The Britannia Panopticon in Glasgow began life as the Britannic Music Hall in the late 1850s. Items on the bill included dancing girls and comic and ballad singers and it was also a popular haunt for prostitutes. A Mr and Mrs Rossborough took over to clean things up and revamped the interior and increased the range of acts.
Designed by Thomas Rickman in the Gothic Revival style the Ramshorn was originally St David’s Parish Church and dates from 1824. It is now owned by the University of Strathclyde and houses Scotland’s National Centre for Languages and the Confucius Institute for Scotland’s Schools.
The Italian Centre opened in 1991 and was designed by Page and Park architects. The design is based on an Italian-style palazzo, with a central courtyard and is filled with a mix of residential spaces, offices, cafes and shops.
This striking statue on the bank of the River Clyde in Glasgow is a memorial to British citizens who fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939. Created by sculptor Arthur Dooley it was unveiled in 1979. The statue is based upon Dolores Ibarruri, known as La Pasionaria (The Passion Flower), a female politician and prominent anti-fascist from Spain.
Glasgow’s City Chambers, the headquarters of Glasgow City Council, is an imposing building that was completed from 1888. There are (pre-COVID) free public tours twice a day Monday to Friday with tickets handed out on a first come first served basis. I got there about half an hour before the start time and was first in a group of about eight people.
The Hunterian Museum within the University of Glasgow is Scotland’s oldest public museum. Free to enter, the museum began when William Hunter, a Scottish anatomist and physician, died and left his collections to the university. The museum first opened in 1807 at the university’s old campus on the High Street and then moved to the new campus in 1870.
The Memorial Chapel at the University of Glasgow can, in normal times, be visited every weekday from 9 till 5 and when I visited I had the whole place to myself for a few minutes before more people came in. It was completed in 1929 to serve as a memorial for members of the university who had died in both World Wars and interestingly both Protestant, Catholic and humanist marriages can take place there.
The chapel was designed by John James Burnet around 1913 but building was delayed by the outbreak of the First World War. It’s not surprisingly a small building but a lovely space nonetheless and has some wonderful stained glass windows designed and made by Douglas Strachan. He died before he could install all the windows he’d designed, so these were worked on by others from the 1950s to the 1960s.
You can find some more photos here.
The University of Glasgow was founded in 1451 making it the fourth oldest university in the UK and second oldest in Scotland. They do run tours of the building for visitors but they weren’t running on the day I went so I did the self-guided tour which can be found on the university’s website.
The main reason I wanted to visit Glasgow last October was to go to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and it turned out to be an even better experience than I’d been expecting, in fact I ended up spending most of the day there. The building itself is beautiful inside and out, designed in a Spanish Baroque style in red sandstone by John W. Simpson and E. J. Milner Allen and opened in 1901.
I’m not a big fan of modern art as regular readers will know but Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art is free to explore and I was intrigued by the history of the building itself. The gallery was opened in 1966 but the building dates from 1778 when it was the townhouse of William Cunninghame a tobacco merchant and slave trader.
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