The Old Ship Bank stands on the corner of Saltmarket and Bridgegate, one of the most historically charged junctions in old Glasgow — and its name is no invention. This was the site of the Glasgow Ship Bank, the city’s very first bank, founded in 1750 by a group of its leading Tobacco Lords. A pub has occupied the ground floor since 1845, and the building’s landmark form — crowned by a corner tower and cupola — makes it one of the more prominent survivors of the merchant city at the historic heart of Glasgow.
Glasgow’s First Bank
The Ship Bank’s story belongs to the tobacco era this site describes in its Trade chapter. Founded in 1750 by Andrew Buchanan of Drumpellier and other ‘Virginia Dons’ — the merchant princes who controlled half of Britain’s tobacco — it was Glasgow’s first bank, born of the enormous wealth flowing up the Clyde from the Atlantic trade. Its most celebrated figure was Robert Carrick, who arrived as a trainee in 1752, became cashier in 1775, and was so famously frugal that he lived in a small attic room of the building to save expense, even as he made himself one of the richest men in Scotland. The bank eventually moved to grander premises, merged in 1836, and by 1843 the Ship Bank name had vanished into what became the Union Bank of Scotland.
The Cashier in the Attic
The bank’s most remarkable figure was Robert Carrick, who arrived as a trainee in 1752 — his place secured through his father’s friendship with Andrew Buchanan — and rose to become its cashier, and effectively its master, in 1775. Carrick was famously, almost pathologically frugal: though he came to own the entire building and made himself one of the richest men in Scotland, he lived in a small attic room on the premises to spare himself the expense of a house. It was a very Glasgow kind of fortune, built penny by counted penny above the counting-house floor. The bank prospered, decanting some of its functions in 1776 to the old Shawfield mansion on Glassford Street; it merged in 1836 to become the Glasgow and Ship Bank, and by 1843 the ancient name had dissolved entirely into the Union Bank of Scotland — itself later swallowed by the Bank of Scotland — so that only the pub on the corner now keeps the Ship Bank’s memory alive.
The Pub on the Ground Floor
Once the bank had gone, the building was converted to shops and dwellings, and in 1845 a pub opened on the ground floor — taking, fittingly, the name of the great institution that had made the corner famous. The premises were handsomely rebuilt in 1904 by the building’s owner, Bernard McAnulty, and it was the addition of the corner tower and cupola in that remodelling that gave the Old Ship Bank Tavern its landmark silhouette. The pub sat amid the bustle of the Saltmarket and Bridgegate — hard by Paddy’s Market and beneath the railway viaducts that carried trains towards St Enoch — in one of the oldest and most characterful quarters of the city.
A Monument to the Merchant City
The Old Ship Bank earns its place in this chapter as the pub where Glasgow’s pub history and its commercial history stand on the same corner. Few bars anywhere occupy a site of such significance — the birthplace of Glasgow banking, the foundation stone of the financial machinery that turned tobacco and sugar money into a global city. To drink at the Old Ship Bank is to stand where the Tobacco Lords first counted their fortunes, in a building that has watched the Saltmarket change around it for the better part of three centuries.
It is a reminder, too, of how completely the pub has become the keeper of Glasgow’s memory: a Georgian bank, a Victorian tavern, an Edwardian landmark and a modern bar, all on one Saltmarket corner — the whole layered history of the merchant city, still open for a pint.