'Greek' Thomson - Glasgow's Master Builder

Glasgow...my hometown.

I've lived here most of my life,

but it still has the power to surprise me.

Wow, the scale of it.

This is quite breathtaking.

Open a door, walk down the street,

this is an incredible city.

And one man did more than anyone else to transform this

Victorian powerhouse into a new kind of metropolis.

Born 200 years ago, Alexander Thomson

created a bold, monumental style that defined Glasgow's most

ambitious age, and helped turn it into the Second City of the Empire.

Thomson designed every kind of building

the booming industrial city demanded.

Tenements and churches.

Shops and galleries.

Grand terraces and suburban villas.

In this film, I'm going to meet the people who live in and love

Thomson's creations.

Every time you walk into a room,

it strikes you anew how lovely it is.

And the fans dedicated to saving his legacy.

I got that out the skip,

and took it home on the back of a 59 bus.

I'm going to discover how a man who never left these shores

fell in love with different worlds.

If you look at a Bible of the period,

you'll see a picture like this,

with architecture as its star feature.

And how his unique designs anticipated our own cityscape.

He treated his own extraordinary style of architecture,

rooted it in the past but yet something new.

The name Charles Rennie Mackintosh is known around the world,

but I believe that Alexander Thomson was perhaps an even

greater visionary, he was more than just an architect,

he was an artist, and his blazing imagination was fired by the past,

embraced the present, and looked to the future.

Wow, this is going to be a treat.

Edinburgh...

the self-styled Athens of the North.

An Enlightenment city that rebuilt itself

in the image of ancient Greece.

And, overlooking everything, the National Monument.

A copy of that ultimate icon of the classical world, the Parthenon.

Construction began in 1826.

But only three years later, funds ran out, and the site was abandoned.

Edinburgh may have fallen out of love with the classical world,

but, 40 miles to the west, it was a different story.

The new powerhouse of Glasgow would take ancient Greek ideas and

ideals and forge an architecture fit for a new industrial world.

Even before work had begun on the National Monument,

Glasgow had overtaken Edinburgh as the biggest city in Scotland.

Over the decades that followed, it exploded.

Its industrial pioneers and immigrant workforce creating

a dynamic city that could boast some of the finest buildings

anywhere in Britain.

This is Great Western Terrace in the west end of Glasgow.

It was completed in 1877,

two years after the death of Alexander Thomson.

But, to my mind, this final masterpiece is as impressive as

anything you can find in Edinburgh's New Town

or Bath's Regency crescents.

Colin McCluskey lives on Great Western Terrace.

-Colin.

-David.

And he's showing me one of the homes which

has been recently restored to match Thomson's original vision.

This is quite breathtaking.

God, the sheer scale of the interior.

She's quite ravishing.

You would never imagine, looking at the simplicity

and the linear nature of outside,

that this is the treasure trove that's about to be discovered.

Beautiful stuff.

Colin, who could afford to live here, back in the day?

Tobacco magnets.

JW MacGregor lived here first.

Blackie, the publisher, lived in the terrace.

And William Burrell moved in in 1902.

What makes Thomson so special?

I moved here about 26 years, 27 years ago.

And I would never move.

A lot of the people in the terrace, have been here longer than I have.

And would never move.

Once you live in the building, you become part of the building.

With Great Western Terrace, Thomson managed to match

the monumental symmetries of classical Athens with

the ever-expanding ambitions of the Second City of the Empire.

But the man who became known as "Greek" Thomson,

began his career in a very different place, and a very different style.

As industrial Glasgow boomed, its wealthier residents looked

for a haven from the crowded streets and polluted air.

Thomson, who suffered from asthma, longed for an escape, too.

Sea air and salvation came down the Clyde in

newly-fashionable villages, like Cove and Kilcreggan.

And Thomson, now an up-and-coming architect,

was happy to design houses in whatever style his clients wanted.

Including a clan chieftain's lair,

at Craigrownie Castle.

BELL RINGS

I'm meeting its current owner, Delhi Onia.

-Delhi.

-David, hi, how are you?

-Lovely to meet you, Delhi.

-Welcome, please, come in.

-Thank you, thank you.

There we go.

Right, David, this is the drawing room.

It's certainly not what I expected from a Thomson interior.

Very different in style.

So, Delhi, what's the history of this extraordinary building?

Well, the house was built for John McElroy,

who was a well-known Glasgow iron and steel and railway merchant.

It was obviously, commissioned through Greek Thomson.

McElroy and Thomson and their partners

developed this whole area, Kilcreggan and Cove,

which are like twin villages.

As a speculative venture, building, basically,

weekend and holiday homes for wealthy Glasgow

merchants and wealthy Glasgow families.

