When the Earl of Rosebery opened the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green in January 1898, he called it ‘a palace of pleasure and imagination’ and declared it open to the people for ever. It was an extraordinary thing to give the East End — then among the most crowded and unhealthy districts in Britain — not a mission hall or a soup kitchen but a palace of its own: galleries, a reading room, and, glowing behind, a great glasshouse of tropical green. Over the following century it became something rarer still: the museum of ordinary Glasgow, the one museum a whole city has learned to call ‘ours’.
This page tells its story: the palace built for the working East End, the winter garden behind it, the people’s history it came to hold, its most beloved treasures, the curator who saved it, and the long, troubled restoration on which its future now depends.
A palace for the East End
By the end of the nineteenth century the East End of Glasgow was a byword for overcrowding, poverty and ill health, its people packed into the tenements around the old Green with little in the way of open space, culture or beauty in their lives. The People’s Palace was the city’s answer — and a remarkably generous one. Opened on 22 January 1898 as Glasgow’s first purpose-built museum, and designed by the city engineer Alexander Beith McDonald, it was conceived not as charity handed down but as a cultural centre owned by and made for the ordinary people of the district: a reading room and galleries where working families could find recreation and self-improvement, all housed in a handsome red-sandstone building at the heart of their own common ground. The name said everything. This was to be a palace, and it was to be the people’s.
The Winter Gardens
Behind the palace spreads its glory: the Winter Gardens, a vast Victorian glasshouse of iron and glass filled with palms and tropical planting, whose great curved roof is fondly said to echo the upturned hull of Nelson’s flagship, the Victory. For generations of Glaswegians it was a warm, green refuge from a grey and smoky city — a place to walk among exotic leaves on a winter afternoon, to hear a band, to court, or simply to sit in the light. That the glasshouse and the museum were built together, pleasure and instruction under one roof, was the whole point of the People’s Palace: it treated the working people of the East End as citizens deserving of delight as well as education.
The museum of ordinary Glasgow
Over the twentieth century the People’s Palace grew into the thing it is most loved for: the museum of Glasgow’s own social history, the story of the city told from below. Where other museums gathered fine art and antiquities, this one gathered the evidence of ordinary lives — and treated them as no less worthy of a palace. Its displays recreate life in a single-end, the one-room tenement home in which whole families lived; they conjure wash day at the steamie, the dancing at the Barrowland, the summer exodus ‘doon the watter’ on the Clyde steamers, and the work, war, football, faith and patter that made up a Glasgow life. It is a museum in which the people of the city can walk in and find not kings and battles but themselves, their parents and their grandparents — the reason it inspires an affection quite unlike any other institution in Glasgow.
Treasures of the people
Its collection matches its spirit. The rooms hold the desk of the socialist teacher John MacLean, a relic of the years of Red Clydeside when Glasgow’s working class shook the British state; and around the top-floor gallery runs Ken Currie’s cycle of History Paintings, eight great murals commissioned in 1987 to mark two hundred years since the massacre of the Calton weavers, telling the story of Glasgow labour in sombre, monumental colour. But the single most beloved object in the building is neither solemn nor grand: it is a pair of enormous banana-shaped boots, worn on stage by the comedian Billy Connolly, and cherished by the people of Glasgow exactly as they cherish the man — proof that a people’s museum can hold a city’s laughter as well as its struggles.
The woman who saved it
The People’s Palace as we know it owes an incalculable debt to one person. In the 1970s, when the building was threatened with closure and its collections dispersal, the young social-history curator Elspeth King fought to save it, and then spent years transforming it into a radical, pioneering museum of the people that influenced the whole practice of social history in Scotland and beyond. She gathered the ordinary objects others thought beneath a museum, told the stories of the poor and the political, and made the Palace a place of real civic passion. King died in the autumn of 2025, mourned as one of the towering figures of the Scottish museum world and as the Palace’s tireless champion — a campaigner for it to the very end. Much of what visitors love about the building is, in truth, her creation.
