Sauchiehall – the hollow of the willows – Street has seen better days. In this article I have looked at the eastern end of the street in 12 blocks, six on the north side and six on the south, divided up by roads going off at right angles: Block 1 is from Buchanan Street to West Nile Street, for example. I show a modern day view, then a couple of older photos with some text to explain. It’s arranged so that either literally or in your mind’s eye, you can walk up the north side of the street from Buchanan Galleries to Rose Street, cross and then walk back on the south side.
Block 1: Buchanan Street to West Nile Street
This the modern view of the row of shops as you turn onto Buchanan Street, backing onto the Royal Concert Hall.
St John’s Methodist Church was built in 1903 (or 1880, depending on which source), and demolished in the 1970s. The photo above probably dates from 1958-1959 because the tower was altered at that time and I think I can read ‘Reopening’ on the sign on the West Nile Street side. Next to the church and built in the same stone is the minister’s house. The remaining shops have seen better days, the one on the corner having been a pawnbroker’s shop. This is the approximate site of the modern steps at the Concert Hall – Buchanan Street would be to the right but straight on (and bearing left) is the now lost Parliamentary Road.
Here’s the view from Parliamentary Road looking back to Sauchiehall Street:
As originally built the church tower looked like this (probably dates to around 1900, trams have been electrified but there are no motor vehicles):
Note the drapes to protect the windows from the sun on the shop on the right (facing south) – in the 1905 Valuation Roll this was a dining room (restaurant).
Here’s the view, presumably from the upper floors of St Andrews House (now the Premier Inn), looking down on the church and neighbouring buildings:
Note the street layout before the Galleries, including Parliamentary Road.
Block 2: West Nile Street to Renfield Street
While the cladding on the hotel makes it look modern, I believe the office block was built in the late 1950s (as St Andrews House):
In the black and white photo of the church (Block 1) you can see the building on the corner was quite modest with two floors, then a warehouse with four floors, and the grandest building at the west end of the block.
The grand building included the Royalty Theatre, built in 1879. It was bought by the YMCA during the First World War and renamed the Lyric around this time (possibly 1913). In later years it displayed the name YMCA. Photos of this block are generally from the west, giving prominence to the theatre building:
The photo (dated 1910) is from the junction with Renfield Street, looking back to Block 2 with St Johns church on the right.
You can see the canopy over the entrance, shown again below:
It seems the theatre itself was on the first floor and was relatively small. It was not included in the original design but as building was starting, a fire in another theatre nearby led to a change in plan. The design included shops to let at ground floor level; here are a couple of examples:
A tobacconist’s is a rare site today – this one also advertises “Golf – Tennis – Library – Pipes – Cigars” above the door. Sadly, the health food shop, Orzone, did not do so well and moved out in 1934:
While the obvious historic interest is in the theatre, the neighbouring warehouse is of interest to as it belonged to Archibald Lauder, a whisky merchant, who gave his surname to a bar we will see in Block 3. A warehouse has the modern connotation of large building for storage probably on an estate out of town, but in Victorian times it seems to have meant a commercial premise bigger than a shop. The warehouse at 38 Sauchiehall Street was divided into three and a typical tenant was Thomas, Skinner and Hamilton, laboratory furnishers.
This photo shows the building being prepared for demolition, dated 11th February 1961:
Block 3: Renfield Street to Hope Street
This is how the block looks today:
Looking at the older photos that were four buildings in this block: the “Lauder’s” building on the corner, the tall white building, the “auction hall” building, and the “Royal Hotel” building on the corner of Hope Street – only the first of these survives.
Lauders took its name in 1871 having been built in 1836. Archibald Lauder was born on 23rd June 1838 in Glasgow, son of Archibald Lauder and Elizabeth Gordon. He married Janet Robertson in 1861 and they had 15 children before Janet died in 1894. The family lived at 10 Burnbank Gardens, off Great Western Road, as he developed his business as a whisky merchant as well as owning property (the warehouse on Sauchiehall Street) and the bar that bears his name. With his second wife, Marion, he retired to Drumspillan, a country house built in the early 1890s at Pinwherry, Ayrshire, where he died in 1912 aged around 74.
Here is a photo, maybe from the 1950s showing Lumleys (“Lumleys for Sports”) on the right hand side:
The second building in the block is seen in this photo:
The elaborate façade was built in 1913 as the entrance to the Salon Cinema which had 950 seats with an impressive café restaurant, but closed after about ten years. It was converted into retail and warehouse space (probably by the architect who did the Beresford Hotel) – this included changing the façade and adding three floors in the space that was previously the auditorium. For more details, please click here. (If this does not work I recommend copying the address into a browser, the photos of the parts of the cinema that survived the refurbishment are amazing: http://www.scottishcinemas.org.uk/glasgow/salon/salon_s.html)
The building probably fairly soon after the conversion was complete and called Lumley House (credit the Project Glasgow FB page):
Next door the building was called the Crown Halls and it housed an auctioneers. The following three photos are all Crown Copyright: HES (Scottish Development Department) – the first is from 1985, the second is undated, the third is after the 2018 fire:
The fourth building in the block was occupied by the Royal Hotel and was the first to be demolished. It was originally a temperance hotel (no alcohol) called the Osborne.
