This was on a wet day last summer. I’ve only just got round to tidying it up for showing.

The cinema was once a Mecca then a Vogue but was more lately the location for Allied Vehicles. It looks shut now though.

Its history is on the Scottish cinemas website.

It looks like I may have photographed the Botanic Gardens Garage in Glasgow’s Vinicombe Street at the right time.

Someone got to this blog by searching for “scotlands art deco heritage” (sic) and following it back to the Google search page I found the link to the Herald article from February about the demolition plans for the garage.

I’d be sorry to see it go.

Okay they say they’re going to keep the facade but that doesn’t mean they necessarily will.

Though I suppose hosung is never a bad use for a building the area has a multitude of restaurants already; it surely doesn’t need two more.

In the gardens surrounding the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, inside a hedged enclosure just behind where I took the picture in the post linked to above there is a memorial to the Cameronians Regiment, also known as the Scottish Rifles, which has a long association with Glasgow.

The statuary is not, like some, a mawkish example of the form, representing as it does members of the regiment in action during the Great War. Indeed it is unusual in that it seems to depict one of the fallen – which such memorials tend to shy away from.

Front view

Side view

Wording on plinth

Over a week ago we visited Glasgow and of course I took some pictures.

This extravagant confection of a building is the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

It was constructed in order to house Glasgow’s collection of Art works and was partly funded by using the surplus resulting from the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888.

Another such Exhibition was held in 1901 to celebrate the opening of the Art Gallery which has been a favourite haunt of the Glasgow public ever since. It was much missed when closed for refurbishment for a few years recently.

I’d never really noticed the details above the windows before.

Each of the gallery type windows has the arms of a Scottish county above it. Further along past the (back) entrance is the one for Dumbartonshire. Note the elephant and castle.

A persistent urban myth is that the Art Gallery’s plans were misread and that it was built the wrong way round (the main entrance faces the Kelvin river and not the west end of Argyle Street) and the architect is supposed to have committed suicide as a result. All complete nonsense.

At the time the road (not Dumbarton Road as the link above has it; that starts just beyond the Kelvin, to the right of the Kelvin Hall in my picture below) would not have been considered so important and the view to the Kelvin out over Kelvingrove Park would have taken precedence.

The later (1927) Kelvin Hall, now mainly a sports venue, is just over the road from the Art Gallery.

There are some stylistic similarities between the two buildings.

None of these are signature buildings but they are pleasant to come across.

I found this one on Great Western Road. There seems to be a garden on its roof. Probably accidentally.

When it was The Botanic Gardens Garage – you can just about make out the wordage above the doorway on the left by the Arnold Clark sign – I once hired a car from this one (in nineteen hundred and long time ago.) It’s just off Byres Road, on Vinicombe Street, opposite the Salon Cinema as was.

These two are cheek by jowl on Byres Road itself, down past University Avenue. It’s mainly the lettering that’s deco. The chippie is excellent. I can’t remember ever going into the cafe. I suspect they have the same proprietor, though. They are well placed for trade from students. As is most of Byres Road to be fair.

This was where I spent the better waking part of seven years of my life; four as an undergraduate (though there were only one lab per week and one lecture per day in 1st year; with an extra lecture and lab per week in 2nd) and three as a research student doing my Ph. D..

The building is in three main parts, oriented like three wheel spokes radiating out from a central hub. This is to reflect the fact that there were three main branches of Chemistry when it was built, Organic (chemistry of carbon compounds,) Inorganic (all other compounds,) and Physical (things to do with properties like melting point, boiling point, dipole moments, dielectric constants etc.)

There are two main entrances, situated between the central and the flanking blocks. This is one of them.

Here’s a close up on the above doorway so that you can see that officially it’s called The Institute Of Chemistry.

This is a (now disused I think) doorway on the end of a block.

This is part of one of the blocks.

Here’s a view from the rear of the building. As I recall the wooden bit at the top is a later addition.

Slightly to the left of this you can see up to the research labs.

Note the gas cylinders kept outside for safety reasons.

There’s a lovely curved end to the building’s frontage on University Avenue. This section is given over to medical research.

The railings separating this side of the building from University Avenue are nice too.

Editorial note:-
I have already featured the Glasgow buildings the Luma Factory, the Beresford Hotel, the Kelvin Court Flats and the Ascot Cinema under the title Scotland’s Art Deco Heritage since they are such iconic structures.

