Church, Glasgow Academy, and Lews Castle in Stornoway. The architect of the Shawfield Stadium gates is likely to have been John Easton, whose catalogued output is minimal.

His design oversight can only be inferred, as Easton is named as the Stadium’s architect in the Dictionary of Scottish Architects, so we assume he must have also fashioned the gates. Information surrounding the design history of the site is so scant though that a degree of conjecture is necessary. Closer inspection of the site however, turns up other affirmative clues.

The first thing that strikes you about the gates is the stepped arch or pyramidic ziggurat design – a style originating in Mesopotamia (largely within what is now Iraq) which was re-ignited in the Art Deco era, enlivening everything from New York skyscapers to suburban fireplaces. It was seen everywhere, including in the proliferation of shops, garages and dancehalls built in the era.

The ziggurat also defined the totalisator board (or ‘toteboard’) inside the stadium. It was perfecly suited to the passtime’s central engine, betting, constantly drawing the gambler’s eye to their possible win or lose scenario. Only two things mattered here: the dogs on the track (though not their health or happiness) and the money.

The ziggurat toteboard became a feature of other 1930s-built racing tracks, a famous survivor being that at Walthamstow Stadium racing track in north east London completed in 1932.

Interestingly the stadium entrance and toteboard at Walthamstow, while no longer part of a greyhound racing track, is a listed building – Grade II listed on the system operated by Historic England. It only became listed in 2007 but its key features have been restored while incorporated into a mixed usage housing and retail development.

Where Shawfield’s design differs most notably from Walthamstow is in its use of that most Glaswegian of surfaces, and the main reason I ventured here, the redoubtable ceramic tile…

The iconic photo of Shawfield Stadium gates in 1937 held by Glasgow City Archives at the Mitchell Library (photo 5 in this article) shows two extruding columns faced in what looks like tiling and topped with lamps, but the monochrome photograph makes it impossible to be certain of the surface material.

Seen in situ there’s zero doubt, as the grey captured by the camera’s lens is revealed as rich green tiling affixed to the bricks behind, smooth to the touch albeit much chipped, missing some tiles entirely, and crudely painted over at points.

Design-wise the ziggurat arrangement matches the old photo but on closer scrutiny something’s not quite right. The tiled columns don’t extrude in exactly the same way. What’s gone on here then? Nothing in fact. There were two sets of gates, these being the slightly less grand set although still impressive in their day. Thanks to Lost Glasgow for the tip.

Another discrepancy is the small flagpoles on the present gates, which don’t appear on the other set. We can see they later had a (now rusted) spotlight affixed to each. Flagpoles are common features of many Art Deco and Streamline Moderne buildings, particularly on corner sites.

Lack of documentation of the building means we don’t yet know if they were there at launch in 1936 or added later. Maybe we can find out…

Do you have any old photos or newspaper cuttings of either sets of gates that show them in better times? We’d love to see them if you do and optionally you can donate old images to our South Glasgow Archive, whether in digital or orginal format. Leave a comment or contact us on social media if so.

A twentieth century temple to flock to

Leaving the gates and cycling round to the opposite end of the site I came to the other stadium structure still abiding from the 1930s. Was it the stadium offices, perhaps a customer bar or cafe with cloakrooms and restrooms, or even a member’s club area? Were you ever in it?

Getting closer the design conveys aspects of both modernist and far eastern architecture, with the almost pagoda-style roof extending over the door reminiscent of Buddhist-influenced roof designs common to China, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam and elsewhere in East Asia.

Overall there’s a Japanese feel to this building when looked at in the round, with its minimal but precise use of ornamentation and vertical window arrangements. This echoes some of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s work which anticipated Art Deco modernism in the Art Nouveau era, with this pared-back style particularly evident at Hill House (built 1904) in Helensburgh and his posthumously realised House for an Art Lover (built 1989-1996) in Bellahouston Park.

While modernist in direction, it’s not fully attuned style-wise with the gates. Maybe the architect didn’t have a singuar vision he wanted to project and was happy to vary styles within the larger stadium site, or perhaps he did and the business wouldn’t allow it. A third possibility is that John Easton didn’t design both structures, so someone else was involved in one of them…

In turn the upper floor windows themselves are metal-framed, possibly Crittall windows. Crittall became the go-to window fitting supplier in many 1930s buildings due to its manufacturing prowess producing windows of reliably tight-fitting seal and weatherproof durability. These ground level windows however are more indeterminate vis-à-vis their material.

Crittall became so successful they even built a village of modernist housing for their workers in Silver End, Essex in 1926-27, contracting a range of architects to design them, most notably Paisley-born architect Thomas S Tait (of 1938 Empire Exhibition fame), on behalf of John James Burnet & Partners practice. Tait designed the manager’s house ‘Wolverton’ among others pictured here.

There’s a well-preserved interwar Crittall advertising sign in the corridor of The Engine Shed, Historic Environment Scotland’s premises in Stirling, which I spotted in 2018 when visiting to attend a conference.

Here too, as at the gates, the green tiles play an ornamental and shape-accentuating role, and suggest at their deployment at the gates by the same architect, John Easton, although green tiles especially in tenement wally closes are ubiquitous across Glasgow.

Meanwhile, below the doorway, a surrounding terrazzo stone step carries the staff, or punters, in.

Zooming closer in, a look at the window panes reveals a pattern. It’s impossible to confirm, but if these are the original panes then its fitting that the patterned glass has a playful Art Deco design.

Another possibility is that this ‘textured glass’ or ‘figured rolled glass’ was fitted later, with patterned panes felt to be in sympathy with the surrounding period style. I’d like to think these were original but haven’t found a match to pin down the production period yet. There’s a great selection of Victorian, Edwardian and 20th Century patterned textured glass collated here.

Either way, the pattern detail has a Jazz Modern swish to it that adds a little zing to proceedings. Have you seen this style elsewhere? Maybe someone could bring it back into production!

The many lives of Shawfield Stadium

Few today will mourn the decline of greyhound racing but Shawfield has hosted many other events over the years, such as music concerts and of course plenty of its original activity: football.

