Step through the door of the Laurieston Bar, near Bridge Street subway on the south side, and you step firmly back into the 1960s. Where the rest of this chapter celebrates Victorian palaces and eighteenth-century inns, the Laurieston is something rarer and more surprising: a near-complete, lovingly unaltered 1960s pub interior, so perfectly of its era that it has been made a listed building precisely for its ordinariness. It is, in the words of the conservationist who championed it, an unexpected gem — and proof that heritage need not mean grand.
A 1960s Survival
The Laurieston is a remarkable survival of a moment most pubs long ago remodelled away. Its distinctive black-and-white mosaic tiling wraps a truncated corner at the end of a tenement row; inside, the public bar has a timber-boarded, elongated oval island counter topped with Formica, a well-preserved suspended canopy with hidden lights, a gantry lit by concealed neon, small fixed red Formica tables, red vinyl armchairs — and, gloriously, the old McGee’s hot pie heater still on the counter. The public bar, as one admirer wrote, simply sings with authenticity: every detail is exactly as it should be.
Why It Survived
The reason the Laurieston kept its 1960s character is the reason so many great pubs lost theirs: continuity of ownership. The pub stayed in the same family from the late 1930s through to the 1970s, and since 1982 has been in the hands of John and James Clancy, with John’s son Joseph working the bar — three generations who saw no reason to change what worked. The island bar spans both the public bar and the lounge, which hosts the occasional musical event. It was following a conservationist’s visit in 2007 that the pub was formally recognised, becoming a Category C listed building in acknowledgement of its 1960s interior.
A Working Local, Not a Relic
For all that it is a listed period piece, the Laurieston is no museum — it is a busy, beloved neighbourhood local with a wonderfully mixed crowd, and one of the friendliest rooms in the city. It is famous for its Guinness, kept and poured with real care; it has held a place in CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide, no small feat for a pub that has changed so little; and it remains resolutely, endearingly cash-only, a small act of defiance in a card-tapping age. A stone’s throw from Bridge Street subway, it draws drinkers from across the south side and beyond who come as much for the company and the time-warp atmosphere as for the affordable pint. It is, in the fullest sense, a pub that is about people — which is exactly the argument its listing was meant to make.
A Star of Screen
The Laurieston’s perfect period feel has made it a favourite of film and television location scouts, and it has taken starring roles in many productions needing an authentic slice of mid-century Glasgow. But its real importance is the argument its listing makes: that celebrated buildings should not only be about grandiose designs and expensive materials — that a working-class pub, used every day and loved by its community, is exactly the kind of building worth saving. The Laurieston matters, as its champion put it, because buildings must be about people; without them they are meaningless, and the Laurieston is most definitely about people.
It earns its place in this chapter as the counterweight to the palace pubs — a reminder that Glasgow’s pub heritage did not stop in 1900, and that the humblest interiors can be the most precious precisely because they are the first to be swept away. Almost every other pub of its vintage has been modernised beyond recognition; the Laurieston, gloriously, has not.