This was built as a weekend home? Good Lord.

LAUGHTER

You've got to be joking! It's a castle.

Maybe, if I can show you around a bit more,

show you a some of the other rooms?

-Please, yeah.

-Let you see the different styles.

-This is the music room.

-The music room!

Delhi, this is a complete contrast to the drawing room

-we've just been in.

-Yeah.

-Chalk from cheese.

-Yeah.

-So what is it like as a family home?

It's just a fantastic place to live.

It looks kind of imposing and magnificent,

and it is, but there's a warmth and an intimacy about it that we've

been able to share with other people, since we've been here,

that we've really, really appreciated.

When it was built in 1854,

Craigrownie was the height of architectural fashion.

Its romantic fantasy of turrets and battlements was repeated on

an even grander scale at Balmoral.

And dozens of other Scots' baronial piles up and down the land.

Thomson loved a monumental sense of scale.

He loved rooting buildings in the landscape.

Craigrownie, behind me, which seems to grow out of the rock itself,

is a prime example.

But he had less time for misty, medieval nostalgia.

No, he wanted to look back deeper in time to something more

elemental, something that would connect him to the eternal itself.

Alexander Thomson's love affair with ancient worlds began early.

One of 20 children, he was born in 1817,

in a small cottage in the Stirlingshire village of Balfron.

His staunchly Presbyterian father was book-keeper

at the local cotton mill and oversaw his family's education.

It was an upbringing steeped in the vivid language and imagery of

the Old Testament.

Sandy Stoddart is one of the country's foremost sculptors.

He understands just how profoundly the Bible moulded

the imagination of Victorian prodigies, like Thomson.

If you look at a Bible of the period,

you will see that it's going to be peppered with engravings,

the Holy Land, all the mud huts,

tremendous things to terrify children. I was one of them.

And, then, you find, well, a picture like this,

with architecture as its star feature.

This is Belshazzar's Feast by John Martin.

-Oh!

-He is the king of the vast.

And what we see here is an insistence on the power of

the horizontal.

The endless procedure into the distant horizon,

the vanishing point,

has a power to make one think of the pathos of the distance,

the far away, not only geographically distant,

but also distant in time.

Now, this is something that would have entered into the young

Thomson's mind when he's looking at illustrations and knowing

about this culture at the time.

Pathos was never far from Thomson's life.

By the time he was a teenager, both his father and mother were dead.

But his talents won him an apprenticeship at

a Glasgow architectural firm.

Here he was enthralled by classical mouldings and architectural

fragments, collected from abroad.

The Bible, Babylon, Israel and Egypt, ancient ruins,

all these things were bubbling away in Thomson's fervent imagination.

And when he eventually realised those visions in stone,

he created some of the most exotic and beautiful buildings

ever seen in Britain.

Caledonia Road Church in the Gorbals,

the dramatic ruin dominates the city's skyline.

And a landmark of another kind, too.

Built in 1856, this is when Thomson became "Greek."

Before the Caledonia Road Church, Thomson had designed

in an eclectic mix of styles.

But, now, in a new partnership with his brother George,

he would begin his lifelong and very personal exploration of

classical architecture.

Sally White, from the Alexander Thomson Society,

knows and loves this building well.

Sally...

..in the 1970s, I spent ten years in the Gorbals,

the Citizens Theatre, 150 yards from here, and this building,

this tower, is emblazoned in my memory, it is so iconic.

So, tell me about it.

Well, I think it is a stunning piece of architecture,

even as a ruin, it is a stunning piece of architecture.

It was described by the American historian

Henry-Russell Hitchcock as one of the finest,

if not the finest, Classical Romantic church in Europe.

Was he unique in that period, of designing in this style?

Yes, I think he was,

I think that many architects have used classical architecture

and its principals and produced beautiful buildings, but Thomson

didn't recreate them, he understood the language,

he understood the complex geometries,

he understood the mystical qualities of it and he then interpreted

that in a very individual and unique way, so,

I think that is difference.

Alexander Thomson was the last great architect of the Greek revival.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the first archaeological

surveys of Greece inspired a new classical building style.

In countries such as England, Germany and the United States,

Greek revival architecture became

a statement of civic virtue, rationality and democracy.

But in Scotland, there was another influence -

the intense debates and upheavals of the Presbyterian movement.

Presbyterianism, in 19th-century Scotland,

was the idea of the Old Testament over the New.

The New Testament was thought to be irredeemably Romanised.

Whereas the Old Testament was more primitive, less corrupted.

Now, architecturally speaking, this meant Greek...

