Buchanan Street was laid out in 1777 on ground feued by Andrew Buchanan, a tobacco lord ruined by the American war — so that Glasgow’s most prosperous street is named for a bankrupt. Running uphill from the river’s din towards what became the Victorian commercial city, it established itself through the nineteenth century as the street where Glasgow shopped in its best clothes.
Its oldest treasure came early: the Argyll Arcade of 1827, Scotland’s first covered shopping arcade, an L-shaped passage under a glazed hammerbeam roof that cuts the corner to Argyle Street and has been filled with jewellers for generations — couples still make the walk to it when the question has been asked. At the street’s midpoint the former St George’s Tron church closes the vista up Nelson Mandela Place; at its foot, Princes Square’s 1841 courtyard was roofed in 1988 into the most handsome shopping gallery in the city, crowned by its art-nouveau peacock.
Up Mitchell Lane, easy to miss, stands something greater: the former Glasgow Herald building of 1895, the first major work of the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh, its corner tower now ‘The Lighthouse’, reborn in 1999 as Scotland’s centre for design and architecture. The helical climb of its water tower gives one of the best hidden views in Glasgow.
The street’s modern character was set in 1978, when it was pedestrianised — among the first and most successful such schemes in Britain — and sealed by the ‘Style Mile’ decades that followed: Frasers at one end, Buchanan Galleries and the Royal Concert Hall steps at the other, with Donald Dewar’s statue looking down the slope and the city’s buskers providing the soundtrack. With Argyle Street and Sauchiehall Street it forms the famous ‘Golden Z’ of Glasgow retail, and it is the stroke of the Z that never lost its shine.
Glasgow being Glasgow, the street’s best-loved feature is free: on a Saturday afternoon, between the pipers and the soul singers and the crowd, Buchanan Street is simply the city’s living room.