Attempt to strip historic Glasgow Vogue cinema's listed status fails
It was then granted listed status by Historic Environment Scotland following an inspection, only for this to be appealed by owners Allied Vehicles.
The Scottish Government's reporter has now thrown out that appeal, after considering the 'cultural significance' of the cinema and its unique, historic architecture.
The reporter's investigation has now been made public. Dismissing the appeal, they said: 'In the circumstances of this case, I find that what remains of the building is of special architectural and historic interest.
'There are no factors which would justify the building not being listed. Consequently, the building should remain listed.'
The Art Deco Vogue opened in 1933 (Image: NQ) With a storied history serving the community of Possilpark, the Vogue was built in 1933 to a design by the renowned architect James McKissak, and has been used as a cinema and bingo hall.
Much of the building has become derelict, but the front structure remains, as do some of the architectural features.
Now the appeal has been dismissed, the building will be subject to strict controls and will be protected from demolition unless it become too dangerous to leave standing.
The owners will also have a duty to preserve what remains.
The report said: 'I have considered the building's design, architecture, age and rarity; its setting and historical location, function and importance; and its social and cultural significance together with the changes over time which have altered the building and its surrounds.
'I agree with HES that cinemas as a building type were once common across Scotland but those surviving from the 1930s period are now exceptional.
Architect Professor Alan Dunlop, who has been vocal in his support of retaining the cinema, said he was 'delighted' the appeal had been rejected.
The architect believes it is now time for a 'reasonable compromise' to resolve the situation, and called for the owner to submit a new planning application which preserves what remains of the building.
Professor Alan Dunlop outside the Vogue Cinema (Image: NQ) Prof Dunlop, a Fellow Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, said: 'As someone born in Springburn and who lived just off Hawthorn Street, close to the junction of Balmore Road, the Vogue Cinema was distinctive and it marked an important road junction.
'The Springburn that I knew, particularly Springburn Road which was once a thriving shopping and community street, has been destroyed, The Princess Cinema on Gourley Street and many other buildings of architectural merit have been demolished.
'Possilpark now seems to be suffering the same fate. The Vogue Cinema is not a classic but it is the only building of any character and architectural worth left in this area of Possilpark and certainly worthy of retaining.'
He added: 'As an architect with forty years experience of building major projects, including working with listed buildings and on conservation projects, bringing them back to life, I know this building can be and should be saved.
'Granting the appeal would have created an unwelcome precedent and perverse incentive for any owner to unilaterally seek to demolish a building that is subject to a designation assessment before Historic Environment Scotland has had the opportunity to conclude its assessment.
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Telegraph
13 hours ago
- Telegraph
The English countryside is paying the price for net zero
Jo Chapman lives in a two-storey red-brick semi on the edge of Leiston Common, close to Sizewell beach, Suffolk. There are vegetable beds and a polytunnel out front, and a studio in the garden where she sculpts with steel and clay. Her long, narrow garden stretches almost to the edge of the pine-fringed common, where gorse and heather cling to dry tussocky grass and sandy soil. Beyond that, the gently undulating land dips into water meadows speckled with wild yellow irises at this time of year, and then rises again towards Kenton Hills, a wooded area scarcely more than 40ft high. But in Suffolk's coastal flats, that's enough to be considered a hill and given a name. It's a landscape she knows intimately, one that she loves and even depends on. 'I have to go out into nature every day,' she says over a cup of coffee in her cosy kitchen. Chapman, who is 60 with a grey-flecked dark bob and a twinkling nose stud, lived in Leiston town until a few years ago when she seized the opportunity to move closer to the woods and heathland, to a place where she can step out of her house and enjoy what she calls her 'daily observational ritual walk and meditation'. Chapman used to go with her dog, a mixed terrier, but after he died, she mostly walks alone with her sketchbook. She often pauses to draw trees. 