Because Greek architecture is unto Western architecture as

-the old Testament is unto Scripture.

-The purer form....

The purer, the originating form.

And, of course, there's an extension here,

because having gone to the original Greek form, they even go further

than that, Thomson actually goes as far as Egypt.

As ancient Egypt.

And, of course, that's Israel and Egypt, you see,

and the Presbyterians regard themselves as the new Israelites.

That's why Thomson has this vast backward-looking skill.

Thomson was fascinated by the past.

But he couldn't have predicted the future.

An elder with the United Presbyterians,

he worshipped at Caledonia Road Church until his death.

But, a century later, the church fell into disuse,

as the Gorbals were cleared.

Taken over by the council, it was allowed to fall into disrepair.

In 1965, the empty building was torched by vandals.

Caledonia Road Church is a survivor of an earlier,

perhaps greater period in Glasgow's history,

and its creator might have taken some consolation from the fact that,

despite everything, this evocative ruin still stands, still speaks.

At the Mitchell Library, there are other tantalising relics of

Thomson's first great Greek-style building.

I'm meeting architect Fiona Sinclair to take a look at them.

Oh, what's this?

-Oh, these are lovely.

-Aren't they?

What we have here are some of the surviving drawings of

Alexander Thomson's Caledonia Road Church.

Now, the first thing I notice about that is it's got no tower.

It's remarkable, actually,

I imagine that this was his initial attempt to design

a church and then it's entirely possible that

he felt that it required more of a landmark feature,

a gateway from the south into the city.

-Almost like a beacon, in a sense.

-Exactly, exactly.

Again, this is a beautiful drawing,

which clearly shows he was working through a series of design ideas.

That's shorter than that one, isn't it?

Yes, it is far dumpier than as built.

And quite different, on top.

Not quite as elegant, but still pretty stunning.

Still pretty stunning.

And this lovely drawing, this is a working drawing, we are

so lucky to have this, the tower is, actually, on the other side.

So it is, he's moved it over. What are these there?

-These are fabulous, these are little sketches.

-Are they his doodles?

-I think they are.

-Thomson's doodles....

Absolutely beautiful,

this is what makes this drawing particularly important.

Done by the great man himself.

What was his work practice like, Fiona, any idea?

He wasn't greatly interested in running the business.

He wasn't terribly punctual,

apparently, which annoyed his clients.

But once he did settle down,

once he actually really began to concentrate,

there was no-one more committed, no-one more committed to the ideal,

and no-one more committed to producing something that was

as perfect as he could make it.

The mid-1850s were a time of immense creativity for Thomson.

But there was also a terrible heartbreak

that makes his achievements seem all the more astonishing.

In 1854, a waterborne cholera epidemic struck Glasgow.

It eventually killed thousands of people,

including four of Thomson's young children -

Agnes, Jean, George and Alexander.

But, somehow, Thomson kept going, kept creating - faith, family,

friendships and work, always the work, to carry him through.

Out of tragedy came this triumph.

Holmwood House.

Thomson's finest villa.

Completed in 1858,

this astonishing building still takes your breath away.

Designed for the wealthy Cathcart papermaker, James Couper,

it was more than a home, it was a show home,

built to entertain and impress clients.

Wow, this is going to be a treat.

Today, Holmwood is run by the National Trust for Scotland,

and volunteer Ian McGillivray is going to give me a tour.

-So, I'm taking you, David, into the parlour.

-It's a beautiful room.

It's the family room.

The circular window, Thomson says in his little notes,

is the ideal place for the lady to do her sewing,

which is what ladies were supposed to do, of course.

LAUGHTER

But when children came, this was their favourite room.

For, as you can see, a circular curtain track.

And you can imagine how children would use that 360.

Almost like you're creating a little theatre to play in.

Exactly so, yes.

But, Ian, this wasn't just a family home, was it?

It was more than that....

Thomson designed a house of two halves.

It's a house for a family to grow up in and it's

a house to entertain in, it's corporate entertaining in style.

-Shall we go and have a look?

-Yes, please.

We'll just go round the corner.

Like an Aladdin's cave.

Right, come away into the dining room, David,

into a much taller, additional storeys...

Now, this is very different.

And, behind you, the focus of the room.

The big, white, marble altarpiece, in bits at the moment,

but being recreated

so that even a bowl of spuds would steam up like

a sacrifice to the gods.

From Greece, stirring up the Trojan Wars,

in the frieze all around your head.

You've got the light coming from above.

And you've got the biggest sheets of plate glass in Europe,

at the other side. So the room is filled with light.

-It's very theatrical, isn't it?

-It is very theatrical.

So, it's the theatre of war, the theatre of architecture,

the theatre of food.

