Lost Glasgow: What's the future of Sauchiehall Street?

Imagine a street of theatres, cinemas, dancehalls, hotels, tea rooms, art galleries, and spectacular, fin de siècle department stores.

Now, imagine a street of gap sites, burnt out and boarded up buildings, with more graffiti and buddleia than bodies.

Those three visions tell the story, so far, of ­Sauchiehall Street, but that’s not the end of the book, it’s just the current chapter in an ongoing history of adaptation and reinvention. Give up on the story now, and you may just miss the most exciting part of the street’s story. The current stushie over the ­closure of the street’s M&S store is but another twist in the road.

First, a bit about that tongue-troubling name – one that trips off Glaswegian tongues but can prove tricky for visitors. “Sauchie” is an old Scots word for willows, while “haugh” is an old word for meadow; so “the meadow of the willows” – and the reason Miss Cranston decided to call her famous tearooms The Willow.

Beginning life in the early 1800s as Saughie-haugh Road, when it was still on the upwind, West End side of the burgeoning industrial city, this was where Glasgow’s wealthy merchants and businessmen built their homes, to escape the noise, stink, and clamour of the old town, but the city was hot on their heels. The street was widened in 1846 and by the 1850s some of the older villas and townhouses were replaced with tenements and, from the 1870s, with commercial properties.

Victorian, and Edwardian music hall stars, and wave after wave of Glasgow emigrants carried the street’s name, and fame, to the four corners of the earth. The Glasgow Empire – the “English ­Comedians” Graveyard’ – once occupied most of the block between Renfield and West Nile Street.

Step inside the CCA, originally Alexander “Greek” Thomson’s Grecian Chambers, and you can see the façade of one of the street’s original Georgian villas. Better still, climb the stairs in the Garage nightclub, and you are dancing inside one of the street’s last ­remaining villas.

Older readers, depending on their vintage, will ­remember the Garage as The Mayfair, Shuffles, The Macushla, or The Electric Gardens. Prior to that, it was the Gainsborough function rooms, and before that it was the Charing Cross Halls. Change and ­adaptation are the very lifeblood of Sauchiehall Street.

From the late 1800s, with the arrival of the great department stores, the street became Glasgow’s ­premiere shopping spot, for those and such as those. Daly’s, Pettigrew & Stephens, Trerons et Cie, ­Copeland and Lye, Reid & Todd’s – great names that have all passed into mercantile history. Watt Bros held on, like a shoogly tooth, until just a couple of years ago.

The arrival of moving pictures brought more light and magic to the street; the Moorish-themed ­Salon – later incorporated into Lumley’s sports shop; the Picture House, later the ­Gaumont, now the Savoy Centre; the La Scala – where you could dine while watching a movie; and the ABC – built on the site of the Glasgow Panorama, later Hengler’s Circus.

Even The Locarno, the street’s famed dancehall, began life as a cinema. Now the Genting Casino, younger readers will recall it as Tiffanys, or The Zanzibar.

In the 1960s, at weekends, the US Shore Patrol used to park a “paddy ­wagon” outside The Locarno, to pick up any drunken sailors on the spree from the Holy Loch Polaris base.

SO much for the past, what about the present, and future?

Battered in recent years, by, first, the second Art School fire, and subsequent loss of the ABC, then the blaze which took out the block containing Victoria’s ­nightclub – the former Crown Auction rooms – and two years of Covid, which has seen footfall, and custom, almost ­disappear, the old street is looking more than a wee bit bruised. It’s had a Glasgow-kiss, it’s got a blackeye, a keeker, a shiner, but the street’s potential is still winking at us; and some folks have already seen that.

Walk west, beyond Rose Street, and the whole Treron’s block has been ­revamped and repurposed as McLellan Works, ­offering modern office suites, and ­co-working spaces to a new ­generation of Glasgow movers, shakers, and ­makers. Through the back, in the original ­McLellan Galleries, GSA students are busy making, creating, and imagining.

They live, drink, work, eat, dance, and create in the street they know now, not some imagined, half-forgotten, ­rose-tinted memory of a street they never knew.