'I look for the structures and architecture in things,' she says. When she shows me round her artist studio, I can see echoes of their entangled branches in her abstract ceramics and sculptural models. Until recently, the walks were restorative, a time for quiet reflection, careful observation and attentive exploration. Lately, they have become more like a funeral procession. Directly in front of her home, a barrier of 2m-tall mesh fencing snakes along a rough track. It's the type of urban industrial fence used to contain crowds or keep people out, and it separates Chapman from a section of the heath she used to walk. But that hardly seems to matter, because the field itself has been transformed into a barren wasteland. When she gets up in the morning, it's the first thing she sees. Across a nearby road, there is more of this Heras fencing, this time replacing a 1,600ft stretch of old hedgerow that has been flailed and uprooted. The building site on the other side roars and belches with bulldozers and backhoes, their diesel engines drowning out the birdsong. It's the first thing she hears. Half a mile in the opposite direction, beyond the common, the water meadows and Kenton Hills, another seemingly endless fence has appeared, marking the abrupt edge of the woodlands and the start of a large building site full of excavators and front loaders, scraped berms of disinterred soil and gangs of men in high-vis vests scurrying about like industrious Doozers. At least the trees on Kenton Hills still stand; the once-contiguous woods of Goose Hill and Dunwich Forest are entirely gone. The reason for it all is the building of Sizewell C, a new nuclear power station. Chapman feels hemmed in, kettled by the new barriers, and anxious. 'It's very unsettling,' she says. She had paid attention to the plans, looked at the computer-generated imagery (CGI) and attended public meetings, so when construction began, she thought she was ready. But, she says, 'I feel shocked by the speed and the level of destruction. There's a constant feeling of being quite vulnerable, because you just don't know where it's going to happen next. You become hyper-vigilant.' Later, as we walk down the track that leads to Sizewell beach, with a row of pines on one side and galvanised steel on the other, Chapman tries to explain her sense of loss over the months as trees have been cut down, hedgerows ripped up and fields and heath flattened. ' It's like grieving. When you lose someone but then, as time passes, you carry on – and you realise that you can carry on – but that the world is different.' Twenty years ago, the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht studied communities living on the edge of new open-cast coal mines in Australia's Hunter Valley, people who stayed in the same place but saw the world around them transformed in distressing ways. Albrecht coined the term 'solastalgia' to describe their feelings of anguish and grief caused by this environmental change, the pain of lost solace. He wrote, 'Solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at 'home'.' In an era of climate change – as ice melts, seas rise, floods surge, wildfires burn, rains fail and heat increases – the world everywhere is being transformed, and Albrecht's term is gaining currency. The irony of Chapman's particular sense of loss is that the rapid environmental transformation she is witnessing is the result of UK efforts to forestall the slower environmental changes caused by climate change. The new nuclear power station is intended to help Britain achieve net zero emissions while meeting the insatiable demand for energy. This month, the Government announced it would contribute £14.2bn towards the cost of Sizewell C, but the project, to be built by French company EDF, still lacks both secure funding and a firm start date. Nevertheless, 'enabling works' have been underway since early 2024, felling 22,000 trees, removing long stretches of hedgerow and fencing off farmland and forest to clear the way for roads, park-and-ride sites, accommodation and other infrastructure. When full-scale construction begins, it will likely last for a decade or more. Compounding the landscape's turbulent reshaping are separate plans for substations and power cables to bring Britain's expanding North Sea wind energy ashore, along with new networks of high-voltage pylons. Whether caused by climate change or human efforts at mitigation, dramatic environmental disruption is a price we will all have to pay in the years to come. In the absence of concerted efforts to reduce individual energy consumption, the spread of solar farms, wind farms, converter stations, pylons and nuclear power stations is an inevitable necessity, not an option. The costs borne and sacrifices made by communities around Sizewell show what will be required of everyone to secure a clean energy future and limit the worst impacts of a changing climate. Will Jones was born on his family's 50-acre arable and dairy farm near the village of Yoxford. Lean, with the tanned skin of someone who spends more time outside than in, the 56-year-old is easy-going, with long grey hair tied up in a messy topknot and a tattoo peeking out from the sleeve of his T-shirt. 'This was our playground when we were kids,' he says, gesturing towards a patch of lawn, a series of vegetable beds, a jumble of outhouses, sheds and barns, a field of spring barley and the encircling mature hedgerows spiked with old oaks. As he grew up, his connection only deepened. 'Most of the land around here isn't our land, but I've roamed this land, it's our backyard, the wild place that we live in, and it's meant a lot to me. To see it devastated in this way…' his voice trails off, and his partner, Laura Gwynne, rests a hand gently on his chest. 'This area of Suffolk is in a state of shock,' she adds. Five miles inland from Sizewell C and Chapman's house, the changes around Jones and Gwynne's home are less extreme but scarcely less painful. A new roundabout, big enough to handle large lorries, is being built at Yoxford, and a link road is under construction a few hundred yards from Jones's home. Bright yellow diggers and graders trundle across the cleared land, causing the walls of their bungalow to vibrate. Jones confronts the shock head-on with regular walks to and along the building site. 