So, let's come up the stairs.

And you're coming into light, you're coming out of darkness into light.

This, again, the drama of the house.

So beautiful.

And here we come into the drawing room,

-which is a superb room.

-Wow.

-Even in its present state.

-Wow.

Now, this was the second half of the entertainment suite.

You'd be brought up after lunch, with your coffee and your liqueurs,

and probably the signing of the contract.

So, this was a very important room in the corporate entertainment game.

And you can imagine the effect it would have on somebody coming up.

Well, he'd be sitting imbibing a beautiful, living work of art.

Of course, you would sign

on the dotted line straightaway, wouldn't you?

One of the incredible things about Holmwood House

is that it's survived at all.

Like other Thomson buildings over the years, it's been altered,

knocked about, neglected.

That it still stands is thanks to a small band of enthusiasts,

including architectural historian Professor Gavin Stamp,

who, in 1991, began a campaign to save Holmwood.

Now, I'm highly critical of the civic administrations in this city,

decade after decade, who let its architectural heritage

go to ruin and disappear into the mists of time.

How difficult a challenge was it?

Well, it was difficult, because it was then occupied by

an order of nuns, who were selling up.

And a developer had an option on it and the plan was to cover

the grounds with blocks of flats.

Its future was uncertain, so we felt that it ought to be

rescued and ought to be in the hands of an organisation that

could look after it, like the National Trust for Scotland.

It's wonderful to come here now and see the restoration that's

slowly going ahead.

Gavin, what is the particular genius of this building?

This is the first picturesque Grecian villa, by that I mean that

it's asymmetrical, it's a building to be seen from various angles.

Before this, Grecian villas tended to be precisely symmetrical,

Thomson's asymmetrical villas

you see down at Cove and Kilcreggan,

they tend to be Italianate, or they're Gothic or they're baronial.

But having found his language, the Greek...

hence his nickname, Greek Thomson,

used it in a quite new way and making this an asymmetrical

Grecian villa, the first of its kind.

Holmwood House is a breakthrough building.

A brilliant fusion of different styles.

Thomson broke down the old, rigid constraints of Greek revival

architecture, and introduced a romantic freedom and honesty.

He hides nothing, look at the building from the outside,

and you understand what's inside.

Holmwood House is an astonishing, beautiful, radical one-off,

and, of course, it was built for a wealthy client,

but Thomson was no rich man's architect,

he had democratic ambitions,

and a burning desire to give architectural dignity to everyone,

no matter what their station.

Industrial Glasgow was synonymous with tenements.

A kind of urban housing practically unknown in England,

but familiar in Berlin, Barcelona, and New York.

And Thomson designed tenements, too.

Built in 1857, in what were then green fields along

Paisley Road West, Walmer Crescent is a hidden gem.

It's a tenement. But a tenement on a grand, even heroic, scale.

Thomson devoted as much attention to tenements like

Walmer Crescent as he did to his more exclusive villas and terraces.

In a brilliant architectural illusion,

he built a gentle curve into the bold, blocky facade.

Brenda Lillicrap lives on Walmer Crescent,

and has researched the history of this pioneering building.

Brenda, what attracted people here in the first place?

Cos, literally, you were out in the sticks,

in the countryside, you were not in the heart of the city.

You were...

I think it must have been the adverts that were run

in the Glasgow Herald at the time.

So there's copies of two typical ones there,

which really tout the place.

"To let with immediate entry,

"several houses with six to nine apartments,

"each beautifully situated facing the south and commanding

"an extensive view of the country around, are fitted

"with every convenience for a genteel family.

"The situation is dry and airy."

These were big, well-appointed residences when they were built,

although they were flats.

They had internal toilets, which was very unusual at the time.

You say they're very sizeable apartments.

Do they have servants' quarters?

Well, they didn't have servants' quarters.

There was only, in the upper flats, just an alcove in the kitchen,

but in the first census after the building was occupied,

so 1861, practically every household had servants.

The big flats, the ground floor and basement,

would typically have three servants and the upper flats have one

or two, and you could have 12 people living in one of the big flats

and eight, nine, ten living in one of the upper flats.

They were much more crowded than we are now,

even though they were obviously doing quite well.

While the residents of an upmarket tenement like Walmer Crescent

shared relatively spacious, healthy conditions,

it was a different experience for the very poorest.

The population of Glasgow quadrupled between 1800 and 1850.

Its overcrowded slums became notorious as the worst in Europe.

"I have seen wretchedness in some of its worst phases,

"both here and upon the continent,

"but until I visited the wynds of Glasgow,

"I did not believe that so much crime, misery and disease

"could exist in any civilised country.

