Templeton Building

The Templeton Building is the most flamboyant piece of architecture in Glasgow — a carpet factory dressed as a Venetian palace, its dazzling front of coloured brick and tile rising over the eastern edge of Glasgow Green in frank imitation of the Doge’s Palace. Yet behind its exuberant façade lies a sombre history, for the building meant to be beautiful enough to please its grand neighbours became, before it was even finished, the scene of one of the worst industrial tragedies the city has known.

This page tells its story: the carpet maker who built it, the reason for its extraordinary design, the Venetian palace on the Green, the disaster of 1889, its completion and working life, and its transformation into the landmark it is today.

Carpets fit for a liner

The building owes its existence to carpets. James Templeton, a Paisley man, had patented a chenille Axminster process that allowed him to weave carpets of unusual density, richness and colour, and on the strength of it he built one of the most successful carpet-manufacturing firms in Britain. James Templeton & Son supplied carpets for grand houses, for state occasions and for the great ocean liners of the age — the company’s work is said to have furnished, among many others, the ill-fated Titanic. Its factory, part of Glasgow’s wider textile industry, stood on the edge of Glasgow Green, and by the 1880s the firm was prosperous enough to want a new weaving mill worthy of its reputation.

A factory the city would accept

There was, however, a difficulty. The site lay on the edge of Glasgow Green, the city’s ancient common, and close to the fashionable terraces of Monteith Row, whose well-to-do residents had no wish to look out on an ordinary factory. The city authorities repeatedly rejected Templeton’s plans for an extension on so sensitive a spot. Templeton’s response was as bold as it was ingenious: he would build something so magnificent that the council could not possibly refuse it — a factory disguised as a work of art, grand enough to grace the Green and to match the splendour of the carpets made within. For that he needed not a mill engineer but an architect of imagination.

The Doge’s Palace on the Green

The architect he chose was William Leiper (1839–1916), one of the leading Scottish designers of the day, and the building Leiper produced is unforgettable. For his model he looked to Venice, and to the late-medieval Doge’s Palace, reworking its famous patterned walls into a riot of colour in glazed and moulded brick, red terracotta, vitreous enamel tiles and mosaic. The result — often called Britain’s finest example of polychrome brickwork — is a Venetian Gothic fantasy on the banks of the Clyde, its glowing façade advertising to all the world the richly coloured, oriental-patterned carpets produced behind it. Nothing else in Glasgow looks remotely like it; it is the city’s most extravagant architectural gesture, a palace front bolted onto a working mill.

The disaster of 1889

The building’s creation was marked by tragedy. On the evening of 1 November 1889, while the new frontage was still under construction alongside the existing weaving sheds, a violent gale struck the city. An unfinished wall, insecurely fixed, was blown down, and part of the rising structure collapsed onto the single-storey sheds behind, where a large number of women were still at work at the looms. Twenty-nine of them were killed, and many more injured — among the worst industrial accidents in Glasgow’s history. It happened in an age before there were building regulations to govern such work. The women who died are remembered with sorrow; a memorial stone to them was placed at the building during its refurbishment in 2005, so that the human cost behind the beautiful façade should not be forgotten.

The working factory

Work resumed after the disaster, and the building was at last completed in 1892. Behind Leiper’s ornate frontage stood a functional mill, and for the better part of a century the factory hummed with the making of Templeton’s celebrated Axminster carpets, employing generations of Glaswegians, many of them women, in the weaving sheds on the Green. It was not the only sorrow the works would see — a fire in 1900 brought further loss of life — but through it all the firm prospered, extending the premises in the 1930s and remaining one of the great names of British carpet-making. For decades the coloured palace on the Green was, first and foremost, a place of work.

From factory to landmark

Like so much of Glasgow’s manufacturing, carpet-weaving on the Green could not last for ever, and in time production ceased. Rather than lose so striking a building, the old factory was given a new purpose: in 1984 it was converted into the Templeton Business Centre, a home for small firms and offices, and later still it was reborn as ‘Templeton on the Green’, a mixed development of flats, offices and workspace. Part of the ground floor now houses the WEST brewery and bar, drawing visitors in beneath the very walls where carpets were once woven. The transformation saved one of Glasgow’s most remarkable buildings from the fate of demolition that overtook so many of the city’s Victorian works.

The building today

Today the Templeton Building is a Category A listed landmark and one of the best-loved sights of Glasgow Green, standing close to the People’s Palace and looking out over the historic common. Its dazzling front still stops passers-by in their tracks, a splash of Venetian colour in the industrial east end, and it remains a monument to the ambition and swagger of Victorian Glasgow — and to the carpet trade that raised it. But it is a monument, too, to the twenty-nine women who died in its building, and to the countless workers who spent their lives at its looms: a beautiful façade with a human story, sombre and proud, woven into its every brick.

The essentials