The Mackintosh Society are hosting a symposium to discuss the future of Glasgow’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh buildings

A symposium is to be held to discuss the future maintenance of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s buildings in Glasgow.

Transcript

00:00 Tell me about the symposium, why is it happening in June?

00:03 Well the reason we're having a symposium, I think, well last year we're into our 50th anniversary of the Society

00:09 so the Society's been very much at the core of protecting and promoting Macintosh in the last 50 years.

00:16 We've seen the sort of highs and lows of his heritage buildings

00:22 and it's a small collection but it's vulnerable.

00:25 But at the same time it's so precious and valuable and it's looked across the world, it's so important.

00:32 The reason we wanted to have the symposium was, well it's 12 years since the last one,

00:38 we highlighted points at that time, what was happening.

00:41 We've seen some good things, we've seen improvements to like the Willow Tea Room's been restored

00:46 in Suckey Hall Street, we've now started work on Scotland Street School, although it's gone into the education side.

00:53 The Hill House is currently under restoration and trying to protect it.

00:59 But there's other buildings like in the city, we've lost the School of Art, we hope that that'll be a rebirth on that.

01:06 Part of the symposium will cover all these types of things.

01:09 The Lighthouse hasn't reopened since the pandemic, we're not sure what the plans are for it.

01:17 Do you see other buildings like Lady Artists Club in Blytho Square?

01:21 I think they talked about turning it into a boutique hotel.

01:25 Yeah, I remember that plan already.

01:26 There's other wider buildings in the city, like Egyptian Halls, Lion Chambers, St Vincent Street Church.

01:34 They're all heritage buildings that just seem to be being allowed to sort of rot, really deteriorate.

01:41 And a part of that is also these people that buy these properties, they're selling them for so long.

01:47 It's a game, going on to get to a stage a bit like the Indian building that recently had the collapse.

01:54 I think it's part of the idea of having the symposium to highlight that.

01:58 Baltas showing day two cities like Brussels, Dermgate, which is in Northampton, which McIntosh did,

02:06 has had a fantastic period and doing really well and just had an extension.

02:11 So it's all these types of things that we'll try and show the good.

02:14 The idea is Queen's Cross, the society took this over this building in 1977.

02:19 It was in a really poor state.

02:22 It was from a small organisation to show what they could do and look after this building to bring it to life.

02:27 There's other things we'd like to do.

02:29 We'd love to have a piazza out there to take the road away from Garscobe Road,

02:35 because it's doing a long time damage to the building with the amount of traffic that goes through there.

02:39 So there's a number of cases there that we'd highlight.