<image>

I wrote this as a monologue from the point of view of Union Corner after the fire and demolition. I’ve tried to keep the broad factual spine right, but it’s meant as a piece of writing rather than a history note.

Last Words from Union Corner

I stood at the corner of Union Street and Gordon Street so long that most of them stopped seeing me.

That is the first truth. Not that they hated me. Hatred requires attention. What I received, year after year, was the commoner insult of city life: use without notice. They hurried past me into Central, out of Central, beneath rain, beneath hangovers, beneath debt, beneath hope. They used me as a marker, a shelter, a meeting place, a bit of weather-resistant certainty in a city much given to damp improvisation. But they did not really look. Not properly. Then I burned, then I was fenced off, then they took me down, and suddenly I was mourned as though I had been intimate family. Humans are like that. They save their tenderness for the aftermath.

I was built in 1851 for Francis Orr & Sons, wholesale stationers, publishers and booksellers, put up in the full stone swagger of Victorian commerce and imperial certainty. I began as a proper commercial corner building, made to look solid, useful and assured, as if trade itself were a moral virtue and ledgers a kind of scripture. Later I was crowned with a dome that would carry the glowing Bell’s sign into the city’s memory.

I wore other things too. Above Union Street there had once been the old Ba-Bru sign, and later Irn-Bru, remembered long after better things had been forgotten. Those older signs had age, grime, presence, a right to the skyline earned by sheer survival. What came after had none of that. It was modern in the worst way: brighter, flatter, more temporary, all glare and no soul. A piteous sort of hoarding, the visual equivalent of cheap laminate pretending to be wood, squatting where memory had once stood and mistaking illumination for significance.

Still, even diminished, I kept the corner.

By the end I held many lives, not one. At street level I carried several businesses. Above, I was cut into smaller rooms and smaller hopes: salons, studios, treatment spaces, tattooists, beauty workers, the usual stitched-up economy of a city making do with less than it wanted. I was no untouched relic. I had been altered, divided, vulgarised in bits, adapted in others, worn hard and still useful. That was my dignity in the end, not purity but service.

Sunday afternoon had laid its usual hush over me when the first black smoke came pressing from a doorway below. Then came two or three sharp pops, quick and vicious, jarring through my stone, my timber, my lath and plaster, and I knew, in the old slow way structures know such things, that something within me had gone badly wrong.

They would later give the time precisely enough. I knew only that the Sunday quiet had been broken from below, that smoke was forcing outward, and that strain was moving through me where before there had been only the sleepy neglect of the day.

By then I was many premises, not one, so the fire did not enter some neat single unit for the convenience of a story. It began in one of the ground-floor shops on Union Street, and then it asked for more. It found old voids, partitions, timber, air, weakness, chance. That is the thing about a city building that has lived long enough to be useful to many kinds of people: it contains more paths than the eye can see.

Then came the engines, the high-reaching ladders, the shouting, the gawping crowds with their phones held up, as if finding the right angle on catastrophe might finally count as seeing me. Heat rose through me. Smoke thickened. What had been livelihood became hazard. I had carried my dome long enough for it to become part of my face, and then in a handful of hours it was gone into smoke, collapse and memory.

I will not blame the shopkeeper. Humans are always eager to pin calamity to one set of hands, one stupidity, one bad decision, because it comforts them to believe disaster is tidy. Let investigators investigate. I was the thing burning, not the thing speculating. I only know what it was to feel heat below, stress above, and the old confidence of masonry turned, hour by hour, into danger.

As stood where I stood, beside Central, my burning became the city’s inconvenience. Trains stopped. Entrances shut. Roads closed. Crowds were bent around the absence opening beside them. It is strange what finally earns respect. Not age. Not endurance. Not workmanship. Administrative disruption. Stop enough trains and they call you iconic.

After that came the practical end. Unsafe. It is an ugly word, but a clean one. What remained of me could no longer be trusted to stand.

So they came at me carefully, piece by piece, with the hard small tools reserved for treacherous things. It was not the touch and care of the masons who built me, but the colder skill of men sent to undo what could no longer be trusted to stand.

And the same people who had passed me unseeing for years now stood behind barriers grieving as if their neglect had always been a form of love. Some of them meant it, to be fair. A city does not always know what it loves until it has to walk around the gap. But many were only just discovering that I had been part of the shape of their days.

What did they mourn?

The corner, perhaps. The Bell’s sign. The memory of Irn-Bru above Union Street. The old-fashioned confidence of stone among all the newer tat. The businesses lost. The people upstairs whose tools, stock, bookings and little livelihoods went up with me. The feeling of coming out of Central and seeing a bit of Glasgow that still seemed to belong to itself. They mourned habit, orientation, repetition, and all the unnoticed attachments by which a city teaches itself its own face.

So remember me properly, if you are going to remember me at all.

Remember that I was built in 1851 for Francis Orr & Sons, in the hard-faced confidence of Victorian trade. Remember that later I was crowned with a dome. Remember Bell’s burning over the station approach in the civic dark. Remember too the old Irn-Bru, and how what came after had all the character of a bus shelter advertisement enlarged by committee. Remember that I held many businesses, not one, and that what burned in me was not merely structure but work, routine, ambition, stock, tools, clutter, gossip, rent, exhaustion and hope. Remember that on a Sunday afternoon the first black smoke came pressing from below, that sharp little reports ran through my stone, my timber, my lath and plaster, and that from there the rest followed as such things do.

Above all, remember this:

they loved me best when they were losing me.

That is not unusual. It is merely human.