George Square was laid out in 1781 on the edge of the growing Georgian town and named for the reigning king — though no statue of George III ever materialised. Instead the square filled through the nineteenth century with an extraordinary open-air pantheon: Sir Walter Scott on his eighty-foot column at the centre (raised in 1837, years before Edinburgh’s monument), Robert Burns, James Watt, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on horseback, generals Moore and Campbell, prime ministers Peel and Gladstone, and Glasgow’s own David Livingstone and Thomas Graham — a dozen statues in all.
As the city’s government settled on its eastern side with the opening of the City Chambers in 1888, the square became Glasgow’s civic stage. Everything has happened here: exhibitions and coronation celebrations, war memorials and remembrance at Burnet’s Cenotaph of 1924 — and, most famously, the ‘Battle of George Square’ of 31 January 1919, when a massed strike rally for the forty-hour week ended in baton charges, the raising of the Red Flag, and troops and tanks on the streets of a British city.
It has been remodelled repeatedly — gardens, parade ground, car park, the much-mocked red tarmac of recent decades — and a 2013 redesign competition was cancelled on the day of the result after public outcry. The lesson was learned: the current transformation, part of the city centre’s £120 million Avenues programme, followed years of genuine consultation.
That transformation is happening now. The square closed behind hoardings in 2025 for a £20 million rebuild — new stone throughout, raised lawns, gardens, a water feature and an events space — due for completion in the summer of 2026, with the surrounding streets following into 2027. The eleven bronze statues were lifted away for specialist restoration and return from 2027, accompanied by new interpretation that tells their full stories, including several figures’ links to the Atlantic slave trade; Scott’s column and the Cenotaph are being restored in place.
A square that has been Glasgow’s mirror for two and a half centuries is, at the time of writing, a building site with its statues away being mended — which is somehow entirely in character. When it reopens, it will do what it has always done: hold whatever the city brings to it.