"In the lower lodging houses, 10, 12, sometimes 20 persons

"of both sexes, all ages and various degrees of nakedness,

"sleep indiscriminately huddled together upon the floor.

"These dwellings are usually so damp, filthy and ruinous

"that no-one could wish to keep his horse in one of them."

Thomson was passionate about Glasgow

and passionate about improving the living conditions of its people.

He wanted to build a new, healthier kind of urban landscape.

And his inspiration came from an unlikely place.

Argyll Arcade in the heart of Glasgow -

built in 1827 by Thomson's former boss, John Baird,

it was one of the first covered shopping malls in Europe.

This glittering playground for the wealthy might have given Thomson

the idea for a radical new housing scheme for the poor.

Thomson's plan replicated Argyle Arcade on a huge scale,

with glass and iron canopies spanning the gap between tenements.

Beneath this sheltering sky,

ordinary people would be able to live and breathe.

It was a revolutionary humane vision,

but like most humane visions, it came to nothing.

There's a tragic irony to Thomson's career.

Of the many designs that this great architect did realise,

many have been lost forever.

His tenement on Queens Park Terrace was bulldozed as recently as 1981.

Cowcaddens Cross disappeared a decade earlier.

His churches have suffered even worse.

Chalmers Free Church in the Gorbals was turned into a factory

before being gutted by fire and then levelled in 1971.

And his extraordinary Queens Park Presbyterian Church

was destroyed by Luftwaffe incendiary bombs in 1943.

But there was one survivor.

St Vincent Street Church in the heart of Glasgow city centre.

Built in 1859, this massive monolith is jaw-droppingly impressive

on the outside.

And, inside, the surprises just keep on coming.

'Evan Macdonald is an elder in the Free Church congregation,

'who worship here.'

Evan, this is truly astounding.

I guess it's the word of God made manifest in stone and iron and wood.

-Well, Thomson, of course, was a man of faith.

-I know he was.

And his faith influenced his architecture, I think.

Thomson took some references from Solomon's temple

in the design of this building here.

His inspiration was the temple of Solomon.

Yes, but more than that, there's Egyptian, Assyrian

and Classical influences

so it's really an eclectic style, in many respects.

How does it feel to work in here and be an elder in this congregation?

Well, it's amazing, really, because this particular space,

although it's large, it's warm, it's welcoming,

and for singing, it's a good space.

Evan, I know as a performing artist that churches of any kind

are always the best for acoustics

cos they were built for the human voice.

-Exactly.

-When they were built, there was no amplification.

That's right, yes, exactly.

It just had to be the resonance of the human voice

and it's beautiful to play in places like this.

Hoy-hoy-hoy! Ho-ho-ho!

I mean, that's beautiful. That's an actor's dream.

CONGREGATION SINGS A HYMN

Twice a day on Sundays and twice during the week,

the church opens its doors to people from all over the city -

all over the world, in fact - to lift their voices in praise.

I know this place has an effect on me,

but what do churchgoers make of Thomson's masterpiece?

I think as soon as you walk in, it just takes your breath away.

It's a magnificent building.

The first time I saw it, I just...

I was thrilled and I was amazed at how beautiful it is.

It's just very sort of worshipful, in a way, to be worshipping God,

creator of beauty, in a beautiful building like this.

Alexander Thomson was a dreamy visionary,

a deep-thinking intellectual, a devout man of religion.

But there was another side to Glasgow's master builder.

Roger Guthrie first began salvaging

bits of Thomson buildings four to five years ago.

Today, he's collected a treasure trove of artefacts

that show how the architect was at the cutting edge

of engineering and technology.

Roger, what are these pieces of substantial glass?

Plate glass, quarter of an inch thick.

A new material, it starts off being used more frequently

in the 1830s, so in the 1850s,

Thomson's grasping these modern materials with great enthusiasm

and using large sheets of glass.

This is from an office building, it's etched glass,

and the second piece of glass

is from a very nice villa in Pollokshields.

I got that out the skip when they were refurbishing the building.

I took it home in the back of a 59 bus...

-In the dark of night when no-one saw you?

-No, no!

But Thomson's interesting because at St Vincent Street Church,

he uses plate glass like this and it's directly glazed

into the stone so there's no frames taking away from the light.

'Another industrial material which Thomson used enthusiastically

'was that ultimate Victorian innovation - decorative cast iron.'

What's the history of these pieces? That's extraordinary.

That's the end post for the adjoining piece of railing.

It's from the same building that the piece of etched glass came from

and it's a standard design

which Thomson designs very, very successfully.

He uses it in his own office,

and lots of other Glasgow architects used the same design.

