Lauder’s, on the corner of Sauchiehall Street and Renfield Street, is one of the oldest surviving pubs in the heart of Glasgow — dating all the way back to 1836 — and it holds a special place in the story of the city’s theatreland. For this was the great theatre pub of Glasgow, the howff of the variety performers, and it stood on a corner with one of the most poignant nicknames in the city: ‘Poverty Corner’. Among the contenders for the oldest-pub crown that open this chapter, Lauder’s is a genuine near-miss, and its theatrical history gives it a character all its own.
An Old Sauchiehall Street Survivor
Lauder’s dates from 1836, when it opened as the Royal Lochnagar Vaults, and it takes its present name from Archibald Lauder, who took over the licence in 1871. It stands on one of the busiest corners in the city, where Sauchiehall Street meets Renfield Street, and has been a fixture of Glasgow drinking for the better part of two centuries — conveniently placed, in its heyday, among the cinemas, dance halls and theatres that made this the entertainment heart of the city. Few pubs in the centre can claim a longer continuous history, and fewer still such a distinctive one.
Poverty Corner
Lauder’s corner earned its melancholy nickname from the trade that gathered there. The north-west point where Sauchiehall Street meets Renfield Street was known as ‘Poverty Corner’ because it was there that the out-of-work comics, ventriloquists, acrobats, singers and shadowgraph artists of the variety circuit congregated, in the hope of finding an agent, a booking or a night’s work. In the great age of music hall and variety, when a performer was only ever a few weeks from unemployment, the pavement outside Lauder’s was the informal labour exchange of Glasgow show business — a place of anxious optimism, and of the camaraderie of a precarious profession. It is one of the most evocative corners in the whole city.
The Whisky and the Warren
In its Victorian heyday Lauder’s was a warren of a place, reputedly running to seven separate bars — including a secret one upstairs — with a barber’s shop in the basement where a customer could get a haircut for a penny. Archibald Lauder was a whisky man of ambition as well as a publican: his blended whisky, Lauder’s Royal Northern Cream, was exported around the world, and the wholesale side of that business long outlived his tenure of the bar itself. For much of the twentieth century the pub belonged to the Tennent Caledonian group, and in a nice flourish of Glasgow enterprise it made the newspapers in 1970 for installing refrigerated milk dispensers and serving a pinta alongside the usual pints — the sort of cheerful gimmick a pub two lanes from a pantomime stage could carry off with a straight face. Much altered over the years — the old public bar is now a smart lounge — it remains a deceptively large and enduringly popular room, and the handiest good pub in the city for anyone bound for the Pavilion.
The Pavilion’s Pub
The theatrical connection was no accident of geography. Lauder’s sits just a lane’s breadth from the stage door of the Pavilion Theatre, and it became, and remains, the pantomime pub of the Pavilion — the place where performers and audiences alike gather before and after the show. Its back room was once hung with theatrical photographs, a small gallery of the Glasgow variety greats who drank there. The pub has been much altered from those days — the old public bar became a smart lounge — but its identity as the drinking heart of Sauchiehall Street’s theatreland has never faded. Lauder’s earns its place in this chapter as the great theatre pub of Glasgow, a Georgian survivor woven into the city’s long love affair with variety, music hall and pantomime.