'It's helpful for me to see the process, even if it's devastating to watch, because it's still a part of me, even if it's changing.' Gwynne finds it hard to look directly at the destruction. During a recent walk – picking his way along the absence of a ghost hedgerow – Jones found a delicate muntjac skull and brought it home, where it sits on a log alongside pieces of wood and stones he has foraged, creating a diorama of what is being lost. Jones says the labourers 'leave bits and pieces after they've cut and chipped everything, so now and then I'll bring back what I find, little bits of my life'. One night he woke from a nightmare that seemed to express the helplessness of enduring change on a scale beyond an individual's control: construction workers were methodically hacking down one of his hedgerows and setting it on fire, and the very fact of their actions seemed to justify what they were doing, so he just watched. Jones says he has 'toyed with the idea' of moving, but it would require an inconceivable emotional uprooting. Instead, he and Gwynne are focusing their attention on what they can control. On the margin of one of their fields, close to a meadow of grasses and wildflowers they have reclaimed from crops, dozens of oak saplings, elder, sycamore and Scots pine are taking root. The acorns came from different places, including one that Gwynne collected from the church graveyard where her father is buried, in the nearby village of Theberton. 'Each means something to us,' she says. The young trees are now as tall as she is and, in years to come, will form a new fragment of mixed woodland. For Gwynne and Jones, it's about creating some space for nature and doing 'a small bit' to compensate for the destruction caused by Sizewell C. It's also about restoring meaning to the landscape, declaring their attachment and committing to the future. 'We're lucky to have all this, really lucky,' Jones says. EDF has its own plans to mitigate the impact of its construction, compensate for the damage, and repair the land. It has built a new nature reserve, named Wild Aldhurst, and says it will restore heathland, plant trees and recover wetlands. Residents remain sceptical, however. Gus Farnes has lived all his life in his family's 13th-century Suffolk pink longhouse next to the river Fromus. A figurative sculptor wearing a trucker hat and a chore jacket with 'Gus' on the pocket, Farnes has a foundry that looks out across the garden to what was once a medieval water meadow. 'My point of inspiration is how human activity over millennia influences the environment we live in and the landscapes we inhabit,' says the 41-year-old. With the coming of Sizewell C, Farnes has seen the velocity of human activity accelerate, and over the last two years, the water meadow of his childhood has been replaced by a Disneyland version, sculpted by the developers to compensate for the removal of marshes elsewhere. 'When I was a child, the fields were grazed in rotation by a dairy herd, the drainage ditches were all free-flowing, full of watercress, and we'd go dipping for stickleback, mucking about, doing the things kids do. All of that's gone,' Farnes says. We walk along a truck-wide road of compacted grey rubble, past neat fences and bright orange life rings installed next to 1ft-deep ponds, and reach a large plastic culvert through which the old stream now flows. Farnes calls it 'a municipal interpretation of what the countryside is,' replacing the 'bucolic, English, [John] Constable scene' of his memory. Farnes finds the removal of one environment to create a new one baffling, and describes his feelings as 'curiosity, anger, frustration, confusion, loss, and a feeling of contempt from the powers that be, directed at the landscape and those who live in it'. He acknowledges that the disruption he has suffered is 'quite minimal' and the new fen, in time, might even achieve the promise of greater biodiversity, but he can't help seeing the work as a form of mutilation and 'a sorry apology' for what came before. 'I try to be pragmatic – to stave off the anger – I'm not anti-progress, but it's at what cost?' says Farnes. For Chapman, Jones, Gwynne, Farnes and many others, the suddenness and scale of the environmental changes unfolding around them are an assault on the imagination as much as on the landscape; the bulldozing of places that inspire, offer comfort and calm, and where memories reside. It creates sadness, anxiety and confusion. But these are places of ecological as well as emotional importance. The Suffolk 'Sandlings' – named for the sandy, acidic soil and the purple-flowering 'ling' heather that grows there – is a rare ecosystem shaped by natural evolution and millennia of human intervention. A dry, rolling lowland heath of gorse, heather and grass, the Sandlings reaches its eastern edge at the low sandstone cliffs that crumble onto Suffolk's shingle beaches and are washed away by the encroaching silt-brown waves of the North Sea. Interspersed with mixed woodland and conifer forest, it bursts with biodiversity: birds, butterflies, moths, snakes, lizards, bees and beetles. On dusk walks, it is not uncommon to spot glowworms illuminating the bracken or hear the high-pitched drill of the nightjar's call. It is a place of startling variety and 'very soft edges', Chapman tells me, which makes the contrast with the new metal fences and denuded land all the more stark and jarring. Not everyone loves this landscape; to some, it appears desolate. The German writer WG Sebald found himself lost – geographically and psychologically – in the 'labyrinth' of the Sandlings in his discursive travelogue, The Rings of Saturn. There, he observed with a rising sense of panic the 'low, leaden