Trongate is one of Glasgow’s oldest street names, and its plainest: this was the gait — the way — to the tron, the great public beam where goods were weighed and duties charged. Along it ran the commercial life of the early burgh, and by the eighteenth century it was the finest street in town, arcaded and busy, with the Tontine Hotel at its head where merchants read the shipping news beneath carved grotesque heads — the famous Tontine Faces, some of which now grin from the garden wall behind Provand’s Lordship.
Its landmark is the Tron Steeple, tower of the Tron Kirk, begun in the sixteenth century and completed in the 1630s. The church behind it met one of the strangest ends in Glasgow’s history: in 1793 members of the Hellfire Club, a hard-drinking society of young bloods, broke in on a winter night, built up the watchmen’s fire to outrageous size ‘to see how much it could take’, and burned the kirk to the ground. The steeple survived; arches were later cut through its base so the pavement could pass beneath, giving Trongate its most distinctive silhouette.
The rebuilt church behind is now the Tron Theatre, one of the city’s liveliest stages — a very Glasgow redemption. And a few steps along, above an amusement arcade frontage, hides an astonishing survivor: the Britannia Panopticon of 1857, the oldest surviving music hall in the world, where audiences hurled rivets at bad acts and where, in 1906, a sixteen-year-old Stan Laurel made his first appearance on any stage. Volunteers have brought it slowly back to life.
The nineteenth century made Trongate a dense shopping street for the working city — drapers, warehouses and penny geggies — and the twentieth let it slide as retail moved west and the buildings above the shopfronts emptied. Its upper storeys remain one of the great half-seen streetscapes in Glasgow: look up and the old town is still there.
Regeneration now creeps along it from the Merchant City — artists’ studios at Trongate 103, the theatre, the Panopticon’s revival — on a street that has been reinventing itself, one way or another, for five hundred years.