Four days left to save Trongate 103

Four days left to save the arts hub Trongate 103 — by Evie Glen

Tenants at (yet another) ill-fated Glasgow cultural hub, Trongate 103, have banded together against their landlord, City Property, in a last-ditch push to save the centre from “immediate jeopardy” before their current leases end on Friday. 

On 25 February, all art and charity tenants of Trongate 103 had their leases terminated by their landlord, City Property, the council’s arm’s length property company. They were given just four weeks to leave the building or sign a new lease. A spokesperson for the local quango was quick to douse the fiery public outrage, stating it was “standard process” for leases to be terminated so that “new agreements can be offered”. The new terms? Fourfold rent increases and “uncapped service charges and repair liabilities” approaching ten times former rates. The public outcry was loud, coming only a month after the CCA’s collapse. Commentators decried the decision as tantamount to “arty Glasgow dying before our eyes”.

In 2023, the council commissioned an independent study to assess the financial sustainability of Trongate 103. In other words, how much money can City Property make from rent without bankrupting its Trongate tenants? The outcome of the study suggested that City Property could recoup running costs for the building via service charges and eventual rent increases to £2 per square foot. But, City Property seem to have disregarded this, as the new deals are set at £4 per square foot in rent, and a whopping £385,000 in estimated service charges, which are uncapped and exclude potential repair work. This new service charge figure was only revealed to tenants on 13 March, just a fortnight before the new leases had to be signed. In total, rent plus service charges under the new lease would total £700,000 to be shared between the seven cultural tenants according to size. This amounts to £560,000 more than they were paying previously. 

Ailie Rutherford, an artist who has held a studio in Trongate 103 since 2014 put it bluntly when she told us, “we literally do not have anywhere to go on the first of April”. 

A broken promise

Now, with only four days to go, differing approaches by tenants to save their companies — such as film charity GMAC pressing the nuclear media button by declaring the situation “cultural vandalism” — have had the same response: City Property won’t budge. That’s despite a petition to save Trongate 103 garnering over 7,000 signatures and campaigners emailing councillors and MSPs. Meanwhile, the non-GMAC tenants have kept schtum, holding increasingly improbable faith in negotiating new lease terms (both City Property and the council have described these as “non-negotiable”). Transmission, an artist-run gallery, is trying to negotiate a 30-day lease that would allow it to stay in the building until a longer-term deal is negotiated. It describes its proposed short-term lease as “a path to long-term bankruptcy but provides time to avoid immediate closure and lay-offs”. 

Now, the existential threat to tenants is overshadowed by a tangle of questions, chief among them: isn’t £4 per square foot, the new rent offered, still quite cheap? 

Compared to the market rate, yes, £4 is well below market rates. If you occupied a nearby commercial property, you’d be paying anywhere between £10–12. But the case of Trongate 103 is unique in that the building was originally established in 2009 as an arts hub to facilitate Glasgow City Council’s cultural redevelopment of Merchant City. Financed through grants and £8 million of public funding, tenants, such as Street Level Photoworks and Transmission were invited to move into 103 on peppercorn rents of around £1 per square foot. They were offered 25 year leases on a handshake promise, though no contracts were ever signed. 

Cultural venue or cash cow?

Six months after opening, Trongate 103 was transferred from Glasgow City Council to their private landlord subsidiary, City Property. The Trongate 103 tenants’ forum says this transfer produced a “structural contradiction” in that a building established to “support cultural activity” is now, in their judgement, being operated as a “revenue-generating property asset”. 

Their proof? City Property found a way to squeeze more cash by way of vague and uncapped service charges for things like maintenance, repairs, building security and cleaning. These charges are the real thorn in the side of the tenants — the new leases include service charges ten times previous rates. A spokesperson for City Property sent an email to the press stating that “the Council undertook major repairs and has agreed to write off historic arrears linked to stepped rents and service charges that had accumulated after earlier caps were removed”.

Given the last meeting between tenants and City Property took place in September 2025, it was hard for the former to read these rises as anything other than a thinly veiled eviction notice.

