Glasgow’s pubs are among the oldest businesses in the city, and many of them are working museums of its history. Several claim to be the oldest. The Old College Bar on the High Street claimed a fabric dating to 1515 until it was demolished in 2021. The Scotia Bar claims 1792, Sloans traces its origins to a coffee house of 1797, and the Saracen Head in the Gallowgate carries a name that goes back to 1755; the original inn later welcomed Samuel Johnson and James Boswell.

The great age of the Glasgow pub came in the late Victorian and Edwardian years, when publicans competed with ever more lavish interiors. The Horse Shoe Bar, dating from 1884, has the longest continuous bar counter in Britain at 104 feet 3 inches. The Old Toll Bar of 1893 in Kinning Park, Tennent’s Bar on Byres Road and the State Bar of 1902 preserve some of the finest pub interiors in the city, and MacSorley’s, opened in 1899, is still a family-run music pub.

Pubs have also been centres of music, politics and community. The Clutha by the river has been a live music institution for decades, and rebuilt itself after the helicopter tragedy of 2013. Babbity Bowster, in a Georgian townhouse attributed to Robert Adam, hosts the oldest traditional music session in the city, the Pot Still has become one of the great whisky bars of the world, and Lauder’s on Sauchiehall Street was once where out-of-work variety performers gathered in hope of a booking.

Glasgow was also a battleground for temperance. Under the Temperance (Scotland) Act 1913, districts could vote to go dry, and the first of the polls was held in Glasgow on 2 November 1920. That year a majority voted for ‘no licence’ in eleven Glasgow wards, though the rules on turnout meant that only four actually went dry. The articles below cover more than twenty pubs, from the Ben Nevis and Islay Inn in Finnieston to Rab Ha’s in the Merchant City.

Every article in this chapter: