OVER a million people listened to a radio broadcast from a remarkable Glasgow building at the weekend. Yet curiously, few people have ever been inside it. “Everybody knows it, yet at the same time, nobody knows it,” was the enigmatic description from a regular attendee.

The programme was the epiphany service from St Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Kilmarnock Road, which was broadcast on Radio 4 early on Sunday.

Epiphany is the service on the nearest Sunday 12 days after Christmas that honours the visit of the Magi to see the baby Jesus and bring him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. I went along to St Margaret’s a few hours after the broadcast and had my own epiphany in the broader sense of a moment of great revelation. For like thousands of motorists who travel along Kilmarnock Road from the south side towards Shawlands and the city centre, I have often seen the attractive church on the corner of Newlands Road but have never been inside until now. It is, quite simply, magnificent, with an astonishingly high barrel-vaulted pine ceiling, rows of pleasing Romanesque-style pillars, and some of the city’s richest stained-glass windows.

If this was a continental city you were visiting on holiday, you would happily wander round this cathedral-style church. But as it’s in Glasgow, most of us don’t bother.

St Margaret’s, named after the 11th-century queen of Scotland who was a great civilising influence in our history, is what’s known in church architecture as a “double-ender”. The doors, unlike many churches, are on the side, allowing the building to have an apse, a circular domed recess, at both ends that gives the church a satisfying symmetry others lack.

There was much to criticise in Victorian and Edwardian era Glasgow, a time of poverty, disease and overcrowding. But you cannot ignore the confidence of the merchant classes that led to the building of stunning buildings such as St Margaret’s. Robert Allan Ogg was a warehouse-owner who became chairman of the well-known department store Copland and Lye. A member of St Ninian’s Episcopal Church in Pollokshields, he donated the money to build a second church when Sir John Stirling Maxwell of Pollok House gifted the land at Newlands to look after the religious needs of the population then spreading southwards out of Glasgow.

Architect Peter MacGregor Chalmers, making his name in church architecture, drew up plans, first for the church hall which was built in 1908 then for the church itself. Work was slow, as further fund-raising was required, and it was not until 1928 that the whole church was consecrated.

Incidentally, I’m drawn to the archives of The Glasgow Herald in 1898 when Mr Chalmers wrote a letter stating that line drawings of the sarcophagus in Govan Churchyard, attributed to his boss John Honeyman, were in fact done by himself. That could be why he set up his own business. Never a good idea to criticise your boss in print.

Funding a building like this is neverending. Just a couple of years ago the money was raised, with help from the Heritage Lottery Fund, to dismantle the magnificent church organ and have it restored. Buildings like St Margaret’s only continue in use due to the hard work of volunteers.

And these volunteers want to encourage as many people as possible to see what has been achieved behind the walls of St Margaret’s, which is why on the second Sunday of every month, at 3.30 in the afternoon – late enough for folk to have finished lunch and early enough for those who are going out in the evening – there is an hour-long concert with everybody welcome, paying only a modest entrance fee.

Conductor, organist, and director of music at St Margaret’s, Michael Bawtree, tells me that most of the regulars who attend the Sunday concert series are not members of the congregation, but music lovers who know that they are going to have a satisfying hour of music irrespective of who is performing.

“We’ve been going for 10 or so years now, so there have been nigh on 100 concerts in the church,” says Michael. “We have a steadily increasing and very loyal audience. The series is very popular amongst performers from the city’s professional orchestras. They love to escape their usual workplace and the confines of the orchestra to perform solo or with groups of friends. We’ve had recent concerts by members of the Royal Scottish National and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestras.

“I also aim to allow young professionals and students from the Conservatoire a platform to perform. We’ve had a number of final-year students giving us their graduation recitals, which have thrilled and delighted the audience.”

The acoustics, warmed by the high wooden ceiling, are perfect. On Sunday soprano Jemma Brown, accompanied on a striking white baby grand by Maryam Sherhan, sang a programme of Rabbie Burns by Benjamin Britten and Robert Schumann, alongside works by contemporary Scottish composers Claire Liddell and James MacMillan.

Jemma, who has performed at many prestigious chamber music festivals with Maryam, ends with Herbert Howells’s King David. As Jemma explained to the audience afterwards: “The song tells the story of King David being soothed by the power of music, which we hope you have been today.”

As we step out into a cold, darkening Glasgow afternoon, we are indeed soothed, and also thankful that the city’s forefathers were willing to invest their money in buildings that would still be bringing pleasure for generations to come.