I then hear that a petition has been started to save Possil train station. The building hasn’t been a station since the 60s and hasn’t been in use since the 90s when it was a bookies and it’s now in a pretty bad way. A campaigner, Andrew Moore, has started the petition partly because his family has fond memories of the place but mainly because the area has lost so much of its original architecture. Andrew says the building is in a state of dangerous neglect and he’s right: it is.
The fact that we’re talking about the building means it’s probably a good time to revisit the list of buildings-at-risk The Herald published just over a year ago because Possil station was on it. I spoke to the writer and architectural historian Ian R Mitchell at the time about the building and he told me why he loved it. “It shows the care that was taken with buildings of this kind at the time,” he said. “They weren’t just functional and utilitarian, they were meant to say something, to say we’re proud of this area and it makes us feel good.”
It is not a surprise, I’m afraid, that a year on from Mr Mitchell’s remarks, the building has got a little bit worse and a little bit closer to its doom. There were 11 buildings and structures on The Herald’s list and two of them have since been destroyed or demolished, eight of them are still at serious risk of meeting the same fate, and only one – the old Vogue cinema and bingo hall not far from Possil train station – has been saved, and that was in the nick of time and against the odds (and part of me still worries about it, to be honest).
So I’m thinking it might be a good idea to go through the rest of the list and do a quick update of where we are with the buildings and we might as well start with the worst news and work up the way. At number 10 on the list were the Wyndford flats, high-rises that some people abhorred but which a group of residents fought to save. The flats were demolished. And at number 11 was the India Building in Laurieston which was in a poor state when we composed the list, having lain unused for around 15 years. It was also demolished. Two down I’m afraid.
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The other buildings – perhaps all of them in the end – may meet the same fate, although the solution is more obvious in some cases than others. At number one on the list is the tenement at 272 Saracen Street, also in Possil. It’s no surprise that three of the buildings we nominated last year are in Possil because working class areas are losing their heritage much quicker than middle class ones, although this one could be quickly renovated. Perhaps there’s a glint of hope there.
Perhaps there’s hope too for a couple of the other buildings: the old Calton police station and the Tradeston telephone exchange. As Liz Fuller of the campaign group SAVE Britain’s Heritage pointed out, Calton is an area where residential development is expanding rapidly; perhaps the station could be part of it. The telephone exchange too is close to the Barclays Bank development and could be part of the regeneration of the south bank of the river. What a place to live or work that could be.
Some of the other buildings look a little more doubtful. The MSP Paul Sweeney nominated the Whiteinch Crane for the list and it looks like there’s very little active maintenance being done on it. The same for the Springburn winter gardens, although there’s a campaign to save them and renovate the glasshouse, in which Mr Sweeney is playing a leading role. So: hope amidst the rubble and rust.
Possil train station (Image: Newsquest)
The last two on the list indicate some of the underlying problems we’re dealing with. At number nine are the Buchanan Street steps which might seem like nothing much to bother about but when the idea of demolishing them was first mooted in 2015, 14,000 people signed a petition against the plans. The idea was to tear down Buchanan Galleries but it now looks like the owners will go for a facelift instead. The problem is this part of town is still based on big city-centre retail which not so long ago seemed like a goldmine for Glasgow. But big-city retail is no longer the answer we once thought it was.
Which brings us to the last building on the list: Washington Street primary school by the Kingston Bridge. The architect Hunter Reid remembers volunteering at the building in the 1970s when it was an arts centre and the head of art there was Alasdair Gray. But it’s now an empty shell and worse, is either unlisted or C-listed, meaning it doesn’t have a great deal of protection. It would be so easy to adapt for other uses but the chances are it won’t be.
Mr Reid’s diagnosis of the problem is that Glasgow doesn’t have the structures in place needed to save Washington Street school and the other buildings on the list. “We haven’t got the good people in place in Glasgow,” he told me. “The city used to have a director of planning but it was abolished about 30 years ago. There used to be strategic local plans for all the areas of Glasgow done by the planning department. And what I always found was if they really wanted to find the money for a project, they could find it.” Which sounds like the beginnings of a plan to me. So could we get on with it please? Before more buildings on the list disappear. Before more of it turns to rubble.