“Until the change in Scottish licensing laws in the mid 1970s, only hotels and restaurants could serve alcohol on Sundays. Consequently, hotels such as the Royal enjoyed enormous Sunday trade. I recall it taking about five minutes to push and jostle my way to the bar such were the crowds in here on Sunday evenings. Strict 10pm closing was enforced throughout the city with ten minutes “drinking up” time before we were ejected into the street. The Royal had a first floor restaurant overlooking Sauchiehall Street where breakfast, lunch and high tea were served daily.” (Flickr website, contributed comment by ‘Phantom of the Flicks’).
Here it is from the doorway of BHS:
Block 4: Hope Street to Cambridge Street
This is the longest block of the area I am covering, because Wellington Street meets Sauchiehall Street from the south but there is no corresponding road on the north, disrupting the grid system. I had to use Google Earth to get a view – but you’ll immediately see the M&S building in the middle of the block so it is not up-to-date.
Looking from the right, there are two shorter white buildings on the right hand side of the block. Dunn and Co stood on this corner:
But before that it was Duncan Bell’s gift shop, one of my favourite photos from this street:
It is dated “the 1940s” but The Picture House was renamed as The Gaumont in 1947, so could this have been Christmas 1945 or 1946? (I also note everyone in the photo has a hat except for the man on the right.)
Next comes the red sandstone building, dating from 1895 and converted to a cinema in 1910; it was called The Picture House. The original was a grand affair, having a fountain with fish and palm trees with caged birds. It wasn’t until 1947 it was renamed the Gaumont:
It closed in 1972 and was being demolished when it caught fire. The façade was retained for the Savoy Centre. For more detail, see this link.
Opposite the junction with Wellington Street, there used to be an arcade:
It doesn’t look very inviting! Had you ventured through the entrance in 1920 the shops you found inside would have been as follows:
The Arcade appears in the 1925 Valuation Roll but not 1930. The ground floor of the building was converted into a branch of FW Woolworths 3d and 6d shops:
I believe this was subsequently demolished (converted?) into the eastern half of the M&S store next door (see below).
In 2026 you will be familiar with gap site at this point in the street from the destruction of M&S. Just over 90 years ago it stemmed from the demolition of Cranston’s Temperance Hotel:
This was to become the site of Marks and Spencers, although as this 1936 photo shows, it did not use up the whole of the vacated site:
If you compare the photo above with this one from 1950, you can see that it was M&S themselves who filled the gap, adding an extension to the west end of the shop:
I do remember using the entrance at the west end and feeling it was a bit of an add way to enter the shop!
Next door to this was Muirhead’s Warehouse (seemingly a wholesaler who sold direct to the public) demolished for the building currently home to Boots; the very grand building (designed by James Thomson) dating from 1902 on the corner of Cambridge Street (Crown Copyright: HES (Scottish Development Department):
And of course there are the smaller shops:
Waiting on a bus or tram back into town, 13th September 1958 (which was a Saturday).
I also liked the shop selling gramophones and radio receivers in 1936:
Block 5: Cambridge Street to Rose Street
Looking back from Rose Street towards the city centre. On the corner of Cambridge Street we are used to seeing the building that to some is C&A (and to younger people maybe Dunnes):
Opening in 1929, the initial design used some floorspace for mini-walkways through window displays – but these then had to be closed off at night:
It looks like they are waiting for opening time! Before C&A, the site was occupied by the Balmoral Hotel:
By the 1920s it was being used as an Employment Exchange (job centre) by the Ministry of Labour.
The neighbouring building housed Cuthbertson’s piano business (established 1887) which seems to have diversified into televisions by the time of this mid-1950s photo:
This was demolished in the 1960s for Littlewoods, then Tesco.
In 1939 the building on the corner of Rose Street looked very similar to today:
Although in the 1950s it was a part of C&A (the Bargain Store on the left):
Block 6: Rose Street to Dalhousie Street
This block is one of the least changed (photo dated 1920, at twenty-five to six on a suny afternoon)
Block 7: Blythswood Street to West Campbell Street
This is the Google Earth view of this block in April 2025 with the Willow Tea Rooms in the centre (and the roof of C&A just peeking in the bottom left corner).
Photo credit to the Mackintosh Architecture page by Glasgow University, dated 1905. Much of what we see now is from a ‘reconstruction’ in 1979-1980 but to see the 1903 design please click here.
