Thursday 4 October 2012

Glasgow - Part 2

And so on to more clocks in Glasgow....

First stop, the Ramshorn Theatre in Ingram Street.


This is the view from the windows of the Premier Inn, looking across the graveyard to the back of the building. A graveyard? A church-like tower? No surprises that this was originally St David's church (also known as Ramshorn Kirk) of 1824-26.


A blue plaque provides further proof of this:


The next clock is to be found on the premises of Carmichael Solicitors, on the junction of High Street and Duke Street.



A much more modern building, of 1985, on the corner of Trongate and Stockwell Street include this simple clock. Clearly this part of Glasgow likes to get ahead of the change back to GMT as it was almost exactly an hour slow.


 

Up to Royal Exchange Square off Queen Street. No prizes for guessing that the imposing building which is now the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) was once the Royal Exchange. The clock faces on the different sides of the tower considerably different in design, and are quite difficult to photograph from street level due to the tight nature of the site.



The clocks in this posting are in a random order. If you try to see the clocks in the order that I have shown them here you either would be quite mad or an exercise freak as you would be walking a lot of unnecessary miles.

So next up for no logical reason is the People's Palace in Glasgow Green (from which you will know from Part 1 you can see the clocks on St Andrews and the Merchant's Steeple).

The building was constructed in 1893-98, and includes some fascinating exhibitions on Glasgow life.


The clock is on the rear of the main building, facing into the botanical garden. The staircase towers and the balcony on which the clock sits are later additions to the building of 1988 - 90.


I assume that this filled-in opening on the rear of the balcony was the clock's original location.


Finally for this posting, we are off the the other end of Stockwell Street, and to the local branch of Argos.

This looks like a clock in that it has the numerals I to XII in the usual circular clockwise pattern, but closer inspection reveals that there are no hands. An identical sculpture on the adjacent wall, but this time with weather-vane type features, would seem to confirm that the "clock" is purely a decorative feature. But hey-ho, it is a nice feature, and not what you would normally expect on a branch of Argos.

 
For more Glasgow clocks (and clock-like features that are not really timepieces unless they are incredibly cunning in the way they portray time) you will have to wait until Part 3.

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