The round building on Finnieston Quay is just over 130 years old but its appearance gives no clue as to its purpose, which was the entrance to a lift-shaft (and steps) taking traffic to a tunnel under the river, emerging at an identical exit building (now located just to the west of the south end of the Squinty Bridge.
The story begins in the 1880s, with Glasgow growing and business booming. It was thought 700,000 people used Glasgow Bridge (Jamaica Street – King George V Bridge did not open until 1928), but if you wanted to travel from Govan on the south bank to Partick on the north bank, a distance of a hundred metres at most, this would involve a long detour.
Photo: The bridge in about 1890, credit to The Glasgow Story website (link)
Downstream from Glasgow Bridge, a new bridge would have to be high enough to give clearance to the masts of sailing ships. But this was the age where waggons were pulled by horses so anything ore than a very gradual gradient would mean either the load was impossible to pull or a special surface would be required to avoid the horses’ hooves from slipping. A low gradient would mean the approach to the bridge would be far longer than the bridge itself: even in the age of the petrol engine, think about the approach to the Erskine Bridge compared to the breadth of the river. A swing bridge was not seriously considered as the river was busy.
The answer provided by the Clyde Navigation Trust was ferry boats shuttling back and forth between fixed points on the banks of the river, charging a small fee.
Some were passenger only and others could carry horse-drawn waggons. Of course, they could be cold and wet, it’s doubtful the river smelt very good at all, and the need for horse-drawn waggons to go down to the water’s edge (as at Govan and Partick) meant they could not be fully loaded.
Photo: horses pull a waggon up the approach to the ferry that ran between Govan and Partick (now the site of the south end of the Govan Footbridge)
I can never resist a comparison photo (Google Street View from 2015):
Possibly inspired by a tunnel under the Thames built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, an engineer saw a tunnel as the solution, and persuaded local industrialists to invest in his idea.
The design (by the company that also designed the Glasgow Subway at about the same time) proposed two tunnels for vehicles (horse-drawn, of course), one for northbound traffic and one for southbound. Each of these was about 5 metres wide (16 to 18 feet). In between was a tunnel for pedestrians only, which was just under three metres wide (9 feet).
Photo: the design, credit to ICA, the Glasgow company responsible for the current redesign of the building (link)
To access the tunnels, pedestrians used stairs.
Photo: pedestrians entered and exited via two doors at pavement level on the river-side of the building (Google Street View 2024)
And here’s a comparison, possibly from around 1910, showing horses and waggons presumably awaiting the vehicle ferry, which was just out of shot on the right:
Photo: steps down to the pedestrian tunnel (138 at the north end and 126 at the south end) – note how worn they are
For the horses and waggons, there were lifts at each end, in a shaft 24 metres deep. The lifts were supplied by the Otis Elevator Company of New York (which had just supplied the lifts for the Eiffel Tower and is still in existence today). They moved at a rate of 4 feet per second which, if my conversions and arithmetic are correct means the descent (and ascent) took 20 seconds.
Photo: The Otis Company’s lifts (sciencephoto.com, link)
The tunnel company chairman acknowledged there was “considerable friction among mechanics [mechanical engineers] that the contract for the lift went to America, but there were no such lifts in this country”.
In each shaft there were six lifts: three would be going up while three were going down as a counter-balance. A horse and cart to a maximum weight of 5 metric tons could be carried.
At the top of each shaft, an entrance and exit were needed at ground level, so two circular buildings were built that included a ticket office. Today we know them as the North Rotunda and the South Rotunda. (‘Rotunda’ is from the Latin word so the plural is ‘rotundae’.) Each rotunda had a three-storey tower alongside with hydraulic equipment for the lifts.
Photo: this amazing photo, probably from the very early days of the tunnels, shows the lifts that carried the horses and their towed vehicle:
The horse and trap on the left is entering a vacant lift, next door to a second lift with a horse and waggon waiting to descend. On the right are two horses who have passed through the tunnel and are ready to go but are posing for the photographer.
Photo:
The men’s clothes and the style of the car on the left of the photo suggest a date in the 1920s. There seem to only been five bays open as opposed to six in the previous photo. There are gates on the front of each lift that were not evident before. And the scene is less busy with only a single horse and waggon emerging.
Soon after the tunnels opened the secretary of the Otis Company’s London subsidiary reported that ‘the horses generally have taken most kindly to the lifts, and are carried up and down without trouble. Carters said that by avoiding the steep inclines at the nearby ferries they could take five extra bags of flour per journey.” (quoted from the hiddenglasgow.com website)
I have recounted the commercial story of the tunnel company in a separate post. In brief, prices for ferry journeys were cut on the eve of the tunnel opening and as a result no profit was ever made; in fact, it ran at a loss. The tunnels opened in 1895, closed in 1907, and reopened in 1911 under a deal with the Corporation.
By 1932 the passenger tunnel was closed for use again with passengers able to use the vehicle tunnel instead. We have a description from this time: “The door of the passenger tunnel has long been disused, and foot-passengers now enter by one of the four elevators for vehicles at the other side of the rotunda. Choosing the company of a horse and lorry as preferable to that of a motor-car, I soon found myself smoothly and quietly descending among a bewildering medley of wheels and cables, through which I could see the mouth of the old disused foot-passenger tunnel as we passed on the way down. At the bottom water oozed through the iron sides of the great tube, which has never been totally watertight. At one place a single stalactite a font long hung from the roof.” (from hiddenglasgow website)
Around this time a water main was built through the passenger tunnel:
The pedestrian tunnel was reopened to traffic around 1940 but the vehicle tunnels closed again, this time for good, because the lift machinery (now 50 years old) was no longer working and was used as scrap metal (for the war effort) in 1943. As the main purpose of the rotunda was to service the lifts, I suspect they soon went into a state of disrepair.
Memories of the tunnel posted on social media today often refer to how fast the (then) young child ran through the scary tunnel on their errand. This photo of the steps down to the tunnel gives a hint of how forbidding it looked:
(Photo credit to James on the Urban Glasgow website)
The passenger tunnel closed in 1980 when it was found that it was costing £55,000 a year to keep it open and only just over 200 people per day were using it (The Scotsman 25th January 1980):
The pedestrian tunnel is still there, although not accessible to the public (but click this link for a short video walking through it). The vehicle tunnels are believed to have been filled in but when this happened is unclear.
The rotunda fell into disrepair (view from Stobcross Crane, I think):
Here is an approximate comparison today:
The initial restoration took place in the late 1980s when it was refurbished and converted into a restaurant. It has been in more or less continuous use similar manifestations since then. In current use, the North Rotunda has been purchased by the nearby hotel, Radisson Red, and is being converted into a live performance venue, restaurant, bar and wedding space (opening 2026). The South Rotunda has been converted into an office. They are Category B listed, which gives them added protection under planning laws.
There is a tunnel under the Elbe in Hamburg with similarities to the Glasgow version (except that it has been maintained and is in use today). Maybe it gives an idea of what might have been here as well (link):
