Central Station is Glasgow’s beating heart. It’s chilling to think we nearly lost it

There are 48,000 individual panes of glass in the roof of Glasgow Central Station. The area covers 2.2 square miles. It is a remarkable feat of Victorian engineering. A few days ago, it looked like this roof, and so much more of one of the great stations of Europe, would be lost to fire.

That it remains intact is largely down to the incredible work of firefighters and, they say, a gap between walls of just a few feet.

A fire, that started in a vape shop that sits in a building adjacent to the station, took hold on 8 March. It raged for hours and destroyed the entire B-listed block on Union Corner. From where I sit in Big Issue HQ I can look out the window and straight down Renfield Street into the site of the fire. The ragged wall, jutting like broken teeth, is all that is left of what was a key Glasgow landmark, a place of direction and anchor. It shocks each time I look. The thought of how close we came to losing that station is chilling. 

Glasgow Central Station is an incredible place. It’s not just the scale of it – 17 platforms, the busiest in Scotland and one of the UK’s busiest outside London – it’s what it represents. Glasgow is a rail city. The train network webs out, from Central – alongside Queen Street it’s one of the two main terminuses – to towns and villages in the west and south, some east. It establishes the pulse of the city.

A recent upgrade to just one line – that runs to East Kilbride – cost some £144 million, a sign of the growing needs of a growing population out in the suburbs to be carried into the heart of the city for work and for living.

It provides a west coast artery to London too. And once, not so long ago, the boat train would take people to Stranraer and back across to Ireland, the seat of family for so many in and around Glasgow.

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Every time you go through Central, as I have thousands of times, it feels like stories are ready to roll across to you. On a Friday early evening, as some are heading home, many excitedly bundle off trains, the boys in a cloud of Buckfast and hormones and Lynx Africa, girls in shoes so vertiginous they seem to be willing A&E triage to take them.

There are still, even in this time of constant messaging, people waiting anxiously under the big clock to see if their date is on the train as promised. Our man Mick is outside selling Big Issue, Japanese tourists check their phones against the departure board and wonder which exit to take. Unlike a lot of stations, Central is all in front of you, that great big concourse opening as you step in off Gordon Street and see humanity waiting. It’s a place of more than bricks and mortar.

But the fire, and there have been quite a number of fires in Glasgow – the renowned School of Art burnt down TWICE – illustrates the fragile state of Glasgow’s built heritage. The city centre has 143 buildings on Historic Environment Scotland’s “at risk” register. Advocates to maintain them and the unique character of Glasgow, like MSP Paul Sweeney, have been calling for better measures to preserve and bring back into use. 

It must feel like pushing water up a hill. Glasgow, like many major cities, faces local authority budgetary tightening. Therefore, it’s understandable that an older building, with all the inherent costs of bringing centuries-old construction up to code and into better use, is not of primary importance.

And Glasgow has a habit of turning a blind eye to fires that helpfully clear sites. There is an old joke that goes: two Glaswegian pub landlords are having a drink on a Monday night. One says to the other, I’m sorry to hear about your pub burning down at the weekend. The other replies, shhh, that’s next Saturday. There is no suggestion there was anything malicious in the fire by Central, but once these places are gone, they’re gone.

What makes a city is, as Glasgow says, people. But it’s also where they go, what they can feel is of them in the streets, where they take pride and where they touch their history. The fire that almost led to the destruction of Central Station is a reminder of how fragile that connection is. And why work must go on to maintain it. Time to get on the train.

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue.Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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