Tinderbox: The Bell launches a new map of Glasgow's many fires

You’ve heard the line about Glasgow’s heritage buildings. That, though they may have a proud history, their future is bound to be an inglorious one. They’ll catch fire in suspicious circumstances, then be demolished, or turned into student flats, or both.

The Glasgow Fire Theory, as I call it, is so ubiquitous that Reddit has a special flair (a tag attached to a post so people know what it’s about) called “Glasgow’s burning. Insert student flat joke.”

But of course, it’s no joke. I’ve been looking through news coverage of the second fire at Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building which, in 2018, gutted one of Glasgow’s most beloved structures and one of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s most important legacies. At the time, The Mack was undergoing an extensive renovation following an earlier fire in 2014, caused by the unfortunate combination of expanding foam and the hot part of a projector.

In the coverage you can see tears and hands covering mouths as faces glowed orange from the blaze. “Heartbreaking”, “just sad” and “mortifying” were words used by locals. The Mack was badly burnt, and remains so now, barely visible under bandages of scaffolding. If you ask people what makes them most angry about Glasgow, this is what they’ll often point to – with seemingly no accountability as another beautiful building goes up in smoke.

With every conflagration there are whispers that there’s slightly more to things than meets the eye. Could owners, wanting to escape the costly regulations of looking after a listed building, be behind it this time? Here at The Bell, it’s one of the things people most often ask us to look into.

Of course, to prove foul play is extremely difficult. Fires are, by their nature, destructive, often leaving little evidence behind. But I wanted to start by exploring whether the premise – that Glasgow is unusually flammable – is actually correct. Are fires a suspiciously common occurrence? To answer that, I realised I was going to need a map. After all, a map helped John Snow work out what was causing cholera in 185os London. Could it help solve what's happening with heritage buildings in 21st century Glasgow?

I've been chipping away at this ever since joining The Bell. The idea is for it to be the definitive record of important public buildings that have gone up in flames in this city. I’ve so far found 36 by looking at the last 25 years alone.

The map is below, have a root around the city and hover over the points to see who owned the property when the fire happened. Then let me know – are there any I’ve missed? Please share it far and wide – the idea is to build a comprehensive picture so the more input we can get from right across the city the better.

So, what patterns start to emerge when we trawl through the data?