On the top landing of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed Martyrs’ School in Townhead, Niall Murphy, director of Glasgow City Heritage Trust (GCHT), is gazing up at the dark timber roof with awe. He is transfixed by the carved motif on the central uprights of the trusses — “the tree of knowledge?” he suggests — and the distinctive pegged brackets which line the tops of the pale orange wall. “They look like birds,” he points out, and so they do: like tiny pairs of doves bobbing on their perches, high above the central hall.

When Martyrs’ was first built in 1895, and for decades afterwards, these “doves” kept watch over 1,000 primary children as they clattered around their classrooms and up and down the worn stone stairs, which still bear their footprints.

Back then, Townhead was a thriving urban neighbourhood, jam-packed with tenements, which had grown up around Glasgow Cathedral. Its warren of smaller streets, reminiscent of Edinburgh’s Old Town, were dominated by 19th Century buildings: the Royal Infirmary, the Blind Asylum and Collins publishing, which was founded by an evangelical Christian to produce bibles.

Mackintosh grew up at the heart of this neighbourhood. He was 27 when architects Honeyman and Keppie were commissioned to design a replacement for the existing school, by then bursting at the seams, on the very street where he was born. Legend has it he pushed for a leading role in the project — a chance to stamp his mark on his own backyard — then experimented with the themes and patterns that run through his later work.

The result is a thing of simple beauty: a compact building with a three-storey central hall surrounded by plain, but light-filled, classrooms. Outside, Mackintosh makes his presence felt in the art nouveau flourishes on either side of the “girls” and “boys” doors and the graceful curved weave of the stonework round some of the windows.

Martyrs’ School was commissioned in 1895 Martyrs’ School was commissioned in 1895 (Image: Colin Mearns)Inside, the hall is flanked on all three storeys by large arches, each filled with gridded windows and delineated with shiny green tiles. The landing balconies are supported by sinuous green braces, which unfold like the leaves on an aspidistra, and the whole building is studded with quirky details — strangely shaped corbels, uneven ceramic squares, floral carvings — which are all the more beautiful for their apparent randomness.

“You can see the early Japanese influence in the roof brackets,” says Stuart Robertson, director of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society (CMRS) who is showing me, Murphy and Labour MSP Paul Sweeney around. “If you look at the Helensburgh [and Gareloch] Conservative Club, Martyrs’ and the art school, Mackintosh is constantly developing ideas, refining them, so they become more stylish and formed.”

Martyrs’ was built on a budget — around £9,500 — his creativity apparently sharpened by the financial constraints.

“Imagine what it must have meant to a working class child to be educated in these surroundings,” says Sweeney, “how it must have widened their horizons.”

It's been a long time since children were taught in this building. In the 1960s, Townhead was pulverised to make way for the M8. Martyrs’ — named in commemoration of two men hanged for Protestant heresy outside the Cathedral — lay directly in the path of the bulldozers. It was saved by a public campaign, which successfully pushed for the motorway to be slightly rerouted.

On the Parson Street side, its high windows still look out on St Mungo’s, a grand gothic revival church which survived the slum clearances. A pathway down towards Stirling Road is lined with trees whose red leaves glow in the late autumn sun and “Mockintosh” lamps installed to play on the architect’s popularity.

But the motorway obliterated Barony Street on its east side, robbing it of its playground and leaving it stranded on an outcrop above the interchange like a medieval fortress. These days the best view of its cupolas and finials is from the bridge that links Parson Street and Castle Street.

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Martyrs’ closed as a school in 1973. Since then it has served as a museum, offices for staff displaced during the restoration of Kelvingrove Art Gallery, and, latterly, the home of Glasgow City Council’s Social Work Leaving Care Services. It has lain empty for more than a year since the social work department moved out.

Then, a fortnight ago, Robertson discovered the council had put the Grade A building up for sale, without telling the CRMS, the GCHT or the Glasgow Building Preservation Trust (GBPT), all of whom would have liked the opportunity to have discussed potential alternatives.

This despite the fact the GCHT and the GBPT are key partners in the Built Heritage Commission set up earlier this year with a £1.7m fund to try to bring vacant buildings back into use. It is understood the commission has been looking at key sites, but Martyrs’ was not on the list.

“I was furious,” Robertson says. “When I met the council leader Susan Aitken a year ago, she assured us we would be involved in heritage decisions, but I only found out through other people and now we’re being told it will go to a closing date.

“My fear is that it will be sold to a developer who land banks it and leaves it to rot or burn, like so much else of the city’s built heritage.”