At the beginning of March, most tenants retained hope that the new leases could be negotiated in good faith. However, on 16 March, Glasgow city council confirmed that the £4 rent and full recovery of backdated service charges were non-negotiable. Regardless, no tenant has signed the new lease. The mood inside the building is now desperate. The tenants’ forum have sent a joint letter to Angus Robertson and 20 other MSPs requesting an intervention. This Friday, a community protest is scheduled to “save Trongate 103”. If no backroom deals are made by then, it’ll be too late for many of the organisations; one artist in the building informs us that “three or four” will likely go bankrupt. Overall, Trongate 103 supports 200 culture sector employees and hosts over 100,000 visitors annually. Currently, its fate isn’t looking good. What it spells for the city’s once world-beating reputation for the arts is even worse: “cultural vandalism” could soon turn to cultural rot.

Glasgow in Brief 

🥙 Poor Mr Best Kebab hasn’t had the best time of it lately, or ever, for that matter. On a visit to Mosob last month, the pressure looked to be getting to him; we heard him shouting and swearing at passersby as he smoked a cigarette, the iconic signage imbuing the street with a yellowish glow. Finally though, a bit of good news for Dundas Street’s premier kebab purveyor. In recent weeks, the accounts of two of the key protagonists harassing the owner, @bestkebab.bandits and @bamupboi, have had their TikTok accounts banned. The Glasgow Times reports that the police are conducting “targeted patrols” to tackle “anti-social behaviour” — which we witnessed on several visits last year. The Times understands the Bandits’ account has been “permanently banned for breaching TikTok’s community guidelines, which prohibit antisocial behaviour, including harassment, bullying, threats of violence, and hate speech”. We contacted TikTok at the time of our reporting, to ask questions about the monetisation of the @bestkebab.bandits account. They did not respond. 

Last time we spoke to the Bandits’ account owner, they told us “Ur article is cracking me up ma man. Except you put my name on the article trying to expose me didn’t you.” When we subsequently pushed for an interview, the user refused, “Cause ur a grass”. They also told us that they “did an interview with someone who’s better than you”. You can watch that “exclusive interview” with @joshybreviews here, in which the bandit says he started the account after “my friend got chased by him with a knife for taking the piss out of him and I thought enough was enough”. He describes the abuse he gives Mr Best Kebab as a “social protest”, mainly “against the police for protecting this man”. If you love softball questions and anonymous quotes, look no further. 

🦅 Last week, we broke the exciting news that Glasgow’s most popular pair of peregrine falcons, Bonnie and Clyde, had moved nest from the University of Glasgow’s Gilbert Scott building to the City Chambers. Raptor lovers rejoice!

A broody Bonnie, named as part of a Glasgow Uni publicity spree, has since laid an egg. In an excitable update from the council, we can see the pair protecting a wee brown egg in their nest box, installed by Glasgow’s premier peregrine documenter, Steven McGrath. 

🤝 In a world full of contradictions, one of our favourites is seeing right-wing, anti-immigrant politicians descend on Homeless Project Scotland to gain votes. First it was Glasgow Reform UK’s Audrey Demsey and Thomas Kerr, now it’s their Scotland leader Baron Malcolm Offord of Garvel. Why is this a contradiction? Well, Calum has visited the Glassford Street night shelter, and it’s clear that HPS plays a vital role in housing many refugees each night who’ve found themselves without a Home Office bed after their asylum claim is accepted. Offord recently announced as Reform UK policy that he would closed a “homeless loophole” that he says has “resulted in our country becoming a magnet for mass illegal immigration”. What we find odd is that, at HPS, the “new Scots” they support are checked to ensure they have a valid asylum claim or have had their claim accepted, and therefore have recourse to public funds. They are not the bogeyman “illegal migrants” Reform UK loves to mention. It could be that the Greenock man, former banker, and donor of £147,500 to the Conservative party was truly interested in seeing the “reality on the ground” when he visited last month, which he apparently insisted should happen without any media circus. Or, it could have more to do with the 109,000 followers HPS have totted up over their various social media accounts. Reform UK might have found a large HPS-shaped stick to beat the SNP with.

