Conservation of the last remaining listed building of the old Gorbals in Glasgow
PagePark have helped Southside Housing Association to refurbish one of the last remaining tenements in the Gorbals. Lying empty for a generation the category A-listed building has emerged into the new neighbourhood of Laurieston as a solitary link to the area’s Victorian past. The surrounding area had lain blighted for three decades until 2015 when new-build housing was given the go-ahead.
The building had been commissioned by the British Linen Bank to house a branch of their bank within the then thriving commercial area of Glasgow’s Gorbals. The bank’s architect was James Salmon Junior, the third generation of the Salmon dynasty, a contemporary of Mackintosh and arguably second only to him as a proponent of Glasgow Style architecture.
Salmon was within his most productive period, producing designs for two of the city’s foremost and most innovative buildings of the period: the Art Nouveau style Hatrack office building which used the new architectural style to maximize light penetration into its narrow Georgian house site and the Lion Chambers of 1904, a very early use of reinforced concrete.
Following closure of the bank in the early 1980s, the upper floor flats had been vacated by the early 1990s. Following several years of deterioration, in 2007 the building fabric was mothballed with temporary measures taken to arrest the decay until funding could be found to restore the six flats and ground level commercial accommodation.
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