By the 1880s Glasgow was, by its own confident reckoning, the Second City of the Empire, and its municipal government — then among the most ambitious in the world, running everything from water to trams — had outgrown its old offices. A competition for new City Chambers on the east side of George Square was won by the Paisley-born, London-based architect William Young, and the foundation stone was laid in 1883 before a crowd of hundreds of thousands. Queen Victoria performed the inauguration in 1888.
Young’s design is an Italian Renaissance palazzo swollen to imperial scale, its front crowned by a sculptured pediment of Victoria enthroned among the nations. But the exterior, for all its swagger, is only the overture. Inside, the building sets out to overwhelm: a loggia vaulted with millions of Venetian mosaic tesserae, and above all the great staircases — the western one rising through three storeys of Carrara marble, alabaster and polished granite, routinely described as the finest marble staircase in western Europe. Film crews use it to stand in for the Vatican.
The banqueting hall runs the full width of the George Square front, lit by giant windows and lined with murals by painters of the Glasgow Boys generation depicting the city’s story — Mungo, the fair, the Clyde. The whole interior was a deliberate statement: that a city of shipyards and tenements could command craftsmanship as fine as any capital.
The Chambers have been the seat of Glasgow’s government ever since — Corporation, District, and now Glasgow City Council — and the building has watched everything George Square has staged, from the raising of the Red Flag in 1919 to royal visits, protests and celebrations. The Cenotaph before its doors, by Sir John Burnet, was unveiled in 1924.
Remarkably, it remains a working, welcoming building: free guided tours run on weekdays, taking visitors up the marble staircase and into the council chamber. For the price of nothing at all, it is the most opulent interior in Scotland that anyone can simply walk into.