In 1987, its basement became home to the now-legendary Sub Club, the longest running underground dance club in the world.

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The former Grand Central Cinema on Jamaica Street in Glasgow. Originally constructed as a warehouse around 1860, in 1914 the lower three floors were converted into a 750 seat cinema by William B. White. It became a specialist 'art' cinema in the 1950s, and closed in 1966. Despite several attempts to revive it, it ceased being a cinema altogether in 1992.

Cont./

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1860s Classical style warehouse on Jamaica Street in Glasgow, with a cinema inserted into its basement and lower two floors in 1914. This was the Grand Central Cinema, which closed in 1966. It then re-opened as a smaller 'specialist' cinema in 1973, which closed in 1992. The basement became home to Glasgow's legendary Sub Club in 1987, which still operates out of these premises to this day.

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PastGlasgow recently posted this George Washington Wilson photo looking north up Jamaica Street, and it got me interested.

A first challenge was the date. The shops on the right-hand side give us a lower bound on this: R. W. Forsyth took over that site at the corner with Howard Street around 1892, appearing in the PO Directory for the first time in 1892-3.

But what interested me was this detail in the background. It was evidently something akin to a telegraph pole, but why was it so high and what was it connected to?

The technical name for it is a telephone standard, and it belongs to a very specific point in the development of Glasgow’s telephone system.

The first telephone systems in Glasgow were set up in between 1879 and 1881 by various private companies, but by the 1890s they’d consolidated under the National Telephone Company, with a base in the Royal Exchange. In doing so they were following the example of an older technology: the Electric Telegraph Company had set up its Glasgow office in Royal Exchange Square in 1847, within convenient reach of both the North British Railway which carried its trunk line from Edinburgh and the information-hungry commodity traders in the Exchange itself.

Although the telephone and the telegraph shared some infrastructural needs, the telephone was far more demanding. Telegraphic communication was mostly from one telegraph office to another, with the final delivery carried out by messengers. Although private lines existed, they were relatively scarce: around two thousand across the UK by 1885. In contrast, by the same year Glasgow alone already had 1300 telephone subscribers, and the number was growing fast.

It’s not surprising that the infrastructure couldn’t quite keep up. Individual subscribers were added piecemeal, each with their individual wire, and the standards that carried these wires across the rooftops became huge. In 1895, Joseph Poole’s Practical Telephone Handbook recorded that on the principal routes in Glasgow each standard had up to 30 arms, carrying a total of 960 wires between them.

I think we can see another of those standards on the corner of Jamaica Street and Broomielaw in 1890. It’s prominent in a handful of photos from the 1890s; by 1901 it’s shrunk to a single pole, and a few years later it’s vanished.

The trunk route from the Royal Exchange to Greenock and Paisley passed over Mitchell Street and, I suspect, connected to that standard at the bottom of Broomielaw; the standard in the GWW photo is plausibly part of the same route. (We have this information because a fire destroyed 66-70 Mitchell Street on 7 August 1892, and the local newspapers covered it in considerable detail.)

With its creaking and unscalable architecture, the Telephone Company became notorious for costliness and inefficiency, and in 1893 the Corporation applied to the Postmaster-General to take the system into municipal control. The Postmaster-General was unsympathetic; Parliament was invoked, and a struggle between local and central government continued for seven years.

The Corporation was finally granted a licence for the entire Glasgow area in March 1900; the short-lived Glasgow municipal telephone system was created, and connected to the national trunk in June 1901. Cables were laid underground in the back lanes of the city centre, new branch and central switchrooms built, and emphatic municipal branding applied.

The municipal system did not last long. As the national system improved, opposition to local control grew, and the Glasgow system was taken over by the Post Office in 1907 as part of the national system. Those telephone standards didn’t survive long — it seems remarkable that they survived the first high wind — but they capture a transitional stage both in the technology’s growth and in its regulation and control.

It’s always worth looking at the background…

Main sources. As usual I’ve used the National Library of Scotland’s online maps, particularly the 25-inch OS town plan of 1892-4, and their collection of Post Office Directories. Photos are via Virtual Mitchell and the University of Aberdeen’s George Washington Wilson collection. Other references:

• John R. Hume, Industrial Archaeology of Glasgow (Blackie & Son, 1974)
• Municipal Enterprises of Glasgow, a.k.a. Souvenir Handbook of Glasgow issed by the Corporation on the occasion of the Twenty-Second Congress of the Sanitary Institute (Glasgow, 1904)
• J. R. Poole, Practical Telephone Handbook and Guide to the Telephone Exchange (Whittaker, 1891)
• TelephoneCollecting.org, The Telephone Exchange
• S. F. Johnston, The Telephone in Scotland, in K. Veitch (ed.) Transport and Communications Publications of the European Ethnological Research Centre; Scottish life and society: a compendium of Scottish ethnology (8), pp. 716-727 (2009)
• Steven Roberts, Distant Writing: A History of the Telegraph Companies in Britain between 1838 and 1868, https://distantwriting.co.uk/

Thank you in particular to Roger Neil Barton for pointing out the connection to the Electric Telegraph Company’s base in Royal Exchange Square.

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Former Grand Central Cinema on Jamaica Street in Glasgow.

This building was originally constructed as a warehouse around 1860. In 1914, the lower three floors were converted into a 750 seat cinema by William B. White. It closed in 1966 and re-opened as the smalller 365 seat Classic Grand in 1973. It finally closed for good as a cinema in 1992.

#glasgow #glasgowbuildings #glasgowarchitecture #oldcinema #glasgowcinemas #jamaicastreet #glasgowhistory