Tucked down a quiet Merchant City side street that determined drinkers make the effort to find, Babbity Bowster is one of Glasgow’s most cherished institutions — a pub, restaurant and small hotel in a Georgian townhouse of real architectural pedigree, and the beating heart of the city’s traditional-music scene. Named for an old Scots dance, it has been, since it opened in 1985, a place where the building’s eighteenth-century elegance and the living tradition of Scottish folk music meet.
A Robert Adam Townhouse
The building is a genuine survival of the tobacco-lord city. Originally a merchant’s townhouse built in the 1790s and attributed to the great architect Robert Adam, it had fallen on the hardest of times — by the early 1980s it was, remarkably, a derelict banana warehouse with no roof. It was saved from demolition in 1983, and the Romanesque columns at its front still announce its Georgian roots to Blackfriars Street. Its rescue is a small triumph of the Merchant City’s wider revival, the story this site tells of a quarter that fell derelict with the old economy and was brought back to life.
Fraser Laurie’s Vision
Babbity’s owes its character to one man’s passion. Fraser Laurie, who had managed the Tron Bar on the High Street and was a devoted patron of traditional music, bought the derelict townhouse in the early 1980s, lovingly refurbished it, and opened its doors in October 1985. His deep love of the music shaped everything: from the very first day the pub was open, it hosted a session. The Mullen family have more recently taken on the pub, aiming to secure its standing as one of Glasgow’s finest, but Laurie’s founding spirit — a landlord who loved the music and welcomed the players — remains its animating idea.
A Room for Everything
Babbity’s is more than a session bar: it is a pub, a restaurant and a small hotel, and one of the most complete Glasgow institutions of its kind. Its kitchen mixes hearty Scottish cooking — the Cullen skink is a fixture — with a genuine French accent inherited from its long association with French chefs and staff, and its walled beer garden, warmed by braziers, is one of the Merchant City’s favourite retreats. Upstairs, a handful of bedrooms make it a rare thing in the modern city centre, a proper coaching-inn-style hotel above a working pub. That the whole enterprise grew out of the rescue of a roofless, derelict Georgian townhouse — saved from demolition in 1983 and painstakingly brought back to life — makes it a small emblem of the wider revival of the Merchant City around it.
The Oldest Session in the City
Babbity’s claim to a unique place in this chapter is musical. Every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon, musicians trickle in and gather around a table by the fireplace — fiddles, flutes, guitars, accordions, whistles, concertinas, pipes, bodhrán, even hammered dulcimers — and play Irish and Scottish dance tunes almost continuously for three hours and more. When the older Friday sessions at the nearby Victoria Bar ended in 2007, Babbity’s became the oldest traditional-music session in Glasgow, running unbroken since that opening day in 1985. Players who were there at the very first session play there still, and visiting musicians return across decades to find the same warm, welcoming table.
The session has, in Laurie’s words, formed friendships and grown roots — a core of players who have kept the music alive for forty years in one corner of the Merchant City. Babbity Bowster is where Glasgow’s living folk tradition and its Georgian architectural heritage occupy the same beautiful room, and it is one of the essential pubs of the city for anyone who cares about either.