From big cup to local club games, it’s been home to plenty of memorable outings for Glaswegians and other Scots who follow the beautiful game, and a key site for Scotland’s sporting heritage, both as home to Clyde F.C., host to visitors prior to 1932, and an ongoing site for matches even while a greyhound track.

In turn, it’s been incorporated into ‘Football’s Square Mile’ by The Hampden Collection project to develop the world’s biggest outdoor football museum centred on the birthplace of the modern game of passing football, namely First Hampden in Crosshill, its successor pitches Second and Third Hampden in the Southside, and connected historic Glasgow (and now Rutherglen) football sites.

Shawfield has a more troubling history too. The site of J & J White’s Chemical Works was built on the lands of Shawfield Estate, owned by Daniel Campbell (1671/2–1753). As Mark McGregor notes in our #SouthsideSlaveryLegacies article on The Tobacco Lords:

“Campbell himself, however, acquired much of his wealth in trading tobacco for iron ore which provided him the means to purchase the Shawfield Estate, next to Oatlands and Polmadie, in 1707… Campbell made a considerable amount from both the trade of tobacco and more directly, in the trading of enslaved people.

The house and estate were passed down to his son Walter who then sold it to the chemical works firm J&J White in 1788. Due to ongoing contamination issues, the site which included the 150-year old Shawfield House was pulled down in the late 1960s.”

The house can been seen still standing eerily amid the Chemical Works complex in this 1967 photo, part of the John R Hume collection in Historic Environment Scotland’s Canmore archive.

This was it closer-up, in 1966, again photograped by Hume while on his odyssey of capturing Glasgow’s decaying industrial heritage.

Environmental legacies of Shawfield’s industrial past

The planning application to demolish Shawfield Stadium and redevelop the land with homes was submitted on 5th November 2021. South Lanarkshire Council responded 22nd December requesting an Environmental Imapct Assessment (EIA) of the proposed works before the application can progess to a final decision, an EIA as yet unreceived at time of publication. This is required as a large area around Shawfield is known to be contaminated with chromium, including hexavalent chromium 6, a poisonous and carcinogenic substance toxic to humans.

Chromium ore processing residue was a byproduct of the aforementioned White’s Chemical Works which operated on the site between 1820 and 1967 producing mainly bichromate of potash, for use in the tanning and textile dying industries. The manufacturing process produced a significant ratio of unusuable chromium byproduct including chromium 3 and hexavalent chromium 6, the latter of which is highly soluble and mobile in the environment.

Over the decades up to 2.5 million tonnes of chromium-containing waste was dumped by White’s – legally at the time – buried mainly in claypits and disused mines all around this area and elsewhere in Glasgow. Toxic clouds of chromium dust were also present in the air at high levels for many decades inside certain parts of the industrial complex.

In 2019 The Herald newspaper spoke to descendants of workers at the plant for an article: ‘Polmadie Burn: Everyone knew chromium waste was damaging health’.

“Workers at the chemical plant responsible for polluting a large area of the south of Glasgow were known as ‘White’s whistlers’, due to the damage caused to their nasal packages by cancer-causing chromium, relatives have claimed.

Men who worked for the company, J&J White’s of Rutherglen, came home clouded in dust, many bearing ‘chrome holes’ – burns in the skin, and with septums ruined by chemicals they had inhaled.”

In recent years large-scale remediation works have been carried out in various parts of the area (both within Glasgow and South Lanarkshire’s municipal borders) to measure and mitigate the leaching of chromium into both the water system and into new structures built locally, by containing or diverting it, by converting chromium 6 in-situ into the less toxic chromium 3, and to a lesser extent by removing it, but the sheer scale of the dumping has made this a huge challenge that’s only partly been addressed.

In the meantime, the chromium 6 continues to leach out, turning Polmadie Burn luminous yellow-green as recently as both 2019 and 2021, causing the waterway and local playing fields to be fenced off and raising alarm among residents and public representatives.

For this, unfortunately, is the most concentrated area of chromium-polluted urban land in the UK by an order of magnitude. While it was produced elsewhere, for several decades J & J White’s gained a near monopoly on bichromate of potash production in Britain from their Shawfield complex, accounting for 70% of UK output in the 1930s.

For now the outcome for the site remains uncertain, and environmental safety concerns are paramount, but the remaining Art Deco fragments of Shawfield Stadium provide a stepping stone into the longer shared history and memories of the area, as well as the interwar era’s design trends.

However development plans proceed, it would be worthwhile keeping these historic elements intact, restoring them, and considering their addition to the register of listed structures in Scotland, as they’re local landmarks and part of the area’s unique character and social history, beacons of its shared past in an area dominated by new developments.

There are good memories here, alongside bad ones, when you get the full measure of the place. Some spectres though might be best not disturbed too hastily until we can figure out how to better tame them. Until then, as sure as it rains in Glasgow, they’ll keep haunting us.

What are your memories of Shawfield Stadium? Tell us in the comments below.

By Deirdre Molloy

Published: 14th October 2022

This is the third in our #SouthsideModerne series of articles, documenting the range of Art Deco and other interwar modernist buildings south of the Clyde for the two-decade Centenary of Art Deco architecture and design.

Follow the hashtag on Twitter and Facebook.

Read part 1: James Miller’s Art Deco Leyland Motors

Read part 2:  Renewing Govan Lyceum’s Faded Ambition

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Sources & Further Reading:

John Easton, architect (1898-1977); entry in Dictionary of Scottish Architects

Charles Wilson, architect (1810-1863); entry in Dictionary of Scottish Architects

Southern Necropolis Gate Lodge, 316, Caledonia Road, Gorbals; Buildings At Risk website

Friends of Southern Necropolis website

Lanarkshire racetrack faces uncertain future with environmental report needed for planning application to proceed; Daily Record, 19th Sept 2022

Polmadie Burn: Everyone knew chromium waste was damaging health; The Herald, 6th March 2019

Whites Chemical Company; Rutherglen Heritage Society

Soil 2017 | Lecture 3 Characterisation of Cr(VI)-Contaminated Urban Soils; online talk by Professor Margaret Graham, University of Edinburgh for the International Institute for Environmental Studies, 20th Mar 2017