Edited to add an explanation of the designation, The University Chemistry Building:-
The venerable degree conferring institution which I attended titles itself The University, Glasgow. (When it was founded there was no other in the city, nor would there be for hundreds of years.)

When in Glasgow’s west end during the summer (see my Kibble Palace post) I took the opportunity to photograph the local cinema, as was, The Salon. It’s a nice building.

I went there quite a few times when I was a student. Gone With The Wind is one I remember particularly well. The good lady hadn’t seen it and so I took her. She wasn’t all that impressed by the film partly due to the bum numbing experience but also the fact that the story and acting weren’t of the best. She wouldn’t have been disposed to like it anyway, though, given that the book was my mother’s favourite and my mother hadn’t ever taken to her. Never did: even after we were married. Strange woman, my mother. (I can get away with that since she died a long time ago. So it goes.) But I have to agree; it’s not a great film, perhaps not even a good one.

This is the cinema entrance on Vinicombe Street as it looks now.

The side alley was cluttered with bins and such on the day.

The other side presents to much better effect.

There seems to be a sort of church architecture to the rear of this as you go down Cranworth Street. You can see it to the left above and to the right below.

This is the view of the building from Cresswell Street.

Photos of the cinema now and in its heyday can be seen on the Scottish cinemas website.

During the summer we took a trip to Glasgow to roam around my old haunts in the West End. (I spent seven years at The University, Glasgow, doing my B. Sc. and Ph. D.)

Actually we frequently go across, the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery is always worth a visit; so was the Transport Museum till its recent closure preparatory to a move and Byres Road is always interesting.

The Botanic Gardens are just over Great Western Road from Byres Road.

I took some photos of the big glasshouse known as the Kibble Palace. It’s hard to get the whole thing in one shot. You can still see the BBC Scotland sign on the building over the road behind it. It’s a while now since they decamped down to Pacific Quay, over the Clyde from the SECC and Armadillo.

Below is the main dome from the side nearest the Kelvin river.

This one was taken through the railings separating the Gardens from Queen Margaret Drive.

There were loads of people about. There usually are. The Botanics is a well-loved Glasgow haunt.

Time was when the Science Fiction crime/detective story was a rarity. This may have been because there is a fundamental disparity between the two forms. In Science Fiction the essence is that the tale is of something changed or changing, by the end of the tale the world is no longer the same. In crime fiction, by contrast, order – normality – is restored, the world is made safe again. There is also a necessary withholding of information in the crime story (or at least a need to disguise it.) In Science Fiction the more information is granted to the reader the more real the changed world seems, the more we believe in it.

The first truly successful SF crime stories that I recall were written by Larry Niven and featured teleportation booths. In A Kind of Murder the resolution and solving of the crime depends solely on a ramification of this SF element. Niven then went on to write novels featuring the detective Gil the ARM Hamilton who as the result of an accident lost one physical arm but then developed a psychic one which he subsequently used in his investigations.

Perhaps because of the infiltration of so much of what was SF into both the modern world and the modern detective story/thriller, especially televisually; perhaps because the conventions of the detective story are so embedded, the SF crime story is nowadays no longer so problematic and SF detectives are far from rare.

These thoughts were prompted by the SF book which I am reading at the moment, The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod. It has elements of the detective story and part of the action takes place in Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is a marvellous setting for detective/horror/supernatural fiction as it is so wonderfully Gothic. There is the unmissable landmark of the castle brooding on its rock, Arthur’s Seat, Calton Hill with its curious, apparently unfinished buildings in the classical style, the bizarre under and over layout of the streets just off the Royal Mile, the contrast between the Old Town and the New (and nowadays the peripheral estates.) The Old Town itself has so many mediæval associations – not to mention underground warrens – several atmospheric churchyards with attached cemeteries and of course there is the bodysnatching/Burke and Hare connection; all of which make it almost perfect for the unfolding of skullduggery of various sorts. Glasgow, by contrast, while its estates are bleak, has only the area by the Cathedral which is truly old. Its streets tend to be more grid like – with no dark, tunnel-like thoroughfares analogous to The Cowgate (unless you count the Hielanman’s Umbrella.) For all its energy and (misplaced?) reputation for violence it seems so much more prosaic a place, more bustling certainly, but more modern, more down to earth, less prone to fancies.

Here are two more pictures I’ve found (on flickr) of the building I started this series off with.

Nice ending to my sentence above, wasn’t it? Not one, but two prepositions.

This is the sort of language that, it is said, up with which Winston Churchill would not put.