But things like that were private patterns and only Thomson could use.

It's really quite a gorgeous wee bit of iron

and that would fit very well in a Gaudi house in Barcelona.

It wouldn't be out of place at all.

While all this beautiful metalwork was designed to be on show,

Thomson also used ground-breaking new iron technology

within the structure of his buildings.

So, David, this is a Robert McConnell compound beam,

invented in 1856.

That's just like a giant version of my Meccano set I had as a kid.

Yeah, except this could span, say, 12-15 metres.

You've got a visionary architect

who's using the contemporary industrial techniques

-to realise his vision.

-Yes.

So, in places like St Vincent Street Church,

there is one McConnell compound beam

and it carries the back gallery of the church,

which has got absolute clear span

with no columns, so he's quite a magician.

What comes across in talking to enthusiasts like Roger

is that Thomson was plugged into a city that was at the forefront

of technological innovation.

He didn't hanker after a pre-industrial past.

He wanted to build on the legacy of the ancient Greeks

and create his own very personal response

to the tumult and excitement of the time.

These are Thomson's Grecian Chambers on Sauchiehall Street.

Built to house shops and offices,

today they're the home of the Centre For Contemporary Arts.

But they're also a time capsule,

containing clues about Victorian Glasgow's explosive growth.

Walk through to the inner courtyard

and you discover an older building hidden behind Thomson's facade.

Architect Karen Pickering knows

this Russian doll of a structure inside-out.

Karen, we have this extraordinary situation

which is a very, very unique.

We have a building inside a building.

One half, the outer half, is Thomson,

and the inside isn't.

Yes, there's a really interesting story about the site.

So, the original building on the site was this villa,

and this was probably built in about 1825.

So imagine this is your front door,

and your garden slopes down a nice, south-facing garden.

Yes, because this must have been ground level.

-This is the front door of the villa.

-Yes.

We are now at least 1.5 storeys up, aren't we?

Can you explain how that came about?

So Sauchiehall Street at that time was beautiful, big villas

set within gardens.

It was very suburban.

Then, obviously, industrialisation happened,

and the city centre spread west.

And 1865 is when Greek Thomson appeared with the Grecian Chambers.

So what was Thomson's first task when he came here?

He built the Grecian Chambers,

but then what he did was excavated underneath the villa.

So the villa is actually just sitting on stilts

surrounded by other buildings.

Propped up by Thomson's cast-iron columns,

the CCA has room for everything from art exhibitions...

..to musical performances.

But while the Grecian Chambers are a hive of activity,

arguably the most spectacular of his commercial buildings

lies empty these days.

Built in 1873, the grid-like framework of the Egyptian Halls

contained everything from shops, to lecture rooms,

to exhibition spaces.

Today, the exotic building on Union Street is surrounded by scaffolding,

with only a printed plastic shroud hinting at what lies beneath.

But the fact that the Egyptian Halls have been vacated and stripped out

gives you a rare glimpse of the stone and iron skeleton

beneath Thomson's masterpiece.

Mark Baines is an architect, lecturer

and chair of the Alexander Thomson Society.

Mark, what is this fairly distressed interior?

Tell us about Thomson's way of working and his methods.

This tells us about his elemental approach to architecture.

It is about simplicity from which derives a great deal of complexity.

Basically, it is about columns and lintels.

Not arches, as he used in the early part of his career.

-Reminds me very much of Stonehenge.

-It is.

He described that as the most sophisticated piece of...

let's call it architectural engineering, that there was,

and that was centuries ago.

This is more stable, ultimately, than that.

Why is that stronger than this? I mean, I have always thought...

Because it is made up of three elements,

as opposed to a number of different and specially shaped elements.

But surely once those different and specially shaped pieces

are all put together,

they are conceivably just as strong as...

They spread the load this way, right?

So they have got to be buttressed.

Whereas the load in the lintels, in the beam, goes straight down.

And the whole thing relies on the keystone.

So what happens if you remove the keystone?

-Do you want me to show you?

-Yes, please.

-OK. Here we go.

The strength of Thomson's column-and-lintel framework

has enabled this incredible building to weather years of neglect.

But today, its future is in doubt.

John Addison is a conservationist and engineer

involved in the attempt to bring the Egyptian Halls back to life.

My history goes back about 18 years,

when I first got involved in this fantastic place.

And in that time, we have watched it deteriorate.

Not to the extent that it is falling down, or anything like that.

It just simply has degraded due to the amount of water

that got into it over the years.

How great a loss would it be to the city if this disappeared,

this building?

It would be a tragedy to lose the thing.

Because this glorious piece of Thomson architecture,

it reflects a great architect in a great city.

