Tucked away behind the jewellery shops of the Argyll Arcade, up a lane most passers-by never notice, Sloans makes a claim all its own: not the oldest pub, but the oldest bar and restaurant in Glasgow, established in 1797. What began as a humble coffee house grew, over more than two centuries, into one of the most opulent and best-loved traditional venues in the city — a listed building of mahogany, stained glass and a ballroom, still busy every night, and still, on Fridays, hosting a ceilidh.
From Coffee House to Institution
Sloans started life in 1797 as a coffee house in Morrison’s Court, off Argyle Street, named for Bailie John Morrison. Its modern identity came at the turn of the twentieth century, when David Sloan bought the venue — then known as the Arcade Café — and gave it his name and its grandeur. Sloan transformed it into the Sloans Arcade Café: a sprawling establishment of a lounge bar, several dining rooms, a cocktail bar and, crowning it all, a magnificent Grand Ballroom. It became a Glasgow institution of the Edwardian and interwar city, a place for celebrations and society dinners in the heart of the shopping district.
The Cobbled Courtyard
Sloans’ cobbled courtyard, now a fairy-lit beer garden, was once a working coaching yard with a livelier past than its calm today suggests. Twice a week a stagecoach left the court bound for Edinburgh — a journey of five hours, the fare nine shillings, each passenger allowed a single canvas travelling bag — and the same yard was the scene of many a cock-fighting contest, the blood-sport of the eighteenth-century city. When David Sloan remade the Arcade Café at the turn of the twentieth century, he filled it with opulence to match its new name: not only the lounge bar, dining rooms and cocktail bar but an aquarium, and the Grand Ballroom that remains the jewel of the building. A charming local tradition grew up around it — couples would choose an engagement ring in the Argyll Arcade below, then climb the stairs to Sloans to hold the engagement party, and later the wedding reception, in the ballroom.
A Listed Treasure
The building is now Grade A listed, and deserves it. Sloans retains a remarkable wealth of original features: a ceramic-tiled entrance, a grand mahogany staircase, acid-etched glass, parquet floors, an old wooden snug and antique fittings throughout — a near-complete survival of a high-Victorian and Edwardian interior of the finest quality. The jewel remains the Grand Ballroom, with its vaulted ceiling, period marble fireplace and intricate stained-glass windows, still hired for weddings and events. To step into Sloans is to step into the pleasure-architecture of the Second City at its most confident.
Survival and Revival
Sloans has not had an untroubled two centuries — it passed through the hands of brewery chains, and in the mid-2000s a spell as a themed bar called Bastille that quickly failed. But a major renovation in 2006 restored many of the original features and set the venue on its current, thriving course, its fairy-lit courtyard now one of the city centre’s favourite beer gardens. The near-loss and recovery is the familiar Glasgow pattern this site records so often: a great building saved, at the last, by people who understood what they had.
The Friday Ceilidh
What keeps Sloans more than a beautiful building is its life. It is famous for its food — a legendary macaroni cheese above all — for pub quizzes and film nights and, most of all, for the Famous Friday Night Ceilidh, a weekly session of traditional Scottish dancing that fills the old ballroom with the most traditional entertainment imaginable. In a city centre of chain bars, Sloans offers something genuinely rooted: the oldest bar-restaurant in Glasgow, doing on a Friday night in the 2020s very much what it was built to do a century ago.