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Dixon Street / Howard Street, St Enoch Square, Glasgow
Unexecuted design for warehouse partly in cast-iron, for John Blair,
hatmaker, c.1851-52
Two elevation drawings in Mitchell
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, 'Early Cast-Iron Facades', Architectural
Review cix, February 1951*; Law*; McFadzean*; G&W; AA*; McKean*;
S&McK*; ATSN no.20 January 1998*
This remarkable and celebrated project for a warehouse with large
areas of iron-framed glazing survives only in two drawings in the
Mitchell Library collection. The dating is uncertain; but both are
watermarked 1851 and one, labelled 'Elevation to Dixon Street' is signed
'Baird & Thomson' with the 112 Hope Street address, which the
architects left in c.1853. The two elevations depict slightly different
schemes, one with an additional floor (see Howard Street aspect, above), but both are in the same
abstracted Grecian manner. The client also commissioned Baird &
Thomson to build The Knowe in Albert Drive, Pollokshields.
Blair's, 17-19 Dixon Street / 32-38 Howard Street, St Enoch Square,
Glasgow
†New warehouse with shops below, for John Blair, hatmaker, 1853
Demolished 1966
Survey drawings of 1901 by John Nisbet, architect, and of 1951 by
James Bunyan, architect, in Glasgow City Archives in Mitchell
Worsdall; G&W; McFadzean; Dominic d'Angelo in ATSN no.20 January
1998*
As built, the warehouse for John Blair had solid stone facades, with
a symmetrical range along Howard Street with a central porch; only a
short range in Dixon Street was executed which may have been intended to
continue further south. The low attic towers show the influence of von
Klenze’s Propylaeum in Munich but the treatment of the corner panels
below as an abstracted grid, responding to vertical and horizontal
continuities, was quite novel while the handling of the curved corner
was subtle and unusual. This would seem to have been Thomson’s first
executed Grecian design as well as his first important urban building.
It was later occupied by Cooper & Co., general merchants.
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