Robertson has come to Martyrs’ to check on its current condition (outside, there is some damage to stonework and the dreaded buddleia has taken hold; inside, there is some evidence of cracking and water ingress) and in the hopes some plan can still be hatched to secure its future.

“More than half a century on [from the re-routing of the motorway], we are trying to come up with another rescue plan,” he says.

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What is happening to Martyrs’ School is a microcosm of what is happening across the city. Glasgow City Council is strapped for cash. So are all local authorities. But Glasgow has specific problems that compound its malaise: a disproportionately large number of historic buildings combined with a low population (and therefore tax base), an equal pay debt, areas of profound poverty, and no national funding for its nationally acclaimed museums and art galleries.

As David Cook, director of the GBPT, points out both the UK and the Scottish governments have also put their regeneration funding on hold.

“We understand the council is in a position where it is going to have to dispose of some of its assets and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the private sector taking on historic buildings,“ he says. “But it needs to be done in the right manner, and that means making sure whoever buys it is in a position to take care of it.”

Paul Sweeney with Stuart Robertson and David CookPaul Sweeney with Stuart Robertson and Niall Murphy (Image: Colin Mearns) The council insists the building’s listed status, in addition to conditions it is attaching to the sale, will protect it. Those conditions involve “[ensuring] that the development plan is clearly understood and that dates can be set for work to commence.”

Sweeney is sceptical. “Well, the council is the biggest owner of listed buildings at risk in the city, so its own standards of maintenance of these historic assets is ropey to say the least,” he says, “and the extent to which it is able to effectively police third parties is equally questionable.”

He points to the former Prince of Wales Hospice building in Carlton Place which has gone on fire twice since it was vacated in 2018 and the demolition of the art deco facade of the ABC 02 in Sauchiehall Street after it was burned down in the second of the art school blazes.

“The council has been lacklustre about pursuing enforcement orders against the owners of heritage buildings,” he says. “The reality is developers can buy them with all sorts of grandiose ideas of what they are going to do, but then they don’t have the finances to see it through.”

Those passionate about Glasgow’s heritage are particularly sensitive about Mackintosh’s legacy because of the devastating loss — or squandering — of the art school, and because of the dichotomy between the commodification of the architect, whose designs grace everything from tote bags to tea towels, and the failure to protect his physical legacy.

Robertson says Mackintosh is a cash cow for Glasgow, just as Frank Lloyd Wright is for Chicago and Gaudi is for Barcelona. The 2006 Mackintosh Festival brought in £6m, and yet Scotland seems cavalier about the state of his buildings.

“I remember once discussing the marketing that was going on around Mackintosh with the then Visit Scotland chairman Peter Lederer,” he says. “He asked me if I had any comments. I said: ‘Yes, the marketing is great, but what’s the point in the marketing if the buildings aren’t being looked after.’ He was horrified and said Macintosh was just as important [to Scotland’s tourism] as its castles.”

The destruction of the art school — the two blazes, the lack of any apparent accountability and the inertia in building a replica or replacement — is a running sore, both physically (six years on from the second fire, the top end of Sauchiehall Street still looks like a bombsite) and on the city’s self-esteem.

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Since then, the Lighthouse — formerly the Glasgow Herald building — has closed to the public, with no reopening date set and the Willow Tea Rooms, hit by the double whammy of Covid and the fires, had to be bailed out by the National Trust.

At the time of my Martyrs’ visit, the Glasgow heritage Twittersphere was freshly outraged by moves to plant a new tree directly outside the tearooms as part of the Avenues project, obstructing, it was claimed, a clear view of its facade. “This is really bad planning,” vented one poster. “In Brussels you are not even allowed to park in front of historic buildings.”

The council is returning Scotland Street School Museum to its original use as a nursery (with a digital learning hub and part-time museum) — a project which has been welcomed but was initially hampered by a lack of expertise. After plans drawn up without the aid of a conservation architect were published, Robertson wrote to all the councillors in the area to complain. In particular he was appalled by the plan to create two new doorways in the south façade which he described as “like vandalising a work of art.”

Though the council does not employ any in-house conservation architects, it later commissioned Fiona Sinclair to create a conservation plan for Scotland Street School. She is also mentoring some of the in-house architects so they will be better placed to carry out future projects.

Scotland Street School was Mackintosh’s second last major commission (only the second phase of the art school was later). It showcases his mastery of the interplay between light and space.

Initial roof and stonework repairs have already been carried out, while a second phase, for which Historic Environment Scotland funding has already been secured, is being finalised.

In its statement, the council stresses that “in the last decade or so” it has spent around £280m on heritage buildings and projects in Glasgow. But this oft-quoted figure riles Robertson, who says much of that spending has been inflated by their failure to carry out regular maintenance.

