It wasn’t too long ago that Glasgow was a truly industrial city, and before that a merchant city - there's generations upon generation of different buildings, structures, and spaces that date back hundreds of years in the city, that we might not even realise have such a storied history.
Old factories, warehouses, former churches and post-industrial spaces - we're a enterprising bunch when it comes to re-using out old spaces, so much so that we can forget that these buildings we see everyday were formerly used for an all-together different purpose.
The re-use of these old buildings is all-in-all a good thing, too many great Glaswegian buildings have been razed to the ground in the last 60 years.
Thanks to the listed building initiative however, many of the better presented spaces like the Templeton Carpet Factory were preserved for their architectural significance.
These spaces produced much more than just the products they manufactured, lifelong friends and even romances were made in the four walls of the factory - as Glaswegians worked ridiculously long hours before returning to slum tenement housing conditions.
The re-use of these old buildings is all-in-all a good thing, too many great Glaswegian buildings have been razed to the ground in the last 60 years.
5. Templeton’s Carpet Factory (1892)
Templeton’s Carpet Factory (or Templeton on the Green as it is now known) was a purpose-built carpet factory which looks incredibly different to the industrial estate carpet factory’s you see today. It was meant to display opulence, which was a tricky thing to get right in reserved Victorian Society who preferred the imposing majesty of Gothic Revival architecture. After repeated design proposals had been rejected by the Glasgow Corporation, Templeton hired the famous architect William Leiper to produce a design that would be ‘so grand it could not possibly be rejected’, so William Leiper modelled the building on the Doge’s Palace in Venice, which was constructed in the alternative Venetian Gothic style. In 2005, the building was extensively modified in a £22 million regeneration project to form a mixed use ‘lifestyle village’. This includes 143 new apartments, accommodation for Sportscotland (the Scottish Institute of Sport), Front Page (a creative design studio) and the WEST brewery, bar and restaurant, which takes up the ground floor of the main building.
6. Ashton Lane
Back in the day Ashton Lane was little more than some old stables and sheds for a funeral undertaker. In 1976 the Ubiquitous Chip relocated from Ruthven Lane to the dingy West End alley, encouraging others to join them - before long there was a fairy light canopy and it became the buzzing heart of hospitality in the West End.
7. Brunswick Street
Described by Historic Environment Scotland as a ‘bizarrely detailed Gothic warehouse’, the 3-storey 10-bay blonde sandstone building on the corner of Brunswick Street and Ingram Street is now being used as flats.
8. 18 Montrose Street
Built in 1878 as a leather merchants’ warehouse, the 5-storey warehouse building has now been converted to flats - the bottom floor was home to independent designer clothes shop 18montrose street, until it closed down towards the end of 2022.
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