Contamination tests over toxic green burn in Glasgow; BBC News website; 12th April 2019

SEPA called to investigate ‘toxic’ Glasgow burn; Glasgow Evening Times, 26th April 2021

The Toxic Burn, Future Climate Info, undated 2021

Football’s Square Mile; The Hampden Collection

Image Sources:

Glasgow Road, Shawfield Chemical Works General view from NE showing SE side of works, 23 July 1967, John R Hume Collection, SC 595654. Copyright: Canmore / Historic Environment Scotland

Glasgow, oblique aerial view, taken from the SW, centred on Shawfield Stadium, 31 August 1998, SC 1685599. Copyright: Canmore / Historic Environment Scotland

Shawfield stadium boundary wall and gates, 1937. Copyright: Glasgow City Archives, Mitchell Library

Totalisator Board at Shawfield; Burrell Collection Photo Library, 1955 Survey. Copyright: Glasgow Life

Walthamstow Stadium toteboard, August 2006. Copyright: Futureshape, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Refurbished frontage of Walthamstow Stadium, 25 April 2017. Copyright: Acabashi; Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Glasgow, Shawfield Chemical Works General View, 27 March 1967, John R Hume Collection, SC 591198. Copyright: Canmore / Historic Environment Scotland

Glasgow Road, Shawfield Chemical Works View from SSE showing SW and SE fronts of old mansion house ‘Shawfield’, 11 September 1966, John R Hume Collection, SC 591469. Copyright: Canmore / Historic Environment Scotland

All other images copyright of the author, July 2021 (Shawfield) and April 2020 (Southern Necropolis).

The post Art Deco fragments of Shawfield Stadium appeared first on SGHET.

We’ve missed out on plenty during our lockdowns and in particular no one’s had a night out at the movies in what seems like aeons. Currently Scotland’s legal reopening date for cinemas is May 17th although it’ll be later than that for many. I’ll bet more than a few of you can’t wait…

You’re not alone. After decades of drastic decline, cinema attendance in the UK has staged a gradual comeback before being kyboshed by the pandemic – but you wouldn’t know it looking at the dilapidated grandeur of Govan’s semi-derelict Lyceum Cinema.

Despite multi-channel TV, streaming film services and the all-pervading distractions of the internet, the allure of the big screen has proved stubbornly enduring. It serves up an experience they simply can’t come close to. This makes the Category-B listed Lyceum’s current parlous condition all the more poignant.

Sitting in the dark munching popcorn surrounded by strangers and gazing up at the big screen as the lights go down and opening credits roll is still one of the most enjoyable and rewarding things you can do across generations. For a host of reasons it’s still a great night (or afternoon) out.

UK cinema admissions peaked in 1946 at incredible 1.6 billion and by 1984 had fallen to just 54 million. Since that 1984 low point, UK cinema admissions have climbed to 176m in 2019, although in the last decade numbers have largely been flatlining.

Multiplexes have helped repopularise the cinemagoing pastime since the eighties, but people can’t always do that locally as pile-em high multiplexes are often distant.

Now that we’re being encouraged to walk, cycle and take public transport more to stem air pollution, reduce carbon emissions and make streets more people-centred, many will rightly be asking why you should have to own a car or trek into town to access the silver screen and its wares, whether blockbuster or arthouse?

In a big city of villages like Glasgow, staying local has all sorts of advantages – cost and convenience benefits to locals and a myriad of benefits to the local economy: jobs, a boost to nearby businesses, visitors from elsewhere. Most of all, having great gathering places like a cinema lifts up community identity, cohesion and pride.

Given how much we’ve come to rediscover and rely on the value of local services and culture in this pandemic, it’s more than a little ironic to note that at the very moment restrictions lift – and as people flock back to neighbourhood bars, restaurants and shops in ever greater numbers – there’s so few local cinemas in Glasgow.

So let’s take a closer look at the Lyceum which has long lain empty after a typical spell as a bingo hall…

Historic Environment Scotland note: “After being sold to County Bingo in 1974, subsequent conversion entailed adapting the stalls for bingo with a 480-seat cinema retained in the balcony. The cinema closed in 1981 and the bingo hall closed in 2006.” That makes it unused for 15 years now…

While currently defunct as a working venue, the Lyceum is still one of Scottish inter-war cinema architecture’s great survivors. Others have been gutted or reduced to rubble. To compound both its importance and the gravity (and potential) of its situation, the signature style of cinema of which the Lyceum is a futuristic branch member – Art Deco – has just one functioning operation left in the city, the Glasgow Film Theatre (1939), another example of the later European-influenced phase of this ‘moderne’ movement.

Glasgow and Art Deco’s double-decade Centenary

As the Centenary of the 1920s settles into its second year – and the double-decade Centenary of Art Deco (or ‘Jazz Modern’ as it was known at the time) and related ‘moderne’ styles that transformed our buildings, interiors, fashion and consumer goods starts to take centre stage – where better to go in Glasgow to get a feel for this dramatic era this than the pictures and one of the city’s greatest movie theatre landmarks.

In cinema’s peak period building-wise – the 1930s – there were around 130 picture houses in Glasgow according to T. Louden (1983). Govan itself reached its peak in the 1950s with 9 working cinemas, more than the entire city of Aberdeen. Not for nothing was Scotland’s only metropolis known as Cinema City.

The Lyceum’s backstory and early days

Even further back, on the same spot, there was a Lyceum music hall. Built in 1898, it was adapted to a cinema in 1923 before it burnt down in 1937. That former variety theatre can be spotted in the mural adorning the Lyceum’s upper wall on the McKechnie St side.

In terms of its architectural style the Govan Lyceum of 1938 defies neat classification, having elements of Art Deco, Streamline Moderne and the International Modern Style, the latter being the most dominant outside and Streamline commanding the interior.

Like most successful cinema programmes then, there’s a bit of ‘something for everyone’ about it design-wise. All the more reason it should prosper as a community enterprise as well as a heritage landmark. All at once momentous, varied, welcoming and streetwise, it’s got that magic… boldly European in style and ambition but also 100% Govan.