This view east is dated 1914 and you can Miss Cranston’s on the right:
Next door at 215 is Ramsay & Ramsay, Gowns, Coats and Furs, and beyond that is Dalys department store, seen in this 1935 photo:
Dalys moved into the shop on the corner of West Campbell Street (now Glasgow Life office, Edward House) in 1892 as a drapery business. It diversified to become a department store and took over neighbouring properties right up to Miss Cranston’s by 1928. It was taken over but retained independent running until it went under the House of Fraser group in 1952. It continued under the Daly name until 1979.
I have found one photo taken inside Dalys (photo credit Crown Copyright: HES (Records of the Scottish National Buildings Record, Edinburgh, Scotland)) but it may seem a bit odd to modern eyes as it does not immediately look like a shop and the items on display appear to be furs:
Block 8: West Campbell Street to Wellington Street
It says something for standards of building commissioning in the 1970s and 1980s that the Sauchiehall Shopping Centre is arguably not even the ugliest block on Sauchiehall Street (I would vote the block at the ABC Regal Cinema a few hundred yards further west). But it’s not beautiful:
The near corner in the photo above is the sight of Copland Lye’s department store. It first moved here in 1878 (from Cowcaddens) and lasted until 1971 – it was actually owned by the Ogg family from 1891. There are excellent articles describing the shop and the working conditions of staff here, here, here and here.
The main external change to the building was the positioning of the clock – originally this was in a tower:
But by 1971 it was positioned halfway up the building:
Photos of Pettigrew and Stephens back on the corner of West Campbell Street are harder to find. Here’s an example from the time it opened (posted on the Lost Glasgow FB page, originally from Frank Wordasall’s book, “Lost Architecture of Glasgow”):
And here it is on borrowed time:
Also on the Lost Glasgow page, the author posted a photo of a paperweight in his possession which I have copied below because it shows ‘the building in-between’ the two department stores:
This building (the lower one on the left) was built to house the Glasgow Institute of Fine Art, which needed premises to house its collection. It was built in 1879 but the Institute sold it to Pettigrew & Stephens in 1920 (link).
Block 9: Wellington Street to Hope Street
Google Street View from 2012:
There are four buildings on this block: the Watt Brothers building, the square building, the two garrets building, and the La Scala building. Here they are in 2003, when every shop had a ‘proper’ tenant (not vaping or tat):
The Watt Brothers building opened in 1915, closed in 2019 “the last of the family owned department stores”.
The Lost Glasgow FB page posted this amazing painting dated 1913 of the foundations being dug out (From the Bath Street side, looking north across Sauchiehall Street):
And the shop in its hey-day:
Next door was a branch of James Craig’s restaurant and bakery; Stobo’s tobacconists; and Birrell’s confectioner’s shop.
Look at that tail-back of trams and not a mobile phone camera in sight!
The tall building with the two distinctive garret windows was owned by the Saxone Shoe Co Ltd of Titchfield Street, Kilmarnock:
This had a branch on the ground floor (with the upper floors being offices and warehouse space):
The shop to the left was RL Allan and Son, booksellers.
The final building on this block was the home to a cinema, as well as shops. Most famously La Scala, it had been built as a warehouse and opened in 1912 and closed in 1984.
Photo credit: scottishcinemas.org.uk. It is now Waterstones Bookshop.
Here is the entrance in good times (1934):
And in less good times:
There was also a branch of Barratts shoes on the corner, seen here in 1955:
Block 10: Renfield Street to Hope Street
This block can be divided into four: the BHS site; the Henderson’s site; the Boots site; and the (Hope Street) corner building. These can be seen in this photo (which is dated 1970, possibly incorrectly):
The United Presbyterian Church on Renfield Street was demolished in 1965 – the church owned the small shops facing onto Sauchiehall Street as well as the blackened three-storey buidig behind the church – this was the minister’s house (above ground level?). Here is another view:
The three-storey white building beyond that housed Henderson’s department store, see to the left of this photo:
The tall building beyond Henderson’s is something of a mystery. It was occupied by Boots the Chemist and carries an advert painted on the side wall – it had the distinctive bay windows visible in the photo above. Here’s another view with curved windows (on the left):
It seems to have been demolished in the 1960s, as it is not visible in the photo below:
Note Hendersons had been taken over by Arnotts, which subsequently moved to the Sauchiehall Centre.
Miss Selfridge, Dolcis and Peter Lords.
Block 11: Renfield Street to West Nile Street
There had been a theatre on this site from 1874. The old Gaiety was demolished and the Empire was built in 1897. It was rebuilt and extended in 1930 to 1931, and closed in 1963. As usual, I have not attempted to repeat what others with more knowledge have made available here and here.
Block 12: West Nile Street to Buchanan Street
The George Hotel entrance was on Buchanan Street, of course, but extended round the corner into Sauchiehall Street – it was built in 1897.
