“WE’VE never seen anything like it,” murmured the man from Corona, California (pop. 80,000). What had left him visibly impressed was the sheer wealth of Victorian architecture in Glasgow.
It was August, 1971, and a group of members of the Society of Architectural Historians, from America, were on a tour of Victorian Glasgow buildings, accompanied by an Edinburgh man, Colin McWilliam. Tagging along with them, notebook in hand, was the well-known Evening Times writer, Jack House.
“They’d had to do it all on their own flat feet, too,” House recorded, “and it included a walk round the centre of the city, finishing up on the heights of Garnethill with Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s School of Art [pictured].
“When I asked a woman from Washington what she thought of it, she said: ‘Wunnerful, jes’ wunnerful – but, oh, my feet!’”
House had met the group in one of the nicest Victorian buildings in the city, the chief overseas branch of the Clydesdale Bank, at No 91 Buchanan Street – a little sandstone gem that, he said, had been designed in 1895, by one George Washington Browne, as a tea-room for the celebrated Miss Cranston.
Browne had been criticised by an architectural journal of the time, which said that the design would be more appropriate to a bank than a tea-room.
The building had housed the Clydesdale Bank since 1920, though some Mackintosh interiors had been lost in its reconstruction.
The visiting Americans enjoyed a buffet lunch in the bank building in the company of such Glasgow architects as Walter Underwood, Peter Williams and Jack Notman.
They then had the afternoon free: some were planning to visit Stirling’s Library, or Glasgow Cathedral, or the Whistler paintings at Glasgow University.
And at least one member of the party, asked what part of Victorian Glasgow she was intent on visiting, declared: “The stores!”
Read more: Herald Diary
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