Designed by CJ McNair and Robert Elder, it opened in December 1938 and was built to seat 2,600, one of the new suburban super-cinema generation, although Govan is hardly suburban. According to Scottish Cinemas and Theatres:

“The main entrance, on the corner of Govan Road and McKechnie Street, is below a three-storey high curtain-wall frontage of five tall glass windows, which were originally backlit. The rest of the public exterior was tiled at ground level, with bricks above, and a strong horizontal emphasis.

The circular entrance foyer had a central island paybox, from which patterns radiated in terrazzo on the floor, and a mural ran around beneath a central light fitting. The auditorium was originally decorated in blue, pink and lilac.”

The Dictionary of Scottish Architects notes of the architects’ working partnership:

“McNair was primarily a cinema architect mainly through his partnership with George Urie Scott in the Cinema Construction Co: between the wars he worked with Robert Elder who was first chief assistant and then partner from 1936. It used to be said that McNair got the work and Elder designed it: Elder was an able designer but was remembered by an assistant, Robert Forsyth, as ‘a very shy man who didn’t want to take the credit’. Some of their later work was considerably influenced by T S Tait.”

Tait’s most famous landmark on the Southside was the tower at the Empire Exhibition of 1938 in Bellahouston Park, dismantled along with most of the site when the Exhibition ended and WWII commenced.

Below is the Tower of Empire looming behind the Steel Industry Scotland Building at the Exhibition, an apt conjunction given we’re talking about a similarly-designed cinema located in Glasgow’s historic shipbuilding district and they both were completed in the same year. Take a look at it – what parallels with the Lyceum can you see? Was Tait an influence?

Charles James McNair (1881-1955) had jumped into the modernist space early on in the 1920s, and by the time of designing the Lyceum he’d fashioned numerous Glasgow buildings in Art Deco and Streamline Moderne style, mainly in unison with Elder.

Coincidentally – for Southside aficionados – McNair’s first credited work was as Chief Assistant to John Nisbet on the recently-restored 1906 Glasgow Style tenement block Camphill Gate in Shawlands opposite Langside Halls, so he’d already cut his teeth on adapting Art Nouveau to the indigenous tenement style of Glasgow.

Having earned his spurs on one of the greats in its antecedent style, McNair was well placed to get stuck into the new wave of Art Deco and full-blown moderne buildings sweeping the globe.

One of his first was in Laurieston, as mentioned in our previous post on James Miller’s Art Deco Leyland Motors building.

This 1928 building was for Alexander Sloan & Co drapers store and drapery warehouse, but had another concrete top storey added in 1937 by Whyte, Galloway & Nicol. The Art Deco Egyptian-style detailing at the 1928 top is still very impressive if you fancy trekking down there to peer closely at it, and the building as a whole has that mini-skyscraper feel.

McNair & Elder – the odd couple Glasgow powerhouse of cinema building

Historic Environment Scotland expand further on the duo: “The architects, Charles John McNair and Robert Elder, had entered into partnership with Glasgow entrepreneur and cinema exhibitor George Urie Scott early in the 1930s. Together they formed the Cinema Construction Company, soon becoming one of the most prolific cinema design companies in Scotland, producing designs for independent cinemas as well as the ABC chain…

“Stylistic changes within the McNair and Elder partnership lead to the conclusion, based also on anecdotal evidence from Robert Forsyth a junior draughtsman with the practice at the time, that Elder was responsible for most of the designs, especially the interiors.”

As mentioned earlier, the Cathcart-born Elder (1899-1963) was the artist hidden from sight, “a very shy man who didn’t want to take the credit”. We certainly have plenty to equally thank both Elder and McNair for now, a legacy sadly mostly lost.

In total McNair and Elder’s resulting range was enormous, sometimes simplified due to the harsh commercial pressures of the period and its hard-nosed clients, but occasionally producing outstanding cinemas. Here’s two more of their ghosts from the Southside…

The above photos don’t do these buildings justice, as they were also designed to be transformed by neon light into magnetic nocturnal beacons. Like most of the period, they have both since been demolished.

The Lyceum is definitely distinct among their works, but not completely alone, in having a daylight presence as strong as that of the night-time hours. Another survivor from the McNair & Elder pantheon on a par with the Lyceum is The Ascot in Anniesland on Great Western Rd. Now converted to flats only the facade remains but what a belter…

Here’s quiet man Elder, the wizard behind the curtain, at it again, speaking volumes in his drawing of the building design…

Govan’s lost Art Deco emporiums

What makes the Lyceum stand out most, even today, is how different is looks to both its Victorian and Edwardian neighbours in the historic quarter of Govan Burgh it’s situated in and from all the other modern buildings nearby.

Poised and puffed out on the corner of Govan Rd and McKechnie Street it looks utterly space age… like a stranger landed from another planet but somehow fitted in without losing their weirdness and ended up staying and becoming one of the gang.

Remarkably, the Lyceum is the sole ‘moderne style’ structure still around locally. But it wasn’t always on its lonesome. Not only did it have the Plaza and Vogue cinemas (the latter designed by James McKissack opened in 1938) for some competitive company, there was also the fashion for adding Art Deco shopfronts onto older street-level shop buildings, explored in the Leyland Motors article.

Maybe it’s just me but when I look at this I think every cinema should have its counterpart shop or cafe, and in the Art Deco era many of them did. As the cinema became part of the area’s DNA, it made sense that its brand extended locally. That said, it’s probably a blessing most of them don’t now, when you look at the deadening design of them. Where has the beguiling pizzazz of cinemas and ability to design for life gone to?

The Black Cat café was much further along Govan Road heading east, at Linthouse. The frontage is gone and it’s now clumsily converted, as is its neighbour on the right, into the ground floor residence of the tenement building it occupied. The lack of shops, services and streetlife in general in this stretch of Govan Rd nowadays is really noticeable.

The Art Deco styling of The Linthouse Café nearby extended beyond the typography and glossy tiling to the jazzy etched detailing on the windows. This frontage is now concreted over, barring some reduced window space, and is the Diamond Dogs Salon. I wonder if any of its Art Deco glory remains hidden beneath..?

I noticed this little Art Deco critter below near ground level on the marble front of the shop right next door to the Lyceum, which was once a Bank of Scotland. There were previously two, but the one on the other side seems to have been removed or concreted over. Since then I’ve spotted a few more around the Southside; there’s an identical series of them on a building at 463-471 Victoria Road.

Glasgow subway’s lost ‘moderne’ period

More ghosts from the Art Deco era in Govan come in the form of subway stations. As the 20s and 30s saw the birth of the makeover as we know it today, so most of our old subway stations got a complete modernist update. Govan has three stations in its orbit that got this treatment.

While most people call it the Subway, and that’s also its official name, it’s interesting that the new signage of this era adoped the ‘Underground’ moniker. Was it mimicking both the look and name of London Underground’s famous revamp in the same period? Very probably, but Glasgow was also big and confident enough to hoover up styles from elsewhere without too much consternation.

There was plenty of indigenous style architecture and local adaptations of global trends in Glasgow already. Adopting a style wholesale from elsewhere didn’t mean the city’s identity was threatened, and the fashion for Art Deco transcended borders globally.

Govan Cross station entrance above, like many others, was inserted on the ground floor an old tenement. An unlikely pairing that somehow works.

These perky modernist portals were not well maintained however, compared to London’s – a reflection of the managed decline of Glasgow in general since the 1940s – and eventually had to be replaced with the underwhelming station designs we live with now (although the train redesigns were quite iconic). Built in the late 1970s, the new ‘Clockwork Orange’ reopened to the public on 16th April 1980.

While each of the modernist stations were unique, some were more similar than others. Cessnock (above) is a curio. Entered almost imperceptibly at tenement basement level, from a distance the sign is practically the only inkling there’s a station located here at all.

Copland Rd station (now renamed Ibrox) was another oddity, with its diagonal shape covering the previous design behind it, but this also provided continuity to an already recognisable local icon. The main difference shape-wise was the change to stepped rather than sloped diagonal inclines, in tune with modernist structures elsewhere.

Do you have any old photos of the Lyceum, the shops or the subway stations (including their interiors) of this period? Get in touch if so; we’d love to include them in our archive.

Many of these modernist station entrances also feature near the start of this brilliant mini-documentary made about the Glasgow Subway in 1974 that came back to prominence recently when a clip from it went viral on social media during lockdown.

We have the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive at Kelvinhall to thank that its digitised and still available to watch freely in full today. Thanks also to Stuart Neville for permission to use his subway photographs.

Snapshots in time: a rare glimpse inside the Lyceum

Concluding our tour of Art Deco-era Govan and returning to the Lyceum itself, what’s less obvious from outside is the remarkable remnants of the old cinema that abide within, despite its increasing dilapidation.

The interior design is dizzying and noticably more Streamline in design, in contrast with the International Style exterior.

In her World Art Deco Day talk on 28th April 2021 for the Twentieth Century Society, Elain Harwood likened this particular style to “ice cream architecture” – when you feast your eyes all those curves, the rolling scoops and whilrling swirls, it certainly has that resonance.

You can see further atmospheric interior shots in this blog post and Flickr set from Ben Cooper in 2010. It was largely intact then, and the main auditorium still hugely impressive. Who knows how much it’s declined inside in the intervening years..?

Sharing Lyceum memories for the future…

In 2019 we ran the ‘Southside Memories’ project to collect memories for our archive, in conjunction with researching and writing our ‘South Glasgow Heritage Trails’ guidebook.

Postcards were distributed at venues in areas around the Southside, each with a map of their specific neighbourhood on one side and space to write memories on the other, along with post boxes for people to put their completed postcards into.

Below is one of the Govan postcard memories contributed. Perhaps you, or a family relative or friend, have your own recollections or comments on Govan or the Lyceum – tell us in the comments here below, or on Facebook or Twitter, or email them to info@sghet.com

The Lyceum is held in great affection by the community and has personal importance for many, as well as being an architectural landmark. This suggests it could be used for a number of community purposes, not just film screenings.

There is a planning application (not the first in its period of disuse however) currently under consideration for ‘Use of vacant building as cinema, concert hall and restaurant and external alterations’, although the period for submitting comments has now closed. More details here.

For now the only certainty is that it remains a building at risk with enormous symbolism, history and potential.  Through better understanding its story, and what it means to Govanites and Glaswegians past and present, we can help shape a positive future for it.

By Deirdre Molloy

Published: 5th May 2021

Sources:

McKean, Charles; The Scottish Thirties, Scottish Academic Press (1987)

Kenna, Rudolph; Glasgow Art Deco, Richard Drew Publishing (1985)

Louden, T., The Cinemas of Cinema City, self-published (1983)

UK cinema annual admissions – 1935 onwards; UK Cinema Association (online)

Virtual Mitchell: Glasgow City Archives online – images kindly reproduced with credit

Glasgow, 908 Govan Road, Lyceum Cinema; Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland

Lyceum, 908 Govan Rd, Govan; Scottish Cinemas and Theatres

Glasgow Film Theatre; Wikipedia entry

McNair & Elder architectural practice; Dictionary of Scottish Architects

The fading grandeur of a former cinema giant; Lost Glasgow (online)

Item NMC/0680 – Ascot Cinema, Glasgow – perspective; The Glasgow School of Art Archives and Collections

Neville, Stuart; Govan Cross and Cessnock subway stations – photographs (online) reproduced with permission

Cooper, Ben; Lyceum Cinema 16th November 2010 (online)

Harwood, Elain; World Art Deco Day Twentieth Century Society talk, 28th April 2021 (online)

Glasgow Subway (1974); National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive at Kelvinhall

Special thanks to the team at Govan Old for hosting our Southside Memories project Govan postbox, in some great company alongside the Govan Stones

All photographs, unless otherwise credited, are by Deirdre Molloy

Follow the #SouthsideModerne hashtag on Twitter

Read the other articles in our #SouthsideModerne series:

James Miller’s Art Deco Leyland Motors

Art Deco fragments of Shawfield Stadium

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Gliding southwards on the raised railway lines from Central Station you’ll spot an intriguing modernist tower peeping up amid the post-war jumble and gap sites on the right just after you pass the 02 Academy (formerly the New Bedford Cinema) on the left.

