Graham Hills Building (Glasgow)

United Kingdom / Scotland / Glasgow / George Street, 40-50
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The Graham Hills Building is one of the largest buildings on Strathclyde University's campus and is best known perhaps for the massive wall mural called the "Strathclyde Wonderwall" at one point it briefly was the biggest of its kind in the UK when it was completed in 2014.

As for the building itself, its history goes back to 1959 when it was originally built by the General Post Office (GPO) and was known as "Marland House" - named for a pub called the Marland Bar which stood on the same site (bearing in mind this was once a largely residential area prior to the slum clearances of the 1950s and 1960s). Marland House was the Glasgow HQ of the Telephones division of the GPO, and was once upon a time the place where people came to pay their telephone bills, even after Post Office Telephones became British Telecom (BT) in the 1980s.

By the time BT came into being, it started to dispose of all the tired buildings it had inherited from the old GPO, and Marland House was one of them. In Glasgow, it built the Westergate Chambers building on Argyle Street. So in 1987 a deal was struck with Strathclyde University, who purchased it and spent a decade transforming it into an academic building. It was renamed in 1991 for the retiring principal Sir Graham Hills who made the deal happen. The original name of Marland House is now all but forgotten since crude cladding added in the 1990s next to the 50 George Street entrance covers up the name plate below.

Although plans existed in the 2000's to vacate the structure eventually, the vast sums of money spent on internal refurbishment and creating the aforementioned wall mural suggest that it will now remain in use for many years to come.
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Coordinates:   55°51'39"N   4°14'30"W

Comments

  • hehe, my mates had sex in there last week.
This article was last modified 2 years ago