Queen’s Cross Church

Where Garscube Road meets Maryhill Road, at the junction known as Queen’s Cross, stands a squat red sandstone church with a tapering tower. It looks at first like many other Glasgow churches of its time, but it is unique: Queen’s Cross Church is the only church designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh that was ever built. Opened in 1899, it served its congregation for more than seventy years and is now the headquarters of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society, known to visitors as Mackintosh Queen’s Cross.

A Free Church commission

In 1896 the Free Church congregation of St Matthew’s commissioned a new church and hall from the Glasgow architects Honeyman & Keppie for a site in the fast-growing district of Maryhill. The job was given to Mackintosh, then still an assistant in the practice, who had just completed his competition design for the Glasgow School of Art. As an assistant he could not be publicly credited, and the church committee’s minutes name John Keppie, but the design is recognised as Mackintosh’s.

The foundation stone was laid on 23 June 1898, and the church opened for worship on 10 September 1899, with room for a congregation of 820. The records of the Dictionary of Scottish Architects give its cost as £7,100.

An awkward corner

The site was difficult: a tight corner plot hemmed in by tenements and a large warehouse. Mackintosh responded with a compact plan and a single strong landmark, the tower on the south-west corner. It was modelled on the medieval tower of All Saints Church at Merriott in Somerset, which he had sketched in 1895, and its tapering, buttressed shape anchors the building to the junction.

The style is Gothic, as a church committee of the 1890s would have expected, but the details are his own. The windows carry flowing tracery with plant forms, the east porch has distinctly Art Nouveau carving, and a flying buttress crosses the aisle on the south side. The congregation’s plain Presbyterian tastes left little room for ornament, and Mackintosh made the most of what was allowed.

Inside the church

The interior is a single broad space under a barrel-vaulted timber roof, spanned by rolled steel tie beams, with galleries cantilevered out on the east and south-west sides. Its ceiling has been compared with Richard Norman Shaw’s Holy Trinity Church in Hammersmith. The light, the carved woodwork and the stained glass do the work that richer decoration did elsewhere. The pulpit is carved with a bird sheltering young plant shoots, perhaps an echo of the parable of the sower, and one window carries a blue heart motif that has become one of the most admired details in the building. Later changes have been modest: in 1960 Gordon Webster designed coloured glass for three lights of the great west window, and the beam across the chancel arch, removed in the 1950s, was reconstructed in 1990 from old photographs.

Thomas Howarth, Mackintosh’s first biographer, wrote that the church had "a warmth and charm conspicuously absent from many churches of the period".

Decline and rescue

Through the Presbyterian church unions of the early twentieth century the congregation passed into the Church of Scotland in 1929. As the population of the surrounding streets fell after the Second World War, the church became harder to sustain, and in 1976 the congregation was united with Ruchill Church, whose hall, also designed by Mackintosh and completed in 1899, stands nearby. For a time the church’s future was far from certain, and in the 1960s and 1970s, alongside repairs, a scheme was even drawn up to take the building down and re-erect it on another site.

The building was saved by the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society, founded in 1973 to promote awareness of his work. In 1977 the Society took a lease on the church and made it its headquarters. It later bought the building with money given by Thomas Howarth: Historic Environment Scotland dates his gift to 1994, while the Society dates its purchase to 1999. The church is listed at Category A.

Visiting Mackintosh Queen’s Cross

Today the church is a visitor attraction, a venue for concerts, talks and weddings, and a base for the Society’s learning programmes. The adjoining hall has a shop and tearoom, with replicas of the chairs Mackintosh designed for the Willow Tea Rooms. In 2026 the church opens to visitors on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with an admission charge for adults, and it also takes part in Glasgow’s Doors Open Days.

With Scotland Street School closed for refurbishment, Queen’s Cross is one of the few places in the city where visitors can walk through an interior designed by Mackintosh in its original building. It is a natural stop on any tour of Mackintosh’s Glasgow buildings, alongside the reconstructed rooms of the Mackintosh House in the West End.

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