Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Built as the Glasgow International Concert Hall, the Royal Concert Hall is one of the largest halls in the United Kingdom. It was granted Royal status shortly before it was officially opened on 5 October 1990 at a gala performance attended by Anne, Princess Royal. It is the replacement for the acclaimed St. Andrew's Hall, adjacent to the Mitchell Library, which had been destroyed by fire in 1962 (the remains of St Andrew's Hall was later incorporated into the 1970s extension of the Mitchell Library), whilst the new Concert Hall was promoted and constructed in time for the city being recognised in the 1980s as the European City of Culture. The Concert Hall stands at the junction of Buchanan…

The building was designed by modernist architect Sir Leslie Martin of South Bank, London, with some of the conceptual ideas for the building dating as far back as the mid 1960s. Some of the basic thinking behind the scheme had been directly influenced by the Bruce Report, which had proposed dividing the city centre up into distinct zones for various types of activity once slum housing had been cleared. In 1964, Glasgow Corporation had already envisioned a new civic square which would be created following the planned closure and demolition of Buchanan Street railway station (which by this time had been decided as part of the Beeching Cuts). The new square would effectively be a superblock…