St Vincent Street Church

Great Western Road Terrace

Holmwood House

Alexander Thomson was given the nickname ‘Greek’ because of what other people saw as his readiness to use the architectural styles found in Classical Greece. In fact, Thomson used a whole range of architectural styles in his work, from Egypt, Rome, Assyria, India and Japan. What is fascinating about his architecture is that he achieved all this without ever leaving the United Kingdom.

Although other architects travelled on a “grand tour” of Europe to see classical architecture for themselves, Thomson relied on prints, paintings and books for his influences. He adapted and applied ancient and foreign ideas to a variety of buildings, from four-storey tenements to offices and grand houses.

For some architects of his time ‘classicism’ meant taking a simple rectangular building design and adding columns or a pediment around or over an entrance, or using repeating patterns of windows and doorways along a façade. For the better ones, it meant taking classical examples and re-inventing them to suit modern needs while preserving a sense of harmony, elegance, strength and visual balance.

Thomson’s genius lies in the way he takes different architectural sources and mixes them all together to create small villas, giant (for his day) offices and monumental churches. Yet he still achieved a sense of unity where everything fits, and nothing looks out of place.

Population and pollution

Thomson was helped by the stone he used – cheap, easily cut blonde sandstone from quarries in Giffnock or elsewhere around Glasgow. The stone’s softness meant intricate designs could be carved quickly and inexpensively. But no-one knew how damaging Glasgow’s polluted atmosphere would become to soft stone, which is why Thomson’s buildings have suffered so much over the years. (Later architects used tougher blonde and red sandstone from new quarries further away from the city).

What people did know, was how damaging the environment was to individual health. The rapid growth of Glasgow’s heavy engineering industries (such as shipbuilding, locomotive engineering, iron and steel-making) brought in vast wealth and a huge new population. Expanding factories needed new buildings, while their new workforces needed homes. But families moving from the rural parts of Scotland and from Ireland had to make do with cheaply built tenements or cut-down versions of middle-class tenements – five- or six-room flats reduced to single rooms for an entire family. With poor sanitation, contaminated water supplies, under-nourishment and over-crowding throughout the 19th century thousands of adults and children died in Glasgow from typhus, tuberculosis and cholera.
The middle and upper classes moved west and south – anywhere to escape the crush, smell and smoke of the city centre. Thomson did too, moving in 1856 to Shawlands then in 1861 to semi-rural Strathbungo. For him the move was necessary. Throughout his life he suffered from asthma, which was made worse by the pollution from factory chimneys and domestic coal fires. Small wonder that when he proposed to the city architect John Carrick a design for a new tenement block, it included a glazed roof to keep off the rain and plenty of ways for the wind to sweep away noxious fumes.

Thomson’s inspirations

In the early days, Thomson’s style derived much from contemporary trends, such as the ‘cottage orné’ style for small holiday villas (Seymour Lodge, Cove). Then came buildings with Romanesque features such as shallow pitched roofs, large overhanging eaves to keep the rain away from the stonework and arched windows (The Knowe, 301 Albert Drive Pollokshields). Gradually he began to develop his own architectural style and the arches disappeared. He started experimenting, as with the 1856 double villa (25 and 25a Mansionhouse Road, Langside), where two houses are fitted together, one turned 180° around from its partner to give the impression of a much larger home.

His first major church, at Caledonia Road (1856), took an awkward V-shaped site and created a Greek temple with a square tower linked to an angled meeting hall and (later) two sets of adjoining tenements. A year later, St Vincent Street Church had to cope with a heavily sloping site, so Thomson simply levelled it off by creating an Acropolis of his own: a massive stone base holding another temple-and-tower, this time with strange Assyrian and Indian features.

Crowning colours

If Thomson’s buildings look impressive today, imagine how much more impressive they would have looked 140 years ago, gleaming white and often the only large building on the street. We should also admire the confidence of the church congregations who chose Thomson, not just for his exteriors but for his beautifully painted interiors as well.

Thomson’s original colour scheme for his most extensive villa – Holmwood (1857) at Netherlee Road, Cathcart – has been exposed and will be restored by the National Trust for Scotland.

With four-storey tenements throughout the West End and South Side, office blocks such as the Grosvenor Building in Gordon Street, Grecian Chambers in Sauchiehall Street and Egyptian Halls in Union Street, as well as smaller commissions for numerous clients, Thomson’s output was large by anyone’s standards.

Thomson took his architecture seriously, and saw little reason why anyone else should not. In Thomson’s mind, the world around him was not just the result of creators, but of a Creator. His architecture was not just designed to serve his fellow men and women, it was also his way of praising God.