St. Enoch Square - Times Past
In partnership with the Glasgow Times, our archivists are exploring Glasgow's fascinating history. This week, Michael Gallagher writes about St. Enoch Square.
Glasgow is an ever-evolving city and one area that encapsulates this flux more than most is a small patch in the city centre: St Enoch Square.
In some ways, the square represents the history of Glasgow in microcosm. It has been a rural pasture, a site of religious veneration, a fashionable residential district which gave way to commerce and industry, a transport hub that connected the city to the world, and most recently a shopping destination geared around the needs of 21st century consumerism.
The square is named after St Thenew, the mother of Glasgow’s patron saint Mungo, or Kentigern, as he is formally known. It was home to an ancient chapel dedicated to Thenew with a holy well nearby, and her bones were said to have been preserved within the chapel’s walls.
Although the church itself was destroyed after the Reformation, the name of St Enoch had become indelibly linked to the area. In the 1760s the Town Council bought the land (which was then on the very western fringe of the town) and decided to create a showpiece square on what had been a corn field. This was quite unusual at the time, as Glasgow’s development during the eighteenth century rarely allowed for open public spaces.
The Council intended to turn the new square into an exclusive residential enclave but it was slow to take off. In 1780, a new St Enoch Church was erected and for a few years it was the only building in the square, before terraced houses were built on the east and west sides. At the centre was a green space planted with grass and shrubbery, which at one time was used to keep sheep.
This fashionable residential quarter lasted for less than 40 years before the encroachment of business. Private residences were taken over by merchant’s offices, warehouses, banking institutions and counting houses, to the extent that one contemporary described the square as “the very heart of stirring and living commerce”.
St Enoch Square remained a commercial hub for some time, but it was altered once again in the 1870s with the arrival of the St Enoch Station and Hotel. This replaced most of the original premises on the east side of the square and the ornate building became its dominant feature. The hotel was the largest in the country at the time, containing more than 200 bedrooms and 20 reception rooms, and welcomed the world to Glasgow.
The square’s status as a transport hub was strengthened by the addition of St Enoch Underground Station in 1896. Described by one critic as a “pretty Jacobean, toy-like building”, it now serves as a café and acts as the focal point of the space, but it could have met a very different fate.
In 1978, the station was caught in the way of the transport authority’s plans for a new underground system, and they applied for permission to remove it brick-by-brick before replacing it when construction was complete. This suggestion was refused; instead, the underground station became an overground one. It was raised 7 millimetres above the ground and occupied a “floating” platform whilst the excavation work carried on below it. When the work was finished, it was lowered gently back into place.
The next stage in the square’s regeneration took place in 1977 with the demolition of the grand station and hotel. In its place was erected the vast St Enoch Shopping Centre. Built at a cost of £65 million, it was the largest enclosed glass structure in Europe. The Centre was opened in May 1989 and the following March received a visit from Margaret Thatcher. Although known for her strict economic principles, the then-Prime Minister required a government bail-out of sorts when she ran out of cash on her shopping trip and had to borrow £30 from a colleague to buy a bottle of perfume – a fact that was gleefully splashed across the front page of the Evening Times that day.
St Enoch Square has adapted itself many times in the city’s past and Glaswegians will be interested to see what shape its future regeneration will take.