sky; the sickly violet hue of the heath clouding the eye; the silence, which rushed in the ears like the sound of the sea in a shell; the flies buzzing about'. Sebald discerned entropy and decline here 30 years ago, and now, as building sites replace woods, fields and heath, his view seems prophetic. Sizewell C will be built alongside its predecessors, Sizewell A (1966-2006) and B (1995-present). What remains of A is a hulking, 100ft-high grey concrete and corrugated metal structure encasing two decommissioned gas-cooled Magnox reactors that had a combined output of 420 megawatts. Next door is the mosque-like Sizewell B, with its white reactor dome arcing over a sky-blue hangar containing a single pressurised water reactor that produces 1.2 gigawatts of energy – almost three times as much as A. Sizewell C will be bigger still in every way: taller, occupying more land and producing 3.2 gigawatts from its twin reactors – enough to power six million homes, according to EDF, which operates B and will build C. Construction is anticipated to take about 10 years and cost £38bn, but EDF's Hinkley Point C power station – which is the same design and model – has been under construction since 2017, has doubled in price, and is not likely to be completed until the end of the decade. It is easy to imagine the visual impact of Sizewell C's construction, partly because EDF has produced visualisations showing a thick forest of cranes and piercing floodlights illuminating the dark skies over Sizewell, and partly because the building site at Hinkley Point is a corollary. Harder to resolve is the impact construction will have on the soundscape of Suffolk's coastal heath. How will the rushing of wind through leaves, the call of owls and nightingales, or the rhythmic wash of the sea on shingle compete with the machines? A leading authority on the Sandlings was Lee Chadwick, who lived on the heath in a bungalow she built with her husband, Paxton, an artist who provided an intricate gatefold illustration of local reptiles for her 1982 book, In Search of Heathland. Communist Party members and local councillors, the Chadwicks are still renowned in Leiston, and their son Peter, 77, lives in the family bungalow with his wife, Bridget. Six months ago, Peter suffered a breakdown that the couple attribute partly to the stress and anxiety of the spoliation around them, and Peter struggles to get his sentences out, so when we meet, Bridget does most of the talking, with Peter listening carefully at her side. 'The week that all the hedging came down, we were absolutely devastated,' says Bridget, for whom the by turns frustrating and satisfying tasks of gardening, coaxing plants from the infertile soil or wrestling the bracken and brambles back from the field of heather, keep her outdoors often. The view from the couple's house of curiosities – full of Peter and Paxton's art, Lee's books and all their own accumulated belongings – is now Heras fencing. 'The awful thing, of course, is you get used to it,' says Bridget. They suggest I join them for their daily walk to Reckham Pits Wood. It's a warm early summer morning, cooler in the woods, with sunlight filtering through leaves and branches swaying in the light sea breeze. Bridget points out a towering spruce among the birch and oak, and a slender young pine that has threaded itself neatly up through the spreading branches of a much older oak in search of sunlight. Peter's ill health and the environmental destruction around them have become entwined, yet an attentive walk still soothes both. 'We have been very distressed at different times, [but] Peter and I are having to learn not to look at all the negatives; we're having to learn to really appreciate all the beautiful things around us.' Theirs is a purposeful striving towards acceptance when faced with the shock of a loved landscape disfigured. On the long path between sadness and acceptance of a future that is different, but a future nevertheless, they are finding a way to process the grief of what has been lost by focusing on what remains. 'I'm really paying attention,' Bridget says as we walk through the woods. 'I'm appreciating what we've got.' Recommended Labour's nuclear dream has destroyed my home: inside the Sizewell C planning row Read more
Glasgow Times
3 days ago
- Glasgow Times
'Important' photos show lost shops and factories of old Glasgow
You can see the Forth and Clyde Canal wending its way across the centre of the image and dividing it into north and south. By this time, Temple had established itself as an industrial area which also supported residences, shops, a police office and a local school. Aerial view of Temple in the 30s (Image: Glasgow City Archives) Temple Primary School in Spencer Street can be seen towards the bottom of the photograph near the centre. It was built in 1901 and we hold historic records for it including the headteachers' log books (1871 to 1977) and admission registers (1879 to 1927). Temple Primary School, 1903 (Image: Glasgow City Archives) Though it no longer operates as a school, the building still stands today and bears evidence of the time when Temple was not part of Glasgow. Carved into the elevation facing Fulton Street are the words New Kilpatrick School Board. Temple was once part of Dunbartonshire. However, it was annexed to Glasgow in 1912, part of the city's great expansion north and south of the river Clyde. Directly beside the school, on the left as you're viewing the image, are buildings belonging to Sloan's Dairies. Here, the firm processed milk delivered from its dairy farms nearby. To the north of these buildings, and