When M&S announced the closure of their Sauchiehall Street branch, the ­comments section of Lost Glasgow was full of people saying, “the street’s had it, mind you, I never go into the town now” – do we think there’s a link?

There were also, as always, the usual slew of comments demanding “they” do something about it, that “they” sort it out, that “they” are destroying our city. The “they” are never specified, but usually, “they” means “the cooncil”.

Now, I’m not quite sure what ­imaginary, Wizard of Oz-type levers Glaswegians think exist within the City Chambers, but they are very much of a ­microeconomic nature and can do little to affect the ­macroeconomic challenges facing every High Street, from Land’s End to John o Groats. From online ­shopping, the ­demise of the UK’s great retail chains, to more working from home, we are on the brink of more change.

Even when the council does spend ­money, such as the recent Avenues ­Project, at the Charing Cross end of Sauchiehall Street, its good work is lost in a torrent of “whitabootery” – why aren’t “they” fixing this, why aren’t “they” ­fixing that? – with the commentators ­little realising that the money came from ring-fenced government funds which could only be spent on such public realm (hate that phrase!) works.

There also seems to be a frankly ­bizarre idea amongst some that ­Glasgow City Council owns every building in

the city, and has the power to strip private ­owners, often pension funds, or offshored ­investment trusts, of their buildings.

There’s a sound legal reason why they say, “property is nine-tenths of the law”.

GLASGOW has also, as first witnessed in some big American cities, suffered from the “doughnut effect”, with residents moving outwith the city’s boundaries, to pay lower council tax, yet still ­commuting in to earn their salaries, and to use the city’s facilities and services, without ­contributing to their upkeep. Add in the burden of reduced funds from Holyrood, the historic equal pay debt to female council staff, and increasing social care costs to look after an ageing population, and the city seems hamstrung.

The recent slew of planned new, ­privately funded rental ­accommodation within the city will bring more ­residents in but will funnel that rent money – ­wages earned in the city – straight back out again, and into the already ­bulging ­wallets of private developers and ­investors.

In truth, the answers to Sauchiehall Street’s current problems may lie in the past. Answers which can already be seen in the recent renaissance of Finnieston, and Govanhill.

When high rents and the arrival of ­national chains forced local independents out of first Byres Road, and then Ashton Lane, young renters, and entrepreneurs looked for somewhere cheaper to live, work, and build their businesses. Today’s buzzing “Finnieston Strip” is the result.

Likewise, with Govanhill and Victoria Road – 10 years of “bad news” headlines saw property prices plummet, allowing new ventures to move in with low start-up costs. Today, living in Battlefield, if I want to grab a great coffee, a blow-out weekend breakfast, some top Middle Eastern treats, or a cracking curry, that’s where I head.

The same thing is happening in The Calton, with new bars, eateries, and ­music venues replacing the spit and ­sawdust pubs of my youth.

I witnessed the same process ­happening in the former East Berlin, after the Wall came down.

Some folks damn such changes as ­“gentrification” – as if Sauchiehall Street didn’t begin life as a boulevard for the gentry. I see it as something more ­positive; people out enjoying themselves, in a buzzy, creative, and sometimes ­chaotic, street.

I STILL get a Saturday night thrill when I stagger, beery and sweat-drenched, out of the basement of Box, Sleazy’s, Broadcast, or the CCA, into the human zoo of Sauchiehall Street.

Often, when folk say that they miss old Sauchiehall Street, they are mourning their lost youth, when they danced, drank, dined, wooed, and winched in vanished pubs and dancehalls.

Glasgow is like a shark, if it doesn’t keep moving forward, it dies, and I, for one, don’t want to live, and love, in ­someone else’s sepia-tinged image of Sauchiehall Street.

If, as the glib marketing slogan says, “People Make Glasgow”, then, as the ­Covid cloud lifts, the next generation of Glaswegians will make and shape Sauchiehall Street to suit their needs and wants.

Willow may look weak, but just think of the magic you can weave with it.

Norry Wilson hosts the Lost Glasgow website devoted to the city and its past. www.lostglasgow.scot