Vanished Glasgow: The Grand Hotel at Charing Cross

But they were out of luck. Some had tears in their eyes when told, with regret, that the room had already been booked. Others decided to take any room in the hotel so long as they could get a wee look into their honeymoon room.

The Grand had for decades been a Glasgow landmark before it closed in October 1968. It was subsequently demolished to make way for the new inner-city ring road - or "the new road which will come up from the Kingston Bridge", as the Evening Times’s Jack House wrote that month as he affectionately marked the end of the hotel.

The Grand, which had been opened in 1878 by one John Duncanson, was substantial. It had 105 rooms, a popular ballroom, a cocktail bar, and no fewer than nine function rooms.

The M8 in Glasgow: Should it be scrapped?

A remarkable number of people had not yet realised that the place was closing for ever. One family had wanted to book for a wedding scheduled for April 1969. When informed that the hotel would not in fact be around then, they brought the event forward to October 1968 - just in time before the bulldozers moved in.

The Grand had in its time been one of the city's two poshest hotels, the other being the Windsor, at the top of the St Vincent Street hill. They had vied with each other, especially during the great Glasgow Exhibitions of 1888, 1901, and 1911.

Sauchiehall Street was sealed off while demolition work was carried out on the Grand Hotel in 1969 (Image: Newsquest)

“Perhaps the Grand’s greatest days,” House recalled, “was when it was run by the Glasgow caterers, R. and S.W. Kerr. These were the days when the sprigs of West of Scotland society held big, snobbish assemblies. The bachelors would hold their assembly in the Grand and take over the whole of two floors. They would be followed by the spinsters, and the spinsters’ ball in the Grand was the Glasgow equivalent of being a debutante.”

Prodigy son. BBC SSO, Studio One, Glasgow

in time the Grand became less of a society place and more of a commercial hotel. In 1942 it was turned into the American Red Cross centre in Glasgow. After the war it was purchased by the United Co-operative Building Society, at a cost of £115,000, and work began on refurbishing the Grand.

There were ugly scenes at the hotel, however, in August 1946, when workmen forcibly evicted 30 families who were squatting at the premises. The families, from Maryhill, Springburn and the Gorbals, were turned out into the street. "There were distressing scenes as women, many of them carrying babies, wept and shouted". One of them, a widow of 26, had four young children with her.

The Grand enjoyed renewed success as a hotel under the U.C.B.S, but in early 1968 it was bought by Glasgow Corporation in early 1968, with UCBS renting it back from them.

Daniel E Pediani, a well-known Scottish hairdresser, during a hairdressing competition at the Grand Hotel, Glasgow, in March 1948 (Image: Newsquest)

An Evening Times reader, James McGowan, wrote to say he had worked as a pageboy at the Grand, beginning in early 1914.

“I remember seeing the young German waiters leaving the hotel with their cases en route for the Fatherland, and the manager, who was also German, wishing them all the best on their journey home,” he recalled. “I often wondered later how many of them survived the war.”

Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, in the 1950s, looking west towards Charing Cross. Scene shows tramcars and the Beresford Hotel and, in the distance, the Grand Hotel (Image: Newsquest)

In March 1969, demolition workers in the partly-demolished Grand had to run to safety when staircases and some inside walls crashed to the ground. “I was standing on top of the west corner,” one said, “when I heard somebody shouting ‘run, run!’”