Closure & restoration
The building’s recent history has been hard. The Winter Gardens were closed at the start of 2019 after the glasshouse was judged structurally unsafe, the sealant of its glazing having reached the end of its life; the rare plants were removed, and the great glasshouse fell dark. After further partial closures and the lost years of the pandemic, the museum itself closed in April 2024 for a comprehensive restoration of palace and gardens together, at an expected cost of £35.9 million, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Glasgow City Council and shaped by community consultation.
The project has not run smoothly. Detailed surveys of the A-listed building revealed the scale of the work required, and in early 2026 Glasgow Life confirmed that the hoped-for reopening in 2027 would not be met, with no firm new date yet set; a substantial funding shortfall remained to be closed, and a strip-out of the interior and the Winter Gardens beds was under way. Meanwhile the beloved Doulton Fountain outside the doors — the largest terracotta fountain in the world, restored only two decades ago — was reported to have suffered damage from vandalism while the site stood empty. As ever in its history, the Palace’s fiercely loyal friends have kept up the pressure, campaigning for the money, the timetable and the care its future demands.
The people’s museum
No building in Glasgow is loved more intensely for its size, which is precisely why its closure has been felt so keenly and its return is so longed for. The People’s Palace is not the grandest of the city’s museums, nor the richest in treasures; the Burrell has finer art, and Kelvingrove draws far greater crowds. What it has is something neither of those can claim: it is the museum that a whole city has taken to its heart as its own, the place where Glasgow keeps the memory of how its ordinary people lived and worked and laughed. When at last it reopens — free to enter, as it has always been — it will be welcomed back not as a public amenity but as something closer to family.
At a glance
| Feature | What it is |
|---|---|
| Opened | 22 January 1898, by the Earl of Rosebery — Glasgow’s first purpose-built museum |
| The Winter Gardens | A great Victorian glasshouse behind the palace, said to echo Nelson’s Victory |
| Billy Connolly’s banana boots | The museum’s single most beloved object |
| Ken Currie’s murals | An eight-part cycle of 1987 on Glasgow’s labour history |
| John MacLean’s desk | A relic of Red Clydeside |
| Status | Closed since April 2024 for a £35.9m restoration; reopening date awaited |
Frequently asked questions
What is the People’s Palace?
It is Glasgow’s social history museum, standing at the heart of Glasgow Green in the East End. Opened in 1898, it tells the story of the city’s ordinary people — how they lived, worked and played — and behind it stands the great glasshouse of the Winter Gardens.
Is the People’s Palace open at the moment?
No. The People’s Palace has been closed since April 2024 for a major restoration of both the museum and the Winter Gardens, and the Winter Gardens themselves have been closed since 2019. It is best to check with Glasgow Life for the latest position before planning a visit.
When will the People’s Palace reopen?
No firm date has been set. The restoration was expected to cost £35.9 million and to reopen the building around 2027, but in early 2026 Glasgow Life confirmed that this date would be missed following detailed surveys, and a revised timetable is awaited. It is expected to remain free to enter when it reopens.
When did the People’s Palace open, and who opened it?
It opened on 22 January 1898 and was opened by the Earl of Rosebery, the former prime minister, who described it as ‘a palace of pleasure and imagination’. It was Glasgow’s first purpose-built museum.
What can you see at the People’s Palace?
Its displays cover Glasgow’s social history — life in a single-end tenement, the steamie, the Barrowland dancing and trips ‘doon the watter’ — along with treasures such as Billy Connolly’s banana boots, Ken Currie’s murals of labour history, and relics of Red Clydeside.
What are the Winter Gardens?
They are the large Victorian glasshouse attached to the back of the People’s Palace, historically filled with palms and tropical plants and used as a warm public garden and events space. Its curved glass roof is said to echo the upturned hull of Nelson’s flagship, the Victory.
Why is it called the People’s Palace?
Because it was built for the ordinary people of Glasgow’s East End — a ‘palace’ of culture and recreation given to a poor and overcrowded district, rather than to the wealthy. The name has proved fitting, for it became the museum of the city’s own working people.