A semi-derelict building largely cut off from humanity by the M74 flyover and hostile feeder roads that throttle its environs, you’re looking at the corner elevation of the Category-B listed Leyland Motor Company Ltd on Salkeld Street, completed in 1933 to the designs of architect James Miller.

Borne of the 1930s, this building’s origins however are rooted in the long timespan of the 1890s to 1920s, in the Beaux Arts, Chicago, and PWA Moderne styles and the American branch of the international Art Deco movement.

James Miller was seduced by American twists on international architectural trends in that period – although he never visited himself. Instead, it was a case of succumbing to an irresistible bug wholesale, caught from his colleague Donald Alexander Matheson following Matheson’s fact-finding tour Stateside in 1902. The result was a series of show-stopping buildings in Glasgow city centre.

This involved Miller fashioning a series of landmark buildings heavily influenced by a range of American styles (especially the Chicago School movement) for Glasgow on a scale far grander than the roadside Americana we find off Eglinton St – but bar one close competitor Leyland Motors is still my favourite of his US-influenced works.

The cinematic car showroom

The mood exuded at Salkeld St builds on these foundations but, showing Miller’s close attention to the times, has moved on trend-wise and is far more cinematic. It’s as if an unused fragment of a movie set oozing Jazz Age glamour has mysteriously materialised in industrial Glasgow, an enigmatic character that threatens to outstage its starring cast (the cars inside), posing and preening from every angle as it waits for its climatic scene… its close-up.

This was no idle fancy but designed to move minds precisely to fulfil a commercial purpose – a siren structure that channelled the zeitgeist, captivating the 1930s Glaswegian’s dream-fuelled gaze when they went to buy that prized after motor vehicle.

Every time I see Leyland Motor Company’s corner tower, the fluted pilasters, ribbed faience and balconies that decorate it, and the optical illusion fashioned of a double doorway with its multi-layered recessing (sadly the tower windows have been cemented over), I think of Irish-American Cedric Gibbons’ late 1920s Hollywood film sets which themselves influenced later 1930s cinema architecture and interior design worldwide.

Geometric and curvilinear, minimalist but dramatic, Leyland Motors corner energy is both magnetic and propulsive, drawing you in while giving the appearance of itself going somewhere. The playful aerodynamic design invites multiple readings; it’s a ship ploughing forward, a plane taking flight… but it’s also a building as a rocket, primed to go stratospheric, and maybe even a teleporting machine to the silver screen. Beam me up Scotty…

In the business, the skyline flourish topping the tower is called a “fin” or “storm prow” [McKean, The Scottish Thirties]. You can find them on Art Deco and Streamline Moderne buildings worldwide and they’re highly adaptable. Two examples show their plasticity: austerely restrained at the Dominion Cinema, Edinburgh (1938) and cartoonishly exaggerated at the Loma Theatre, San Diego (1945, now a bookstore) where it forms the theatre marquee.

The Loma also typifies many ‘moderne style’ buildings that were transformed nocturnally by neon lighting which also often formed the signage, and its lights still operate. Cinemas, bars, restaurants and shops everywhere including dark, dreich Glasgow embraced this new night-time ambience and self-advertising opportunity.

Fittingly, while it didn’t originally have external neon (as far as I know), through the use of transient neon lights Leyland Motors briefly rematerialised in miniature over its own doorway, when it doubled as an American-themed bar and restaurant backdrop in the 1990 BBC Scotland TV drama series Your Cheatin’ Heart penned by Paisley artist and playwright John Byrne.

The Roaring Twenties and Art Deco’s double-decade centenary

As the Centenary of the 1920s gets underway – the decade modernism swept through much of the world, and the style we now call Art Deco came into being – I wanted to start taking a closer look at Southside “moderne” buildings beginning with my favourite. Although many are already lost, these beacons to a period of super-charged change are still more numerous, and more varied, than you’d think…

Art Deco, what it is and what it isn’t, still provokes debate – the term was only coined by design critic Bevis Hillier in 1968, is blurred around the edges and acts as something of an umbrella concept. It derives from the Paris Exposition Internationale de Arts Decoratifs of 1925 which ran for 6 months attracting 15 million visitors.

Art’s influence was to the fore in this emergent pan-design shift that had its first dedicated showcase in the French capital:

“movements such as German Expressionism, French Cubism, Italian Futurism, Russian Suprematism, and English Vorticism were making their presence felt. The artists associated with these “isms” shared an interest in deconstructing and abstracting the appearance of the world… and their endeavours had a profound influence on design and architecture.” [Hans van Lemmen, 2012]

What we now call Art Deco was, in van Lemmen’s view: “an eclectic style that drew on many stylistic influences, such as European avant-garde (particularly the work of abstract painters such as Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian), classical architecture, the ancient civilisation of Egypt and South America and exotic cultures from the Far East.”

Was Mackintosh an influence on Art Deco?

I can’t help wondering though if the pared-back abstractionism of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s architecture (reworking much older Scots Baronial and Japanese influences) shouldn’t be included in that list? It tends to get bracketed solely with Glasgow Style Art Nouveau. Elements of CRM and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh’s interior design works certainly have Art Deco resonance.

Below are two of his lamps from The Glasgow School of Art, rescued and restored from the debris of the library, displayed at an ICON Scotland event I attended at GSA in November 2019 – looking just like little Art Deco skyscrapers.

Industrial chic and everyday escapism

Art Deco shared with Art Nouveau the quality of being a “total design” movement, present in many spheres of the made world. Where it differed was that mass production driven by manufacturing efficiencies led to cheaper costs and rapid innovation in materials, causing Art Deco style and its younger sibling Streamline Moderne to become democractised and accessible to almost everyone to some extent.

It became the must-have style in many walks of life, from cinemas, factories, banks and civic buildings through to furnishings, ceramics, jewellery, clothing and poster design. Indivisible from consumerism and a faster, more frenetic and increasingly robotic pace of life, clocks, radios, trains – and even laundry vans made by Holland Coachcraft in Govan – embraced the signature moderne look.

