Lament to loss of city heritage as day breaks of fire destruction

Jane Quinn remembers only too well travelling down Renfield Street to be greeted by the sight of Union Corner. The elegant Victorian building buttressing Central Station was a beautiful vision in its own right, but what stuck in the memory most of all was the signage above it.

“You used to come down on the bus and you’d always see the Irn Bru sign, and you’d know that you’d arrived in town,” the 67 year-old recalled. “That big dome with the Bell’s advert has totally gone as well. That was part of Glasgow, that was it. It’s horrible and frightening what’s happened.”

Like so many in the city, Ms Quinn, from the Townhead area, could only look on in horror overnight as news reports and social media posts documented the rapidly escalating blaze that, at one point, threatened to consume the historic Central Station.

The tireless work of Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) crews prevented such a disaster, but the pain of knowing that another precious part of the historic cityscape has been all but destroyed was keenly felt in the city. “It’s such a historic building, it’s a shame, such a shame,” said Ms Quinn, one of hundreds of people who gathered at police cordons around the scene to glimpse the extensive damage. “I don’t think they’ll be able to rebuild it, it’s gone.”

The devastated remains of a once-grand building, much of its masonry strewn across the main thoroughfare of Union Street, is testament to the power of the fire. It started in a vape shop at around 3.45pm on Sunday, but went on to develop rapidly throughout that evening.

As darkness fell on the city, near-apocalyptic images and video footage of the building aflame made headlines the world over. At the height of the fire, around 60 firefighters and 18 appliances were on the scene, fighting to bring it under control.

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Mercifully, by the early hours of Monday, they had done so. The flames that had threatened to engulf the rail station were quelled, leaving only smoke billowing out through the battered facade. One image captured two SFRS crew catching a moment’s rest as they sat on the plinth Kenny Hunter’s bronze Citizen Firefighter statue on Gordon Street.

As night gave way to morning rush hour, a time when the rail station is ordinarily abuzz with commuters arriving in the city centre for the start of their working week, the surrounding streets were deserted, save for the emergency services.

Three SFRS high-reach appliances could be seen training powerful jets of water on the smouldering ruins of the four-storey building at the corner of Union Street and Gordon Street, with Network Rail teams also on site.

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Even though the location of the fire was barely 100 metres away from a Police Scotland cordon set up at nearby Mitchell Street, impenetrable palls of grey smoke obscured much of the view at street level, and an acrid chemical stench hung in the air across the city centre.

Among those looking on, visibly upset, was Tony Veitch. Like so many people in the city, he felt a mixture of disbelief and devastation at seeing such an iconic part of the city centre being gutted by fire.

“When my daughter sent me a video of the fire at about 8pm last night, I thought it was AI at first, I couldn’t really believe it,” he said. “But when I realised it was real, I was devastated.”

The 53-year-old, originally from Newcastle, has lived in Glasgow for the past 20 years, and said he would find it difficult to picture the streetscape without the Union Corner building, with pre-dates Central Station itself and was designed by architect James Brown of the firm, Brown & Carrick.

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“I have a lot of happy memories of this part of Glasgow,” he said. “It’s where you’d wait at the taxi rank when you’d been out for a drink, and I passed by that building on numerous trips to get the train to Newcastle. I’ve got lots of fond memories and it’s just devastating to see.”

Also watching the scene unfold was John Fraser, 63. He, like so many other people in the city, has strong memories of passing by the building en route to Central Station. Indeed, he was due to travel by train on holiday to Blackpool, and after deciding to come by to see what was lost to the fire, he was left shocked at the extent of the damage.

“It’s a lot worse than I thought it would have been,” he said. “I think it’ll cost millions of pounds to clear up and a lot of businesses are going to lose millions of pounds as well.”

“It’s a building that dates back to the 1850s and Glasgow’s always had a great history of old buildings, especially all the way from the city centre up to the Trongate. It’s really sad.”

For now, Union Corner will have to live on via such memories, as well as the countless photographs, sketches, and paintings in which it has been captured over the years. It is too early to know what, if anything, can be salvaged from the fire.