HISTORICAL buildings always have something to teach us, and it is heartening to learn the South Rotunda on the banks of the Clyde has been renovated and stands ready for active life once more.
Many people may not know the history of the Rotunda tunnels, built in the 1890s to take foot passengers and vehicles across the river. At each end stood a rotunda, and these housed hydraulic lifts and stairs that took people, horses and carts 79ft down shafts to the three tunnels.
Over the years, the viability of the Rotundas ebbed and flowed. Old carters liked the lift-and-tunnel system better than the steep inclines at the nearby ferries though, in 1932, a columnist on the Evening Citizen seemed disturbed by a foot-long stalactite and the “bewildering medley of wheels and cables”. During the Second World War, the lift metalwork was removed for military use, and the tunnels were closed due to safety fears, though the pedestrian tunnel reopened in 1947 and remained in operation till 1980.
Fast-forward to more recent years and we find the North Rotunda has fared better than its brother on the South, with the former finding new purpose as a fashionable restaurant hub, while the latter could only attract a less glamorous clientele of pigeons. True, it had been resuscitated briefly on occasion, even housing a replica of Nardini’s famous Largs ice cream parlour in 1988 (as part of the Glasgow Garden Festival) and hosting the National Theatre of Scotland in 2014.
But its long-term future looked grim until a light appeared at the end of the tunnel when Glasgow architects GD Lodge took on its renovation for new owners, Malin Group marine engineers, and made it fit for a purpose again.
Now the South Rotunda can once more stand as proudly as its partner, the North, while their tunnels play host to ghosts from the past.
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