The old Pump House on the Clyde governed the flow of trade through Glasgow from the shipments of tobacco coming in to the tide of whisky going out.
It provided power for the Queen's Dock - one of the biggest wet docks in the world - and controlled the lock gates to ensure drink didn't slip through untaxed.
As the noise and bustle of the docks disappeared, the Pump House became another forlorn monument to Victorian enterprise on the banks of the Clyde. It has since been an Indian restaurant, a visitor's centre for the city's Tall Ship and, most recently, housed contractors building the SSE Hydro next door.
But a new, exciting life awaits as part of Scotland's latest distillery. All being well, the Glasgow Distillery will fire up its stills some time in 2015.
To find out more I spoke to Glen Moore who cooked up the idea with Tim Morrison, a fellow former director of whisky distillers Morrison Bowmore who now runs the independent bottlers AD Rattray. Like other independents it relies on a supply of malt whisky casks from the big distillers - a supply that has been drying up thanks to the current global boom in Scotch. The solution is to build or buy a distillery of your own.
Distilleries for sale are few and far between and they don't come cheap - with Bruichladdich on Islay snapped up for £58 million last summer. The problem of building one is having to wait three years before you can sell your first drop as Scotch whisky and get any return on your investment.
But this project has evolved into something much bigger as Glen Moore explains. As well as a distillery, cafe and shop, it will have a museum to give visitors an interactive experience of how whisky began and how it's made. Moore says: "It'll be a celebration of our national spirit."
It will also show Glasgow's role in the whisky industry - something of an untold story. The city housed countless whisky blenders and bottlers and is still home to firms such as Whyte & Mackay, Morrison Bowmore and Douglas Laing & Co. It also had a couple of dozen distilleries of its own, the last being Strathclyde in Moffat Street, across the river from Glasgow Green, which closed in 1975.
Today the nearest distillery to Glasgow is Auchentoshan out by Clydebank, and Moore found himself wondering if there were some bylaw banning the making of hooch within a certain radius of the city centre. In the end he says the council "loved the whole idea and could see no reason why not".
There are still plenty of hurdles to overcome including planning consent and more funding, but assuming it happens, the result will be like the Scotch whisky heritage centre in Edinburgh, only better. Having its own living, breathing distillery in the heart of Glasgow will make it unique. Without that it would be just another heritage centre like the Jameson's distillery in Dublin which I visited. The stills were depressingly cold and instead of the sweet scent of distilled spirit, all you could smell was Irish stew from the canteen next door.
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