In turn, an industrial edge defined Art Deco as it shrugged off the soft, nature-inspired sensuality of Art Nouveau. It was a more pared-back aesthetic, but never without its decorative details, hence the Deco moniker. Machines, mammon and a faster speed of life were in but art – in the form of geometric patterns, zig zag motifs, coloured tiles and various exotic (for example Egyptian-themed) ornaments – was still there co-habiting with it. The presence of the “decoratif” element showed this machine still had a beating heart inside it.

Charlie Chaplin’s character was literally trapped in the wheels of industry in his 1936 movie Modern Times, but in the same period Art Deco counterbalanced and offered transcendence from the recent horrors of WWI, the grinding poverty of the Great Depression and the anxiety of looming conflict in the 1930s.

Escapism, dynamism, glamour, exoticism and a slinky, noirish mood were the watchwords. We were doomed but we’d have a good time en route and hell mend anyone trying to stop us. Buying a car in the jazzy surrounds of Leyland Motors, if you had the cash, was certainly one way for the growing Southside middle class to sedate those gloomy feelings and get a serotonin hit.

The birth of Art Deco and Glasgow’s moderne appetite

Art Deco architecture drew its visual energy from analogies with the artefacts and currents of the human-made world: electricity, cars, ships, neon light, aeroplanes… even science fiction space rockets and robots themselves. Compare the Salkeld St premises to this from the iconic poster range for Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis… Leyland Motors is Glasgow’s equivalent icon.

Indeed, Glasgow has considerably more moderne era buildings – Chicago Style, Art Deco and Streamline Moderne – than Edinburgh not because of its larger size but due to its industrial focus and, allied to that, greater readiness to embrace the new. Equally, despite its distance from New York and Berlin, many in the architectural “demi-monde” of 1930s Scotland championed ‘style moderne’ as it was then known, particularly through the RIAS Quarterly journal which was edited by a notably younger set of professionals in the inter-war period than beforehand.

The ferment this created in Scottish architectural circles saw many public clashes between advocates and sceptics of the moderne style, in conferences and the letters pages of publications. Typically, James Miller didn’t involve himself in these debates. As a distinguished RIBA member, politically conservative and older by several decades than the new cohort he stayed aloof, but as frequent judge in the competitions that ran for building design selection, he clearly observed them closely. Ironically, he’d already got a head start on them all with his fast-evolving take on American trends. He just quietly and industriously got on with it.

James Miller’s five-decade legacy in Glasgow

It’s striking that Miller completed the ultra-modern Leyland Motors when he was 73, one of his last sequence of buildings in a career that had seen him change the face of Glasgow and leave an indelible mark across Scotland and elsewhere. Born in Auchtergaven, Perthshire in 1860, his architecture career spanned five decades and numerous changes in period style, influences and approach, each twist of which he mastered leaving his own highly varied and original stamp.

Miller’s agility means he defies pigeonholing and the lazy label. Commercially savvy, his output and readiness to please his clients was prodigious. The art emerged in his ability to simultaneously serve commercial imperatives while also creating landmark buildings that have won hearts across decades, and indeed centuries, and are celebrated today.

Unlike his contemporary Charles Rennie Mackintosh, you couldn’t point to a certain structure and say “typical Miller” but the Glasgow (and Scotland) we know is unthinkable without him. Among many of his railway related commissions, Miller’s Wemyss Bay railway station (1903), Turnberry Hotel and Railway Station (1903) and the massive extension to Glasgow Central railway station (1901–1905) are renowned. His Botanic Railway Station on Great Western Rd (demolished after a fire in 1970) revelled in exotic Russian orthodox-styled domed towers and according to Fergus Sutherland a broader ‘Orientalism’.

When compared out of context, it’s hard to believe the same person designed St Enoch Subway Station (1896) and Leyland Motors 37 years later, but if you trace through his American-influenced works between those years you can detect the thread connecting them.

Many iconic buildings of his give Glasgow city centre its energetic New York / Chicago feel, as mentioned above. My favourite is the Commercial Bank Of Scotland on Bothwell St (1934), which also boasts an amazing set of 6 (front and side) relief sculptures by Gilbert Bayes.

So why are all these buildings feted and cherished while Leyland Motors is left to languish? Is it because its Art Deco, or because of its hostile setting in the Southside interzone, away from the tourist haunts and on the wrong side of Eglinton St, all blighted by motorway “convenience” and the related depopulation and demolition derby?

Dereliction doesn’t have to be its destiny. After debuting as a temple of consumerism, and then transitioning to become the world’s most unlikely stable for police horses (now stationed in Pollok Park), it follows that it could adapt in endless ways.

Apparently there’s nothing left inside to restore (though I’d like to get a look to check) – and the exterior needs largely cosmetic but increasingly urgent attention. An audacious survivor of Glasgow’s moderne era it’s bursting with potential in need of a purpose.

The Art Deco makeover and its relevance today

Prior to the 1920s buildings had always been adapted but in more occasional and less frenetic ways. In the inter-war period, mass-produced materials and new techniques fuelled an unstoppable trend that changed our streets radically. Suddenly any little shop of Victorian or Edwardian origin could afford a makeover. Moderne style exteriors and interiors, especially at ground level, started to appear everywhere including Glasgow’s Southside.

The very same trend meant, ironically, it contained the seeds of its own destruction. What had been lasting became disposable. Shopfronts were now transient playthings, and as the fashion for Art Deco and Streamline Moderne passed they were often scrapped for the next in-vogue look. Take this café frontage on Pollokshaws Road, a Victorian tenement with a moderne street level frontage that even boasted the style’s name. Long gone, it’s now Café Buongiorno.

Dereliction & demolition vs. retrofitting & reuse

Leyland Motors has (so far) only escaped this fate by being a holistic Art Deco building rather than a discrete ground-floor premises, but its visible decline shows it’s at risk and raises issues of sustainability in the context of the climate emergency. Why do we let viable buildings rot? Why do we enable the carbon waste that comes of demolishing rather than retrofitting?

The consequences of enabling dereliction and relentlessly prioritising new build  – and indeed new motorways as seen in the above poster, regarding the recent M74 extension which passes close to Leyland Motors – were starkly addressed in a Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland article ‘The importance of adaptive reuse’ from 15th February 2021.

