Tay House / "Bridge to Nowhere" (Glasgow)

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Since 1992 it has been a fairly bog standard office block called Tay House which is currently the home to Barclays Glasgow HQ. Older people remember it as one of the follies of the M8 Inner Ring Road - a concrete podium that went over the motorway, with no way on, and no way off. A literal "Bridge To Nowhere". The original plan was that the nearby Elmbank Gardens complex was supposed to be part of a much larger megastructure that would have made use of the podium. In the end, the Elmbank scheme was pared back through lack of money, and the structure stood as a folly for over 20 years - a monument to the controversial ring road scheme's incompletness.

Its one other claim to fame is that the rear cover photograph of the Deacon Blue album "Raintown" was shot from the bridge in 1987, three years before the construction of the office building, but I feel for the poor photographer that had to climb up there at night time with the M8 traffic rushing below.

There is another "Bridge to Nowhere" 600 metres south of here, originally conceived in the same building project, that still actually is unfinished. But that's another story...