The Templeton Building exists because Glasgow Green’s trustees had standards. When the carpet manufacturer James Templeton & Co sought to extend its works facing the Green in the 1880s, the Corporation — guardian of the people’s park — rejected utilitarian designs until the firm, exasperated into magnificence, engaged William Leiper to produce something worthy of the setting. Leiper reached for Venice: a polychrome fantasy on the Doge’s Palace in red, blue and gold brick, terracotta and mosaic — a factory in carnival dress, and still the most joyously improbable façade in Scotland.
Its construction carries the Green’s saddest story. On 1 November 1889, with the great screen façade rising in front of the working sheds, a gale caught the unbraced wall and brought it down through the roof of the weaving shed below — where the firm’s weavers, young women almost all, were at their looms. Twenty-nine women and girls were killed. The disaster shocked the city profoundly; it is commemorated now beside the building, and no honest account of the palace-front can leave it out: the beauty was paid for twice, once in money and once in lives it should never have cost.
Completed in 1892, the factory wove for nearly a century more — Templeton’s carpets, met in this site’s Textile pages, furnishing liners, parliaments and picture palaces worldwide from behind the Venetian screen — and gathering extensions in gradually calmer dress along William Street as the firm grew. Production ended in 1980 with the industry’s general fall, and the building faced the empty-mill fate of its generation.
It escaped through reinvention: refurbished in the 1980s as the Templeton Business Centre, and joined in the 2000s by housing and — in the old winding house — WEST, the German-style brewery whose beer garden now fills the corner where the façade meets the Green: Munich by way of Venice, in Bridgeton, which is a very Glasgow set of coordinates.
Architecturally it stands as the high-water mark of the city’s conviction, met throughout the Built City pages, that industry owed the public beauty — a factory ordered to delight, and delivering still, category-A listed, to every walker on the Green it was built to face.