The name is the square’s oldest story. ‘St Enoch’ is a worn-down form of Thenew — the mother of St Mungo, and by tradition the first name in Glasgow’s story: the princess cast out to sea who bore the city’s founding saint. A medieval chapel and holy well dedicated to her stood near this spot outside the old town, and when Glasgow’s eighteenth-century expansion reached the site, the new square of the 1780s kept her name — making this shopping precinct, improbably, a monument to a sixth-century woman.
For ninety years the square belonged to the railway. St Enoch Station opened in 1876 as the Glasgow terminus of the Glasgow & South Western route to England, under two great arched spans, and its St Enoch Hotel was the largest and grandest in Scotland — the first building in Glasgow lit by electricity, and for decades the city’s most fashionable address for arriving travellers.
The twentieth century took it all. The station closed in 1966 in the railway contractions of that decade, the hotel followed, and demolition came in the 1970s — a loss Glasgow has regretted at leisure, ranked with the St Andrew’s Halls among the city’s great architectural bereavements. In its place rose the St Enoch Centre of 1989, the stepped glass shed whose roof was claimed at its opening as Europe’s largest glazed structure — ‘the greenhouse’, Glasgow promptly christened it.
One delight survived everything: the little subway station of 1896 in the middle of the square, a miniature Jacobean palace in red sandstone built as the headquarters of the Glasgow District Subway. Too charming to demolish, it has served as travel centre and café while the subway runs beneath — the smallest listed treasure on any Glasgow square.
St Enoch today is the hinge between Buchanan Street’s polish and the riverside’s slower revival — a square that has been holy ground, railway cathedral and retail box in turn, and keeps, in its name, the memory of the woman the whole city descends from.