St Andrew’s in the Square was built to make a statement, and has never stopped making it: begun in 1739 east of the Saltmarket, it was the parish church of Glasgow’s rising merchant oligarchy — the tobacco lords of this site’s Trade pages — and they instructed their builders, in effect, to better London. The model was Gibbs’s St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square; the Glasgow answer, by master of works Allan Dreghorn and master mason Mungo Naismith, matched its portico-and-steeple grandeur and dressed the interior in a rococo plasterwork splendour that still startles: often called the finest classical church in Scotland, and the merchants’ wealth made visible to God and neighbours alike.
Its seventeen-year construction bred the city’s favourite mason story: the great six-column Roman portico — among the earliest and boldest in Britain — drew doubters who swore its wide stone entablature must fall, so Naismith, tradition says, slept a night beneath it as the centring came down, staking his life on his stonework. It has now held for the better part of three centuries above him; the anecdote is told as tradition, the confidence it records as fact.
The church seeded Glasgow’s first residential square — St Andrew’s Square, laid out around it in the later eighteenth century as a fashionable address whose Georgian survivors still frame the church — and its pews held the Virginia aristocracy at prayer, scarlet cloaks in the family lofts, until fashion drifted west and the district down; through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the great church served an increasingly poor East End parish, its splendour weathering the same history as the streets around it, until the dwindling congregation worshipped there for the last time in 1993.
Rescue matched the building’s dignity: a trust restoration in the 1990s returned the fabric and its plasterwork to glory and gave it a new vocation as Glasgow’s centre for traditional Scottish music, song and dance — ceilidhs, concerts and classes under the rococo ceiling, with a café in the crypt — the tobacco lords’ showpiece now hosting exactly the culture their era’s poor made in the streets outside, which is a redistribution of a kind.
Architecturally it remains the standard-setter of Glasgow’s eighteenth century — the building that announced a provincial burgh’s intention to build like a capital — and the essential companion piece to this site’s Trade pages: if you want to see what the tobacco money believed about itself, it is all here, in one portico and a ceiling.