Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Glasgow Live
Glasgow Live
National
David McLean

Glasgow's unbuilt 'vision of the future' that would've dominated the city centre

We've witnessed no shortage of lofty buildings being constructed in Glasgow in recent years, but nothing on the scale of the unbuilt Skyhouse.

Proposed back in 2002 for the brownfield site at the former College Goods Yard off Glasgow's High Street, the 100-metre-tall vision of the future would have dwarfed everything else around it.

The Skyhouse, which was the brainchild of London Eye architects Marks Barfield, would have contained up to 500 homes with sub-tropical sky gardens on the 10th floor and incorporated retail units and well-being facilities.

READ MORE: The unbuilt Charles Rennie Mackintosh projects that we'd love to see constructed in Glasgow

The concept was dreamt up to tackle the housing crisis in Britain's cities, offering affordable housing fit for the 21st century, with individual apartments tipped to be offered for as little as £70,000.

The skyscraper would have used eco-friendly technology, utilising renewable sources such as wind and solar power to generate energy for tenants. On-site recycling and high-quality insulation to keep energy costs down was also envisaged.

At 30 to 50 stories tall, the development was on the scale of the kind of buildings you would see in downtown Manhattan and would have dominated Glasgow's historic heart as the tallest building in all of Scotland.

And it was for this very reason that the development was very swiftly rejected by Glasgow council chiefs, who felt it would have been out of keeping with the general cityscape while also explaining that their quota for new residential developments had already been met.

There was also a general feeling that multi-storey housing was no longer viable in a city where post-war high rises had fallen out of favour.

With their Skyhouse plans for Glasgow refused, architects David Marks and Julie Barfield would try their luck in other cities, including Edinburgh and Liverpool, but would also fail to convince local authorities that theirs was the right vision for the future.

The London Eye remains the most famous of Marks Barfield's most notable works.

Sign up to our Glasgow Live nostalgia newsletters for more local history and heritage content straight to your inbox

READ NEXT

Remembering Glasgow's slightly bonkers street market Schipka Pass

What the cast of 1999 Glasgow cult classic Ratcatcher are up to now

19 things that ruined your day if you were a Glasgow teen in the noughties

Recalling Buchanan Street's NAAFI that became Glasgow's first casino

Glasgow's great department stores of yesteryear that are gone but not forgotten

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.