He was a technologist.

He was a thinker, he was a philosopher. Indeed, a poet.

This place represents him all the way through space and time.

John, do you think there is a viable future for this building?

There are lots of futures.

I think one of the key things is to bring everybody together

in Glasgow and make it work.

You know, for almost 150 years,

this building has stood in the heart of Glasgow,

and for all of those years, think of the thousands of people that

came here to work and produce and to learn.

And all that are left now are the ghosts and the whispers

of bygone days and a pile of rubble.

But if this building is ever lost to Glasgow, it would be a shame.

This is a vital part of

the industrial architectural heritage of this city.

But thankfully, there are a small group of hard-working people

determined to keep Thomson's legacy alive.

In 1861, Thomson moved his family to Moray Place,

a beautiful Greek-inspired terrace on Glasgow's Southside

that he designed himself.

KNOCK ON DOOR

-Hello, David.

-Hello, Andrew.

I'm meeting Andrew Greg, who lives at number one,

to find out how he's been restoring the architect's former home.

So, this is another Greek Thomson beaut.

-So, how was it when you moved in?

-All covered in paint.

If you think, there is 150 years of other varnishes and paints

and different fashions of interior decoration.

Layers and layers of wallpaper.

So one of the first things I was interested in finding out

is whether there were any remains of the original decoration,

cos we know this was Thomson's own house,

so it was very interesting to find out

whether there was anything left from his time.

What did you uncover?

So we started to peel the wallpaper off and found these friezes

and the original paintwork, the original colours.

So almost everything you see now is as it was in

Alexander Thomson's time.

-And is this ironwork original, Andrew?

-Yes, it is.

It was all painted white again,

and some poor man had to come and strip it with chemicals

and then by hand.

He said it was one of the worst jobs of his life.

-But it was worth it, because...

-It was well worth it.

You can see the detail, and they're beautiful now.

Oh, what a beautiful door through there, Andrew.

Another example in the dining room of Thomson's beautiful woodwork.

He chose the wood very carefully to be free of knots

and to have nice grain and a natural colour,

which is what really was important to him in his houses.

Now, you have uncovered a little patch on the wall there.

What is that?

Well, above, there is a tiny bit of the original decoration

of the dining room.

So I did get a professional painting restorer

to uncover that little fragment, that was very expensive,

but it shows, at least, the original colour scheme of this room.

But it does give you a lovely idea of what it was like

when Thomson and his family all lived here.

It clearly wasn't a show home.

It wasn't somewhere where he was showing off richness of decorations.

An ordinary, middle-class house.

Number one Moray Place is different from so many of Thomson's buildings.

It is surprisingly modest, restrained,

and, for me, it is especially moving

that it is being so lovingly restored,

because this is where Thomson ended his days.

In the winter of 1874 to '75,

the asthma that had plagued Thomson all his life grew steadily worse.

He had made vague plans to visit Italy

to try and improve his health,

but realised now that he had left it too late.

He was never to make that foreign trip.

On 22 March 1875,

Alexander Thomson died, here in his home in Moray Place.

He was 57 years old.

Thomson left behind an astonishing collection of buildings.

Unique one-offs which challenged the conventions

of so much Victorian architecture.

But he also left behind intriguing plans and sketches

for buildings he never got to realise.

Fiona, I believe this is one of Thomson's last drawings. Am I right?

Yes. He was working on this drawing something like two days

before his death.

In fact, his biographer, Thomas Gildard,

rather dramatically referred to him having been working on this

when the pencil fell from his hand.

-How dramatic. But what a way to go.

-Very dramatic.

-Yes.

And what was it for? Where was it for?

The thinking is, it was a competition entry

for Annan Town Hall.

-Oh, wow, what is this?

-Oh, this is lovely.

-Isn't it?

I think the thinking is that

this is a combined church and manse at Balfron.

-Where he came from.

-Where he was born.

And he was, of course, a devout Presbyterian,

he was devoutly religious, very moral, very spiritual.

And this is kind of an example of

his continuing commitment to the church.

-Oh!

-This is lovely.

This is an absolutely remarkable, unbuilt...

Yes, but you could imagine coming across it,

riding through the deserts of north Africa

and suddenly in the heat haze, in the distance,

this extraordinary, beautiful, captivating building

appears like a mirage before you.

So this was his proposed design for the Albert Memorial in London?

That is the conclusion that has been drawn.

It is far more sizeable than

the final Gothic shrine to the Prince Consort

that was designed by George Gilbert Scott,

who, of course, ultimately secured the commission.

Tell me, Thomson suffered from being from the provinces, didn't he?

He was slightly looked down upon.