In 2015, the CRMS was commissioned to carry out an assessment of all the Mackintosh buildings - public and private - it could access. It handed a list of recommendations about maintenance and repairs to the owners; but it had no power to ensure they were carried out.

Its report for Martyrs’ highlighted the need for urgent work to the cupolas, external doors and windows and the stonework on the west wall, but noted most of the works recommended were “modest relative to the scale, and the overall condition of the building is fair.”

Interior of Martyrs’ School on Parson Street, Townhead, GlasgowInterior of Martyrs’ School on Parson Street, Townhead, Glasgow (Image: Colin Mearns)A few years after it was formed in 1973, the CMRS leased, then bought, Mackintosh’s Queen’s Cross Church from the Church of Scotland, which had merged this congregation with Ruchill’s, turning it into its headquarters and a successful arts and music venue. “We do annual roof repairs to make sure there is no water ingress or other damage,” Robertson says.

He points to other cities which, he says, place greater value on their architecture: Barcelona, for example, and Brussels which — rather than offloading its crumbling art nouveau buildings — is investing in them. In 2022, it bought the Victor Horta-designed van Eetvelde house so it could be reopened to the public, and earlier this month the city celebrated the completion of the two and half year restoration of the facade of Horta’s Hôtel Solvay.

Unlike Glasgow, however, Brussels benefits from the existence of Beliris, a collaboration between the Brussels-Capital Region (BCR) and the federal government, which provided most of the money for these ventures.

With Glasgow more financially constrained, Murphy suggests it should institute a tourist levy similar to the one being introduced in Edinburgh and direct it towards the upkeep of the city’s best buildings “because that is what tourists are coming to see”.

Sweeney sees the selling off of Martyrs’ as part of a larger problem: the failure to address the mess which arose from the scything of the M8 through Townhead and the cancelling of the east flank of the inner ring road, which left it with a outsized, over-engineered junction it no longer needed.

“If you come off the motorway here, you arrive at a no man’s land of car parks and slip roads,” he says. “That whole area from the Provand’s Lordship — Glasgow’s oldest house — to the Royal Infirmary to St Mungo’s Church, it’s like a twilight zone because of the weird legacy of road building and cancelling that has never been addressed.

Standing on the motorway bridge is a dizzying experience — down below, a constant stream of cars spinning around loops and gliding along slip roads — while a walk around the blocks close to Martyrs’ is mainly car parks overshadowing a few shards of old Glasgow, such as the pink granite William Annan memorial fountain which sits outside the Howgait pub.

“The other day I was at the Seafarers’ Service at the Cathedral and passed squads of Spanish tourists standing in the midst of this dereliction talking about the Provand’s Lordship,” Sweeney says, “and yet, if it was rebuilt sensitively, it could be a really vibrant quarter.”

Robertson is taking photographs of marks on the ceiling now — tell-tale signs of water ingress — and talking about his hopes for the future. Earlier in the day, David Cook had also visited. Cook says the GBPT is trying to find a community use that would allow it to take over Martyrs’.

In its 40-year history, the GBPT has been involved in rescuing many old buildings, starting with the Briggait, the A-listed former fish market, which it helped repurpose as a salubrious shopping centre and venue space in the 1980s (and part of which was later turned into the WASPs studios). Other successes include Pollokshaws West Railway Station, the Kelvingrove Bandstand and Castlemilk Stables.

Interior of Martyrs’ School on Parson Street, Townhead, GlasgowInterior of Martyrs’ School on Parson Street, Townhead, Glasgow (Image: Colin Mearns) One disincentive for developers to renovate old buildings is that, under current legislation, all repairs or maintenance are subject to 20% VAT, while new-builds are exempt. Many listed buildings are mothballed until sufficient funds can be raised for their repair or in the hopes they fall into such a state of dereliction they must be demolished.

The way the GBPT typically works is that it will acquire a property from the council either by lease or purchase (at the district valuer’s valuation) with an end user in mind. After carrying out the renovations, it will sell it to the end user for its new value. This allows the organisation to legitimately reclaim the VAT on the construction site.

This time the model would be slightly different because the building is already on the market, but Cook remains optimistic a solution can be found.

He doesn’t deny there are problems in parts of the city, but prefers to focus on the GBPT’s success stories: such as the recent rescuing of the Victorian Parkhead School. The school had been vacant since 1990 and was on the buildings at risk register but now belongs to Parkhead Housing Association, which is running it as a community hub.

At Martyrs’ it’s time to leave. I cast one longing look back at the tiled archways and the sleek timber rafters, as we are ushered out the door, and cross my fingers that one day soon it will once more be filled with with noise and bustle.