The Trades Hall

The Trades Hall is the noblest survivor of Georgian Glasgow — the only major work of Robert Adam, the greatest British architect of his age, still standing in the city, and, save only the medieval Cathedral, the oldest building in Glasgow still used for the very purpose it was built for. Raised in the 1790s to house the Trades House, the ancient federation of the city’s craft guilds, it has served that body without a break for well over two centuries, and serves it still — a rare and living link between the medieval crafts of Glasgow and the modern city.

This page tells its story: the guilds that built it, the cramped old hall it replaced, the great architect who designed it, the building itself, its splendid interior, its unique distinction, and the Trades House that occupies it today.

The Trades House & the fourteen crafts

The Trades House of Glasgow was born in 1605, when a reform of the city’s government formally divided its people between the Merchants and the Craftsmen. The crafts — organised, like the merchants, into a self-governing body — were represented through the fourteen Incorporated Trades of Glasgow, each an ancient guild of a particular calling: the Hammermen, Tailors, Cordiners, Maltmen, Weavers, Bakers, Skinners, Wrights, Coopers, Fleshers, Masons, Gardeners, Barbers, and the Bonnetmakers and Dyers. Together these incorporations elected the Trades House, led by an officer with the resounding title of Deacon Convener of the Trades — an office that survives to this day. In an age before any welfare state, the House and its crafts looked after their own, relieving the poor and sick among their members and endowing charity and education.

An almshouse on the High Street

For its first two centuries the Trades House had no grand home of its own. It met in a former almshouse on the corner of the High Street and Cathedral Street — the old medieval heart of the city, near the cathedral, on the site where a hall of Strathclyde University stands today. By the later eighteenth century this accommodation had become quite unsuitable for a body of the House’s standing in a rapidly growing and prospering city, and in 1791 the crafts resolved to build a new hall, purpose-made for their meetings and ceremonies. A site was secured on Glassford Street, in the fashionable new grid of the Merchant City — a street named, like so much of that quarter, for one of the tobacco lords whose fortunes were remaking Glasgow.

Robert Adam’s commission

The choice of architect was not straightforward. A first design was sought from James Jaffray, but the Incorporation of Masons pressed for a wider field, and alternative proposals were invited from John Craig and from Robert Adam — the Kirkcaldy-born genius who was the most celebrated architect in Britain, architect to King George III, and the master of an elegant classical style that bears his name. Adam came to Glasgow in July 1791 to prepare his designs, and his was the scheme chosen. But he was at the very end of his life: in 1792, before building had properly begun, Robert Adam died, and the task of carrying his design through to completion fell to his younger brothers, James and William Adam, working with a local builder drawn from the Incorporation of Wrights. It is thus Adam’s conception, executed by other hands.

The building on Glassford Street

The Trades Hall opened in 1794, at a cost, complete and furnished, of a little under £8,000. Its front to Glassford Street is one of Adam’s finest compositions — a dignified classical façade of five bays, its emphasis falling on the central doorway beneath a shallow dome, flanked by lower wings. Restrained, balanced and beautifully proportioned, it is a model of the Georgian manner at its most refined, and a striking survival amid the later Victorian commerce of the surrounding streets. Behind that composed exterior lies a building that has been altered and enriched more than once over the centuries, yet has never lost the essential character its great designer gave it.

Adam’s masterpiece

The Trades Hall is the only major work by Robert Adam still standing in Glasgow, and that alone would make it precious; but its interior is a treasure in its own right. Its centrepiece is the Grand Hall, an opulent room hung with golden chandeliers and encircled, high on its walls, by a remarkable frieze — added in 1903 — that depicts the fourteen Incorporated Trades at their work. The building was remodelled and embellished by later architects, among them James Sellars in the 1880s, and it houses a fine collection of the crafts’ treasures and portraits, including a likeness of the composer Chopin, who visited Glasgow in 1848. An earlier extension had even served, from 1808, as a school room for the Trades’ own free school, teaching some sixty children.

The oldest hall in the city

The Trades Hall holds a distinction shared by no other building in Glasgow. Apart from the medieval Cathedral itself, it is the oldest building in the city still used for the purpose for which it was originally built — a continuity of function stretching unbroken from the 1790s to the present day. Designated a Category A listed building, it is a monument not only to Robert Adam and to Georgian taste, but to the extraordinary staying power of the craft guilds that raised it: an institution founded in 1605, housed since 1794 in the same elegant hall, and active yet. Few cities anywhere can point to so direct and unbroken a link with their medieval trades.

The Trades House today

The Trades House of Glasgow is no museum-piece but a living body. Its fourteen incorporations still elect their members, still choose a Deacon Convener each year, and still carry on the charitable and educational work that has been their purpose for four centuries, distributing funds for good causes across the city. The Hall itself, meanwhile, has taken on a modern life as one of Glasgow’s most prestigious event venues, its Adam rooms hired for dinners, weddings and gatherings of every kind, and thrown open to the public on the city’s annual Doors Open Day. In it, the crafts that helped build medieval and Georgian Glasgow keep their place at the heart of the modern city — and their beautiful hall endures as one of its architectural glories.

The essentials