Glasgow seems to have a liking for bulbous grey architecture.

This started with the building whose construction saw it immediately dubbed the Armadillo. Its “Sunday” name is the Clyde Auditorium. It sits on the north bank of the Clyde in Finnieston right by the Crowne Plaza Hotel (where Eastercon was held this year) and the SECC and has certain structural similarities to the Sydney Opera House.

On the other side of the River Clyde lie more examples. The nearest to the camera here is Glasgow’s IMAX cinema. The other silvery building is the Glasgow Science Centre of which the tall white tower on the left is also a part.

This is a closer view of the IMAX. It looks like a giant silver slug. The entrance is on the other side.

And here’s the Science Centre closer up.

And the Science Centre from the north bank of the river. The paddle steamer Waverley is at anchor.

Better view of the Waverley, the last remaining ocean-going paddle steamer in the world.

Glasgow’s newest concert venue is the latest addition to the bulbous grey architecture fixation. It’s the Hydro.

Another black and white postcard of the Empire Exhibition, Scotland, 1938, held in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow. This time, the entrance to the UK Pavilion.

Lovely Deco features; rounded columns with banding at the flagpole supports, vertical dividers, sculptured figures – which, like the lions flanking the steps, were gold painted.

The zenith of Art Deco (or of Moderne if you must) in Scotland came in 1938 with the Empire Exhibition, Scotland, held in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, and which opened 75 years ago today on 3/5/1938.

Its signature building was the Tower of Empire (seen in the above photograph taken from the link) designed by Thomas Tait whose houses at Silver End I featured eighteen months ago. The tower was erected on the hill in Bellahouston Park and dominated the Exhibition.

Tait was in overall charge of the architecture for the Exhibition – some of whose buildings made extensive use of the new construction material, asbestos cement! – and designed many of the buildings himself.

My favourite is the Atlantic Restaurant, a ship-shaped building cresting the wave of the hill on which it was set, two postcards of which I reproduce below.

Sadly almost none of the buildings remain. (It was a condition of such events that their locations were restored to their original condition soon afterwards. Moreover shortly afterwards the country was involved in the Second World War and conserving architecture became a minor consideration. The Exhibition itself came to an end in the midst of the Munich Crisis.)

Only the Palace of Arts is still standing in Bellahouston Park itself. It was transformed into a sports pavilion. The Palace of Engineering was taken down and re-erected at Prestwick Airport and can still be found there. The South Africa building was in Dutch Barn style rather than deco or moderne and later became a staff canteen at ICI Ardeer. All the rest were demolished.

Think of what a tourist attraction Tait’s Tower, as it was known, could have been! Glasgow’s answer to Eiffel.

As it is, the main tourist draw in the Park today is the House for an Art Lover built to designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh whose buildings are a sort of bridge between the freer, flowing style of Art Nouveau and the more rigid Art Deco.

You may have noticed that I have added a new category to my list especially for this Exhibition. There is so much more I could, and will, post.

…… that the last Glasgow Tram ran along the rails.

The trams were much loved in Glasgow. Thousands turned out to watch their final passing.

There’s film of Glasgow’s trams at the Scottish Screen Archive and The Last Tram appears on You Tube.

I hadn’t been to Glasgow for a while before last Sunday.

Imagine my surprise when I came upon this in Byres Road:-

This wasn’t a Nardini’s the previous time I was in Byres Road but I can’t remember what shop occupied this building up to then.

They have tried to make it look Deco, certainly. The lettering is Deco; and the top glazing. The interior lighting is like the ones in the re-opened Nardini’s in Largs.

Since it is new I can’t really include it in my Glasgow’s Art Deco Heritage series. I wonder if anyone in the future will think it’s 1930s.

Not a very catchy headline, is it?

Yet this is exactly what has happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan – an event which has now apparently overshadowed the many thousands of deaths from the tsunami which followed the earthquake; a tragedy of enormous scale, very difficult to get your head round, and virtually unbloggable.

Yes, it was stupid to site the plant by the sea-shore in a quake-prone region subject to tsunami inundation. Yes, there should have been thought put to the likelihood of a tsunami stopping the cooling system’s pumps from working. Yes, there should have been back-up cooling systems in place.

But…

No-one has died yet.

Of course any unnecesssary deaths are to be deplored but any deaths will be microscopic in number compared to the natural disaster.

And there are deaths associated with the extraction of coal and oil/gas for burning to make electricity. Even hydro-electricity has its drawbacks.

There are catches to alternative power generation methods too.

No power generation technology will be free of them.

It’s a question of risk, and nuclear generation has quite small ones really. (The waste is a different issue.)

I wouldn’t want a nuclear power plant in my backyard, though.

What’s that? Torness is only a relatively few miles away (as the wind blows) on the Berwickshire coast?

Hmm. So it is.

But then I grew up between Glasgow and Faslane; two prime targets in the event of the Cold War becoming hot, with a third – Holy Loch – not much further away, and barely gave it a thought.

Mind you, thermonuclear immolation would be a damn sight quicker than radiation poisoning.

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.

After Inveraray it was off round the headwaters of Loch Fyne. Hooking left at Strachur we went down the Cowal Peninsula. This took us along the shores of the stunning fresh water Loch Eck. The road runs along the (north) east side. In the late afternoon the water looked black in places, reflecting the hills on the other side like a mirror. A beautiful spot for a canoeing or fishing holiday if you’re into those.

Scotland is well served for lochs such as these; usually with steep sides. To my mind fresh water lochs are so much more scenic than sea lochs as they do not have margins scabbed by brown seaweed.

Destination was Dunoon.

I’d only ever visited Dunoon by ferry boat/paddle steamer before – probably en route to Rothesay on a “Doon The Watter” trip and I don’t remember actually setting foot in it.

Its heyday is obviously long past. The main street was shabby and a bit forlorn and the pavements up the town were festooned with weeds.

The Cowal peninsula was the territory of Clan Lamont. In our wanderings we found a memorial to the Lamont dead of the Civil Wars of the 1640s. (Wiki has this titled as The English Civil War but it was way more complicated than that with various shifting alliances involving the whole of the British Isles.)

The plaque with the names was a bit corroded so they are difficult to pick out.

.

Down by the seafront just across from the ferry terminal at the pier there is a memorial to the Great War and World War 2 containing names of all those from the peninsula who died. As I recall, it (unusually) gave the names of nurses. Once again (as was also true at Inveraray) vastly more names for the Great War than the later one.

Round the coast, at Sandbank, there was another, this time dedicated to the more local dead of Sandbank and Ardnadam.

In days gone by, in the background to this memorial, you would have been able to see swathes of US Navy ships, or at least the anchorages they used, for this is Holy Loch which housed (harboured?) a Polaris missile submarine base. Note this is within twenty-five or so miles as the crow flies from Glasgow. Would such a thing ever have been allowed that short distance from London if the requisite deep water had been as close to it?*

*Edited to add:- Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet is based even closer to Glasgow; at Faslane in Gare Loch (the Gareloch as it’s known locally.)