I think so.

In addition to which he railed against the Gothic style,

which was the popular style of the period, particularly in England.

And I think that made him deeply unfashionable.

MUSIC: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach

Glasgow University on Gilmour Hill,

rising high over the city skyline

that represents the triumph of the Gothic over the Greek.

It was built by that most fashionable of London architects,

George Gilbert Scott.

And Thomson hated it.

He said its mock medievalism made it a laughing stock.

But who was listening?

By the time the university was completed, Thomson was dead.

And it seemed as if his vision was dead, too.

He had a few disciples.

But the truth was that Gothic, and not Greek, was the fashion.

And for the next few decades, medievalism would rule.

But perhaps, just perhaps,

it might be Thomson's vision that ultimately endured.

A generation after Thomson, a group of international architects,

including Frank Lloyd Wright in America,

Mies van der Rohe in Germany

and Le Corbusier in France

began to think about new ways of designing and building

that chimed with his elemental philosophy.

I think Thomson recognised the emergence of what I would call

a modern architecture.

Not modernism, because I hate that word,

but a modern architecture.

Freethinking, using classical principles,

but not being a slave to the aesthetics.

And he's using and adapting the language,

the architectural language of his day.

That is the magic of the man.

That is why I admire him.

There is an argument that Thomson anticipated certain aspects

of 20th-century architecture.

He is aware that his own time

hadn't produced an identifiable style.

You find him saying "castaway archaeology"

and, "Let's not be dependent on the past."

So he created his own extraordinary style of architecture

rooted in the past, but yet, something new.

There is one last Thomson building I want to visit.

A building which I think perfectly represents

that radical fusion of the old and the new.

At first sight, this looks like a big detached villa.

It has Thomson's stamp all over it.

The shallow pitch roof, geometric carvings,

and, of course, not an arch in sight.

But come with me for a second.

It's a mirror image of the other side.

But this is, in fact, a suburban semidetached.

Now, what Thomson did brilliantly

was to give each house its own separate entrance,

with the back of each home

looking like an organic part of the other.

It is not an optical illusion -

it's magic.

-David.

-Evelyn, hello.

-Welcome.

-Lovely to meet you.

Thank you for agreeing to show me around.

'Dr Evelyn Silber owns one half of this inspired building in Langside,

'and she has kindly offered to show me around.'

-Lead on.

-Right, come on through.

Oh... Wow.

The interiors are just as beautiful and extraordinary as the exteriors.

Yep, he really liked doing his decoration

and echoing some of the things that are outside inside as well.

So, Evelyn, for you, what is so special about this house?

Well, I fell for it the first time I walked through the door.

The scale of the rooms is just wonderful,

and the sense of craftsmanship

and the colour and the way all those things interact.

You are always aware when you wake up in the morning,

you live in this really beautiful building,

and every time you walk into a room,

it strikes you just how lovely it is.

You have whetted my appetite.

-You're going to show me the rest of the house?

-Yes, let's get upstairs.

-So, here we are.

-Oh! THEY CHUCKLE

Beautiful!

This is quite, quite breathtaking.

-Stunning. This is your living room!

-Yeah.

-Look at the windows.

-It is amazing, isn't it?

180 degrees, windows right the way round.

And that, in a way, makes me think of his sort of protomodernity,

because a modern house, a lot of people would want

in their reception rooms an enormous amount of light.

And yet here he is in 1855, 1856, doing the same thing

with a whole full length of the wall.

-He was a genius ahead of his time, wasn't he?

-Yeah.

-He was a true visionary.

-Absolutely.

Alexander "Greek" Thomson's nickname was a misnomer.

He was equally "Egyptian" Thomson,

"Assyrian" Thomson, "Indian" Thomson.

Definitely "Modern" Thomson.

In fact, he was hard to put in a box,

impossible to pin down and categorise.

But his work anticipated much of the architecture

that surrounds us today.

And this inspirational, intensely creative and original man

left behind another more personal legacy.

A few years after Thomson's death,

his friends met to discuss how best to celebrate his achievements.

As a tribute to a man who had never been abroad,

they decided to set up a travel scholarship

for young artists and architects.

And one of the first to win that award

was a rising young star from the East End of Glasgow,

Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Thomson and Mackintosh -

two great international architects from a great international city

that has never embraced or supported its native genius.

He is hugely important, nationally and internationally.

I think Thomson ranks amongst the greatest.

He's a towering figure.

Great mind, as well as being a highly original architect.

I'd put him top.

He was a profound thinker, a great dreamer.

He had this remarkable capacity

for looking beyond the earthly, the worldly.

You've got to acknowledge that he is one of the greats.