Offord is a shrewd operator, if a little green where media appearances are concerned. Yet he continually finds himself being buffeted not only by his choice of candidates, but his own leader’s political positions. Nigel Farage’s public statements have contradicted his own, particularly the Reform leader talking about the “cultural smashing of Glasgow”, which Offord said made him “squeamish”. Offord has since told the BBC his hardening stance towards immigration is the result of the time he’s spending on the ground in communities across Scotland. Over the weekend, the Scottish Sun exposed 15 of Reform’s Holyrood candidates as members of a Facebook group where members shared Islamaphobic posts and racist conspiracy theories. Yesterday, Offord was back on the BBC, defending a candidate who referred to Humza Yousaf as an “islamist moron”, “brown FM” and “not British”. Offord described the comments as “fruity”, defending Linda Holt’s “intemperate language”.   

Stories you might have missed: 

🚂 Glasgow Central Station to fully reopen after Union Street fire | BBC

🏗️ Plans to be lodged to build 168 homes exclusively for NHS staff | Herald (£)

🍺 Why are so many of Scotland’s craft brewers failing? | The Times (£)

🛑Glasgow dispersal zone introduced to combat anti-social behaviour | BBC News 

🏚️ Kingston Halls’ column collapses | This is My Glasgow

🇮🇷Iranian man arrested trying to enter Faslane nuclear base | BBC News

💸‘Billionaire’ brothers to turn Glasgow's Watt Brothers building into hotel | BBC News   

Read/listen/watch: Ultras, BBC Scotland

Making a series about Scottish ultras without interviewing anyone from the Union Bears or Green Brigade feels akin to doing a documentary about Oasis without the input of the Gallagher brothers. And yet this three parter from Studio Something is bold, smart and sympathetic. Without shying away from the difficult questions, the series seeks to understand — rather than demonise — the astonishing rise of grassroots, youth-led fan groups at clubs across Scotland, from Aberdeen to Kilwinning, Perthshire to Partick. The documentary follows groups of young men over the course of a year, skilfully showing how ultras provide belonging and identity in a society stripped of its social hubs, community centres and third places. You can read more about how Glasgow’s big two brought ultras to Britain in Danny Macpherson’s essay.

We also rec: 

• The Bell gets a menshy in the LRB, in Audrey Gillan’s elegiac essay

Catch up and coming up: 

• Over the weekend, Calum’s dug Dumpling made her weekend read debut. It was a slightly inglorious appearance, though, as Robbie describes how the “otherwise unflappable” chow chow vomited upon seeing Overtoun Bridge. Could it be that she was so disturbed by the ghosts of hundreds of suicidal dogs who lept to their deaths from the 130-year-old bridge? Robbie goes into full myth/ghostbuster mode on Dumbarton’s most dark doggy legend. 

Debunking Dumbarton’s doggy suicide bridge

Since the 1950s, 500 dogs have died on Overtoun Bridge. Or have they?

The BellRobbie Armstrong

• We published the second instalment of our investigation into those big strange banners on the side of Tay House over the M8 that read “augmented reality education”. If you haven’t had a chance to read part one, which finds out that a charity with children as ‘directors’ was using 44 offices across Glasgow to make money by helping landlords avoid business rates, you can read it here. Part two goes deeper: we find the landlord behind it, lift the lid on the tax avoidance scheme, and find out how those enormous banners are made — and why. 

Headline of the week

Household 'warm for first time in 10 years' as designer radiator transforms home | Glasgow Live

Re:view - Shawarma King, Tradeston 

I found myself in Tradeston earlier this month for a Glasgow Film Festival screening (Josh O’Connor as a sad, sexy cowboy in Rebuilding, if you’re asking). My sister and I opted for Shawarma King’s sit-down outpost on Paisley Road West, for a truly weird dining experience. The instruction to the interior designer seemed to be: make everything gold, or failing that bright yellow — from the walls and electricity sockets to the lampshades and cutlery. Fair play, I have no truck with gaudy interiors. What I do have truck with, however, is a Middle Eastern restaurant inexplicably running out of falafel at 7pm on a Wednesday night. Janey went for the shawarma, which was disappointing (certainly not up to the high standards of the OG King Street premises). My options limited, I opted for smoked aubergines and some sesame bread. Both were good, if not a meal. The service throughout was patchy, aloof and slow. The food took almost thirty minutes to arrive. As we were leaving, the waiter apologised, telling us the falafel were now back on the menu. Either way, we won’t be back.—Robbie 

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