Anyone who has spent time in Glasgow’s West End knows the black-and-gold façade of Tennent’s Bar on the busy corner of Byres and Highburgh Roads. While the bars and cafes around it come and go, Tennent’s is a stalwart — a cavernous, high-ceilinged Victorian institution that has been serving Byres Road for well over a century, famous for its cheap pints, its twelve cask ales and a clientele that runs from diehard locals to students to the occasional footballer or novelist. It is one of the great traditional pubs of the West End, and it has a genuine place in the city’s social history.
A Byres Road Institution
The pub was bought from the brewer Hugh Tennent around 1884 and rebuilt into the corner tenement that stands today — a grand, columned room whose gold flowery capitals, high moulded ceilings and paintings of old Glasgow still speak of its nineteenth-century foundation. Its opening was not without controversy: the Principal of the University of Glasgow, John Caird, railed against the ‘demon drink’ and petitioned to block a licence for premises so dangerously close to the university gymnasium, fearing temptation for students walking home. The licensing court took a less puritanical view, and Tennent’s has been proving Caird’s fears well founded ever since.
The Sit-In
Tennent’s carries one landmark in the history of Glasgow’s changing social attitudes. Astonishing as it seems now, women were not allowed in the bar until the early 1970s — when Shelley Russell, an American studying at Glasgow University, organised a sit-in and a demonstration out on Byres Road. The policy was quickly changed, and a small cleaning cupboard was hurriedly converted into the pub’s first ladies’ toilet. It is a small, telling episode in the long story of a city’s public life opening up, and Tennent’s wears it as a badge of honour.
Good Beer, Good Value
What keeps the room full is the same unpretentious offer Byres Road has relied on for generations: good beer at fair prices, food served all day, and a proper pub atmosphere. Tennent’s has held a place in CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide for over a quarter of a century, its twelve cask lines a genuine draw for real-ale drinkers; and while the main bar keeps its music-free calm for the sake of conversation, the basement below — Tennent’s Basement — hosts comedy, gigs and jam sessions for those who want them. It is famously good value in an increasingly expensive city, one of the few West End pubs where a decent meal and a drink still cost very little, and the mix of students, locals, workers and the odd passing celebrity gives it the easy, democratic feel of a pub that belongs to everyone.
A Real Pub
What Tennent’s offers is the unpretentious ideal the whole of this chapter keeps returning to. It has been in CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide for over twenty-five years; it serves food all day and sport on its screens; and downstairs, Tennent’s Basement hosts comedy, gigs and jam sessions. But the main bar remains a place for talk, with no music on the PA — where, as one fond regular put it, plumbers discuss philosophy with lecturers and hairdressers argue politics with journalists. The staff, famously, never leave; some have been there twenty years. It is, in the phrase the pub itself likes, a REAL pub — and one of the reasons Byres Road still feels like Byres Road.
The pub’s early corporate history reflects the churn of the trade: Hugh Tennent sold up to Bass Brewers in 1894, probably to the pub’s long-term good, given that his estate collapsed into a notorious court case on his death in 1919 over the legitimacy of his secret second family. Through every change of owner, though, Tennent’s has kept its character — a rare feat on a street that has reinvented itself around it many times over.