The golden mosaics over the Buchanan Street entrance to the Argyll Arcade in Glasgow.

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Love the inscribed nameplate on the 1904 Argyll Chambers on Argyll Chambers above the Buchanan Street entrance to the Argyll Arcade in Glasgow. At one time, this was home to Stuart Cranston's Tearoom. The brother of the more famous Catherine Cranston, the Queen of the Glasgow tearoom scene, Stuart, a tea dealer by trade, created what is thought to have been the world's first tearoom at this location in 1875.

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The old and Thenew: St Enoch’s Square

Come with me on a walking tour of St Enoch Square in 1853, courtesy of George McCulloch’s View of Glasgow.

McCulloch captured this part of town at an interesting moment. Much of the street plan is recognisable today, though only a few individual buildings survive. Meanwhile, there are details that look back to the origin of the Square seventy years earlier.

St Enoch Square started as a piece of “Town’s Property” at the western edge of the expanding city. It was edged by the already altered course of the St Enoch’s Burn, which formed the official boundary of Glasgow.

The area was traditionally associated with St Thenew, mother of St Kentigern. The ruins of her chapel were still visible in the early eighteenth century, and her well, now lost, lasted some decades longer.

It was customary to nail votive offerings to a tree that overhung the well. The custom seems to have survived the Reformation; when the well was cleaned out around 1800, some of these offerings were found at the bottom. (Our authority for that statement, by the way, is the pastry-cook and inventor Robert Hart, who also gave us the story of James Watt’s epiphany on Glasgow Green.)

In the 1780s, new ranges of buildings gave St Enoch Square its modern rectangular shape. Adam’s Court Lane, which mostly still exists, marks the old boundary of the Square and the line of the Burn.

The main feature of the Square was St Enoch’s Church, built 1780-82 and rebuilt, retaining the spire, in 1827. It was a classic project of prosperous late eighteenth-century Glasgow, investing its unscrupulously acquired wealth in elegant bricks and mortar.

By the 1850s the city had thoroughly swallowed the Square and its surroundings. McCulloch’s View shows a complex urban landscape of tenements, warehouses, shops, light industry and public buildings.

Let’s look for a few details…

On the east side of the Square is Surgeons Hall, the HQ of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. Founded in 1599, the Faculty was already two centuries old when it moved to the Square in 1791. In 1862 it would move to its current, even more upmarket premises on St Vincent Street.

From 1801 onwards, Surgeons Hall was the base for the smallpox vaccination campaign, a quietly heroic achievement that provided ten thousand free vaccinations, mostly to children, in the first five years.

The Post Office Directory gives us a picture of the other inhabitants of the Square: merchants and agents; printers; the National Hotel to the west of the entrance from Argyle Street, and the Scottish Temperance League to the south. In McCulloch’s View we can also catch a glimpse of traffic at the north end of the Square, suggesting that the cab rank predated the station.

The block to the east of the Square was trisected by two thin streets: St Enoch Lane, the original western boundary of the Square; and the older St Enoch’s Wynd.

Beyond them is Maxwell Street, where “Dr” James Knox Stuart dispensed spurious remedies for everything from gonorrhea to cholera from his “Private Medical Establishment” (and later ventilated hat emporium) at number 39.

The like of Maxwell Street were causeways of relative respectability thrown across the Wynds, an ill-defined region with a reputation for villainy that made Mos Eisley look like Milngavie. (The area cleared for the station in 1876 was said to have contained 150 brothels and 190 shebeens.) Hugh MacIntosh speculated that a building of unknown date on St Enoch’s Lane might have been “a conventual or monastic institute” associated with St Thenew’s Church. It was an area, even by McCulloch’s day, that few reliable records bothered to describe.

At 11 St Enoch’s Wynd were the former premises of the Night Asylum for the Houseless and House of Industry for Indigent Females. Established in 1838, it was the city’s first homeless shelter. By 1847 it had already been replaced by a larger building in North Frederick Street.

Argyle Street was already a prospering thoroughfare, though almost all the big retail buildings we associate with it date from the 1870s or later. An exception is the Argyll Arcade (1827), already well established in its L shape between Buchanan Street and Argyle Street.

John Willox’s Glasgow Tourist and Itinerary (1850) described Argyle Street as “a vista of street architecture not to be surpassed in Scotland” and noted that the Arcade sold “bijoutery, millinery, stationery, fancy cutlery, and perfumery”, i.e. bling. Stay classy, Glasgow.

A couple of buildings to the west is another survivor, though not immediately recognisable.

In 1879, Kate Cranston would open a tea room at 114 Argyle Street, below a Temperance Hotel. In 1898, now the empress of Glasgow’s tea scene, she would return with big ideas.

The facade of the eighteenth-century tenement was completely remodelled, giving it its characteristic “Belgian” look. Inside was one of the famous Cranston interiors, designed by George Walton and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and the first to feature the classic Mackintosh chair.

In Morrison’s Court behind it, the Arcade Café still survives, now under the name of its early C20th proprietor David Sloan.

Precious little else of the scene in McCulloch’s View survives. Everything to the east of the Square vanished in 1876 with the arrival of St Enoch Station and the magnificent Station Hotel.

St Enoch’s Church was demolished in 1925. The station, in turn, was demolished in 1977 and replaced in 1986 by the shopping centre. Other buildings vanished one by one: some replaced by better, some by worse.

To the robot stare of Google Earth, this is what it looks like now.

As ever, the city forgets itself; remembers itself; jumbles memory and forgetting together into myth.

(And somewhere, perhaps, below the centuries of building and rebuilding, the well of St Thenew waits until the city, like all cities, ends.)

Main sources

As usual I’ve leaned heavily on NLS Maps and the Glasgow Post Office Directories. Hugh Macintosh’s speculations can be found in his Origin and History of Glasgow Streets (1902), and the story of the votive offerings is from Andrew Macgeorge’s Old Glasgow (1888). For tea rooms, I referred to Perilla Kinchin’s Tea and Taste: the Glasgow tea rooms 1875-1975 (1996). Corrections and additions, as always, welcome!

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The Argyll Arcade in central Glasgow. Developed by James Robertson Reid in the 1820s as Scotland's first indoor shopping arcade, it was modelled on the Parisian Arcades of the late 1700s. It's about 150 metres long and L-shaped, and was designed by John Baird I.

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The entrance to the Argyll Arcade on Buchanan Street in Glasgow. Created in 1827, the Argyll Arcade is Scitland's oldest indoor shopping arcade. It's accessed through the Argyll Chambers, an Edwardian Baroque building designed by Colin Menzies and constructed in 1904.

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