“As things currently stand, according to the United Nations environment programme, buildings and their construction account for 38% of global energy use and 39% percent of energy-related carbon emissions annually… 28% of these carbon emissions come from the operational emissions of a building, such as heating and ventilation. The remaining 11% are ‘’upfront’’ carbon emissions, that is, associated with materials and construction processes throughout the whole building lifecycle (Abergel et al. 2017).

“Adaptive reuse reduces the amount of raw material required to produce a new structure. This construction process adapts the materials already available at hand, using more minimal interventions in order to retain the historic fabric. As well as this, the absence of the demolition of a structure further saves energy. Demolition is an energy intensive construction approach which is required for a new build. Adaptive reuse must also encapsulate a revaluing of the building stock we currently have.”

As a functional building first and foremost, with no remaining interior worth preserving to speak of Leyland Motors is also – interior-wise – something of a blank canvas. The opportunity to adapt inside while keeping the present exterior and scale of the building intact is enormous. Just as Miller was chameleon-like in his adoption of architectural styles, the inner life of this building can also change for the better.

Heritage, history and regeneration

Last but not least, Miller’s building speaks to the story of the area in the last chapter of its heyday – once a bustling hive of activity across the commercial-cum-industrial hub of Tradeston, the Garment District of Laurieston and the manufacturing and residential locale of Hutchesontown and the Gorbals.

There’s an Art Deco cluster locally too if you look closer: New Bedford Cinema (1932), Cumbrae House (1937-8), the Art Deco extension to Kinning Park Co-operative Society Drapery Warehouse (1935), and Alexander Sloan & Co drapers store and warehouse (1928). Leyland Motors’ neighbouring Category-B listed Park’s Motor Works – though dating from 1913 – also deserves honorary inclusion. Built using the innovative Kahn system by Truscon Ltd, Detroit, it’s one of only three such Kahn system buildings in the UK. Taken together this amounts to some serious moderne clout.

Multiple purposes beckon for reviving Leyland Motors and reanimating the area. Nearby, creative coalition Lateral North are pursuing temporary usages of abandoned and hostile public spaces as part of their After The Pandemic initiatives.

They recently staged an orchestra playing under the M74 and have a major project underway to transform a 3000sqm disused site by the Clyde in Tradeston into a creative and community-curated hub to coincide with the COP26 United Nations climate change conference at the SEC this November. Their mission is to “to RETHINK, REIMAGINE and REDESIGN our spaces and places to be greener, more vibrant and more resilient at COP26 and beyond”… but what about rethinking the re-use of derelict buildings?

The audacity of Leyland Motors’ corner elevation and how it animates the building as a whole both asks and answers key questions: can art be industrious, can commerce co-exist with culture, can utility have ornament and flair? By squaring these circles Leyland Motors radiates the undimmed appeal of Art Deco and its enduring relevance.

What if Miller’s building could become a hive of creative, community and commercial activity? The Covid-19 pandemic and environmental crisis frame our present time as one to urgently re-imagine our cities and their landscape. How do we define and support prosperity in this context? Finding a future for this building and bringing life back to the motorway-scarred hinterlands of the inner Southside seems an obvious pathway in local terms – but how do we get there?

Connected futures: Leyland Motors & Glasgow’s sustainability

There’s more than little irony in the fact that Leyland Motors has been orphaned from the streets we habitually roam by the primacy put on the very thing it was designed to sell – the car.

The railway has been much kinder to Miller’s architectural legacy, albeit with losses like Botanic and Kelvinbridge Stations, because mass transit is (to a degree) less destructive and definitely more efficient, affordable and sustainable than the ubiquitous automobile – which often carries just one person.

As it turns out, Miller’s first commission upon moving to Glasgow in 1888 was in the Southside – for the new Bridge Street Station of 1889. Part of it is still there, though the building now services flats, offices and shops. There’s no sign indicating what it was, just as in Salkeld Street. Built 44 years earlier, the building abides unobtrusively in a rather low key but re-used form.

Looking beyond Glasgow, much larger Art Deco buildings have been rejuvenated with innovative technologies (like this in Fort Worth, Texas), with respect for the original design (in London), and in Glasgow city centre they’ve never gone out of style (apart from the occasional fire)…  so why not here? The story of Leyland Motors Southside moderne landmark is waiting for its next chapter to begin.

By Deirdre Molloy

Published: 4th March 2021

Sources:

McKean, Charles; The Scottish Thirties, Scottish Academic Press (1987)

Kenna, Rudolph; Glasgow Art Deco, Richard Drew Publishing (1985)

Kenna, Rudolph; Scotland in the Thirties, Richard Drew Publishing (1987)

van Lemmen, Hans; Art Deco Tiles, Shire Publications (2012)

Lennie, Lindsay; Scottish Traditional Shopfronts, Historic Environment Scotland (2017)

Lennie, Lindsay; CPD: Conserving Interwar Shopfronts – Materials and Methods Glasgow City Heritage Trust event, 5th June 2019

Sutherland, Fergus; James Miller (1860-1947): talk for the AHSS, 23rd January 2020 (later repeated for GCHT)

Virtual Mitchell: Glasgow City Archives online – images kindly reproduced with credit

Glasgow, 140 Salkeld Street, Garage; Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland

Edwards, Anne; Designing Films: The Art Déco Years, Architectural Digest, 1st March 2006, photography by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (online)

Dominion Cinema, Edinburgh; photograph copyright of Scottish Cinemas and Theatres

Act Now: Stop The M74 billboard poster by Frank Boyle for Friends of the Earth Scotland on Eglinton St, 21st June 2006

St Enoch Subway Station, photo CC-BY-SA-2.5 by Túrelio

Holland Coachcraft of Govan laundry van via @PastGlasgow; original photo source unknown

Follow the #SouthsideModerne hashtag on Twitter

Read the next articles in our #SouthsideModerne series:

Renewing Lyceum Govan’s faded ambition

Art Deco fragments of Shawfield Stadium

The post James Miller’s Art Deco Leyland Motors appeared first on SGHET.