The history of the old Saracen Head Inn: A playground for Glasgow's elites and a visit from Robert Burns

During the 18th Century, the Saracen Head enjoyed a reputation as a “resort of the elite of Glasgow” and the stop off for the aristocratic traveller making a visit to the city. A landmark building, built in 1755, it stood on the opposite side of the road from the current pub and boasted 36 rooms and stabling for 60 horses.

Then, it was the preferred watering hole for judges, nobles and a number of influential writers who were drawn to the inn for meals of “mutton and oceans of claret”, with the formal dinners thrown at the tavern for the great luminaries of the time.

Waiters were “resplendent in embroidered coats, red plush breeches, white stockings and powdered hair,” according to one account in F. Marian McNeill’s The Scots Cellar.

It added: “A prominent feature on such occasions was the famous punch bowl of blue and white china, decorated with the tress, the bell and the fish of the city’s coat of arms, together with a rolicking procession of liquor.”

The bowl held no less than five gallons of drink, with the vessel now held by Glasgow Museums.

Those attending a cock fight at the pit in the Gallowgate, would also use the tavern, then known as the Saracen’s Head Inn. Among them was the Duke of Hamilton who would “gather with his cronies at the Saracen’s Head and celebrate his gains or drown his losses, in reaming rummers of Jamaican punch,” according to C Stewart Black’s Glasgow Story.

The pub has attracted a long line or writers, including Robert Burns who stayed at the inn during one of his visits to Glasgow between 1787 and 1791. Printer William Reid, of Brash and Reid, was one of the friends made at the tavern by the poet. It is reputed that Burns first offered his poems to Brash and Reid, but Reid refused to publish them.

Noted travellers Boswell and Johnson rested up at the inn following their tour of The Hebrides in October 1773. Dr Johnson was in “high glee” after arriving and particularly appreciated the coal fire.

Boswell wrote of their night at the Saracen Head: “On our arrival accounts from home, and Dr Johnson, who had not received a single letter since we left Aberdeen, found here a great many, the perusal of which entertained him much. He enjoyed in imagination the comforts which we could now command, and seemed to be in high glee.

“I remember he put a leg up on each side of the grate, and said, which a mock solemnity, by way of soliloquy, but bud enough for one to hear it; there am I, an Englishman, sitting by a coal fire.”

Several figures from the university, then in the nearby High Street, joined them the following morning for breakfast before the pair departed for Ayrshire. It has also been claimed economist and philosopher Adam Smith joined Dr Johnson at the Saracen’s Head Inn for a drink but that their meeting ended in a swearing match.

The poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy arrived, along with Samuel Coleridge, as part of their tour of Scotland in 1803. One account said: “The hackney coach in which they arrived was the first ever seen in the city and when they left to travel west-wards a crowd of small boys followed the coach cheering and shouting, for several miles.”

The original Saracen’s Head Inn was built in 1755 by Robert Tennent, gardener and owner of the White Hart Hotel, on the graveyard of Little St Mungo’s, which had been a chapel founded some time before 1500 by David Cunningham, archdeacon of Argyll.

Much of the stone Tennent required to build his hotel was recovered from the ruins of the Bishop’s Castle in Townhead and from the walls of the old Gallowgate Port, the city’s east gate, which was demolished to make way for the inn.

Tennent died bankrupt two years after the opening of the hotel and it was managed first by his widow Katherine, then by James Graham, following her death. Jean Graham took it over following the loss of her husband in 1777 but the popularity of the inn started to wane as new hotels opened up in the city and Glasgow expanded around where the Saracen Inn stood.

The glory days were over, and the building was turned into tenements, with the Old Glasgow Club continuing to meet in what had been the Assembly room of the Saracen Head Inn. In 1791 William Miller of Slatefield purchased the Inn and added shops and houses, with an addition built to the east. The end came when the weary remains of the old tavern were finally demolished in 1905.

Old Glasgow Pubs reports that the current Saracen Head is the fourth establishment to hold the name. The second was at the corner of St Mungo Lane and the third at the corner of Saracen Lane, next to where the original first stood. The present Saracen Head opened its doors in 1904.