June 4, 2021
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This venue housing four exhibitions for Glasgow International 2024 (1), is the former Adelphi Terrace Public School, designed by Thomas Lennox Watson (1850-1920), and opened in 1894. It is a Category B listed building, located on the south bank of the Clyde, opposite Glasgow Green. Watson also designed other schools for The School Board of Glasgow, including Garnetbank School on Renfrew Street, which is located near The Glasgow School of Art.
Adelphi Terrace Public School was part of a wider building programme undertaken by The School Board of Glasgow who built 75 schools over the period 1874-1916. Such a profusion of schools was due to The Education (Scotland) Act of 1872, which made schooling free and compulsory for five to thirteen year olds and transferred control of those schools from church to state. Until that point 40% of the school population had not received any education. The new schools were to accommodate an estimated 35000 children. (2)
Adelphi Terrace Public school follows an architectural layout found in many of the schools, with classrooms grouped around a central atrium and galleries linking the segregated boys’ and girls’ stairs at each end of the building. The main entrance to 5 Florence St is the ‘Boys Door’, with the ‘Girls Door’ round the opposite side of the building. The tympana (recessed triangular space) on the side of the building facing the River Clyde, show masks of a pharaoh and an Elizabethan woman. (3)
The School Board of Glasgow’s large building programme involved commissioning (all white, all male) architects including Charles Rennie Mackintosh, David Thomson, Honeyman and Keppie, H.E. Clifford and McWhannell & Rogerson. Earlier buildings are yellow sandstone, whilst later are red sandstone. Architectural innovations included separate entrances, staircases and playgrounds for boys and girls. The words ‘Boys’, ‘Girls’ and often ‘Infants’ are carved over entrances, on gate posts and, in the case of Golfhill, in the east end of Glasgow, spelt out in the wrought ironwork of the gate. On the majority of the buildings the school names and ‘School Board of Glasgow’ have been relief carved in the stone. The words ‘School Board of Glasgow’ are engraved on the frieze running along the top of the building at 5 Florence Street. Some of the bolder architectural aesthetics, in particular Mackintosh’s Martyrs’ and Scotland Street, influenced other schools, such as the window details of St Rollox.
The schools over the ensuing century or more since their construction, have had different fates, with only 31 remaining. The School Board of Glasgow buildings fall into four different categories: those which were demolished; those currently vacant; those that have had change of use into community or business centres, Council-run social services, residential flats, studios or museums; and those which have remained as schools.
Latterly, 5 Florence Street was an annex for the Glasgow College of Printing Annex (until 2010). The building is now owned and being restored by Urban Office, who will hire rooms out as work spaces and studios. Urban Office is an architect led development company who transform forgotten buildings, reinventing space and re-purposing old materials for new uses.
Footnotes
(1) Too Much (too little, too late), curated by Giulia Gregnanin and Understate Projects Ltd; Are We Reading Closely? (ll), curated by GSA Exhibitions
(2) ‘The School Board of Glasgow 1873-1919’, James M. Roxburgh, University of London Press Ltd, 1971
(3) Historic Scotland entry, Source ID: 377210