identifiable by its name painted on the roof, is another key building which formed the industry of Temple. Collars Ltd was a clothing manufacturer, employing many locals. Like many small and mid-sized businesses, its archives appear not to have survived. Cyro Works in Sutcliffe Road, Temple, July 1936 (Image: Glasgow City Archives) Nor have those of the Cyro Works in Sutcliffe Road, which are just out of shot in this aerial view. The newly-built works are pictured here in 1936, just a year after their construction, and were dedicated to the manufacture of typewriter accessories. The Works' distinctive Art Deco clock made the building a local landmark. Although the factory itself was demolished in the mid-1990s to make way for new flats, the developers rescued the clock and incorporated the timepiece into the new building where it can still be seen today. Another key employer was Temple Saw Mills, founded in 1874 and also known as Robinson Dunn and Co. The company was a timber merchant and their extensive premises featuring several buildings and yards were on both banks of the Forth and Clyde Canal. Peer closely at the photograph and you can see the piles of timber stacked up in the yards, looking like matchsticks from the air. The historic records of this important business are held by the University of Glasgow's Archives and Special Collections. • 56-64 Fulton Street and Linden Place: new Co-op shops, Apr 1930 (Image: Glasgow City Archives) Like many other self-sufficient Glasgow districts, Temple would not have been complete without its row of Co-op shops which included a grocer, draper, baker, confectioner and dairy. On the aerial image, they're just along from Temple Primary School, on the corner of Fulton Street and Linden Place, but are mostly hidden from view by the surrounding tenements. You can see them in much more detail in this image of the new row of Co-op shops taken in April 1930. Fulton Street also boasted a fruiterer whose new shop front is pictured here in August 1939. Understandably, with so many employment opportunities available in the local area, many people of working age and their families moved to Temple in the 1940s and 1950s. Often, they left behind the cramped and overcrowded living conditions of the city centre tenements. In the tenements of Temple, they found more spacious accommodation in flats with several bedrooms in addition to the kitchen, and an indoor toilet. Members of my family grew up in Temple. They lived in its tenements, attended its school and worked in its local businesses. When I shared this aerial image with them, it sparked many childhood memories and reminiscences. In turn, they shared their local knowledge with me as I prepared this article. That's the importance of archives, like these photographs. Not just that we keep and preserve them but that we share them and learn from those who experienced life there first hand. Interested to see what photographs there are for your local area? Check out the Virtual Mitchell ( to browse these images. And if you're on Facebook, we regularly post photographs on our page (@GlasgowCityArchives).
South Wales Argus
21-07-2025
- South Wales Argus
Concerns that ALN sessions at Splash Pad could be cancelled
The splashpad runs specific sessions for children with disabilities and ALN to use the space, giving them a stress-free experience with less children using the park. Parents of those with ALN have voiced their concerns and highlighted the discriminatory comments that have been overheard and directed at these sessions. These same parents are now becoming increasingly apprehensive to visit the park, as inappropriate behaviour from other parents who are unable to use the site for ALN sessions has increased. One parent, who wishes to remain anonymous, said: 'I'm a bit scared to go back down there. 'I don't want to go there just to sit and listen to people slag off my kid because he's disabled - a lot of us don't have the energy to go there and get shouted at anymore. 'I'm just worried that people like me aren't going because they're scared and we're scared that less people going to ALN sessions means that they'll stop or cut the sessions.' Parents are still feeling the effects of offensive comments directed at their children (Image: NQ) A Newport City Council meeting this week passed a Notice of Motion to promote neurodiversity inclusivity in the city. This motion will make the city more accessible for those with additional learning needs and create a neurodiverse-friendly city. This 'requires a comprehensive approach that involves both raising public awareness and understanding and designing spaces that accommodate the specific challenges faced by neurodiverse individuals and their families'. As the hot weather persists and sessions at the splashpad become increasingly popular with new opening hour increases, parents are urged to response 'with kindness and compassion' to those with ALN. Councillor Laura Lacey, cabinet member for social services in Newport, said: 'It's just about getting people to understand. The city needs to be tolerant and compassionate. 'It would be nice if parents of non ALN children stuck up for those with ALN children, so they don't have to fight for their own kids. 'The people who are saying and doing these things are the ones who should be pointed and looked at, not the children trying to enjoy these sessions.' Newport's splash pad will be open until 6PM every day from Monday 21 July to the end of the summer holidays. From Monday, the booking system will be extended to cover the weekday morning 10-11AM relaxed sessions for those with ALN.
