It wasn’t too long ago that Glasgow was a truly industrial city, and before that a merchant city - there's generations upon generation of different buildings, structures, and spaces that date back hundreds of years in the city, that we might not even realise have such a storied history.
Old factories, warehouses, former churches and post-industrial spaces - we're a enterprising bunch when it comes to re-using out old spaces, so much so that we can forget that these buildings we see everyday were formerly used for an all-together different purpose.
Here are nine historic Glasgow buildings with a hidden history.
9. Templeton On The Green
Templeton’s Carpet Factory (or Templeton on the Green as it is now known) was a purpose-built carpet factory which looks incredibly different to the industrial estate carpet factory’s you see today. It was meant to display opulence, which was a tricky thing to get right in reserved Victorian Society who preferred the imposing majesty of Gothic Revival architecture. After repeated design proposals had been rejected by the Glasgow Corporation, Templeton hired the famous architect William Leiper to produce a design that would be ‘so grand it could not possibly be rejected’, so William Leiper modelled the building on the Doge’s Palace in Venice, which was constructed in the alternative Venetian Gothic style. In 2005, the building was extensively modified in a £22 million regeneration project to form a mixed use ‘lifestyle village’. This includes 143 new apartments, accommodation for Sportscotland (the Scottish Institute of Sport), Front Page (a creative design studio) and the WEST brewery, bar and restaurant, which takes up the ground floor of the main building. | Contributed