Union Street fire: what we know and what happens now

On the scene

We first caught wind of a fire breaking out in Union Street on Sunday afternoon, just an hour or so after fire services had first been called to the scene at 3.46pm. Idly scrolling on the sofa, a colleague spotted the videos posted of grey smoke billowing out of a unit by Subway. It looked like a nuisance; something central didn’t really need on a Sunday already disrupted by Old Firm shenanigans, but nothing majorly serious. 

Six hours later, the nuisance had snowballed into a catastrophe. When Calum arrived on the scene at 10pm, 105 Union Street no longer existed. Between 6pm and 8pm, the fire became a raging inferno. Flames had swallowed up the building the blaze had started in; it had collapsed into rubble around 8.30pm. Now Union Corner’s famous dome was under siege. 

The street was packed, despite being choked with smoke. Most of the crowd were young, drawn in by the spectacle of another piece of Glasgow’s Victorian history being razed to the ground. The atmosphere was a mix of shock and awe; there were collective guttural ‘ooos’ as a fireball erupted from the ground floor of Union Corner, sending red embers up into the sky. Ash fell on nearby cars on Renfield Street. Adding to the chaos were rowdy football fans still hanging about post an Old Firm Scottish Cup quarter-finals match at Ibrox (and subsequent violent pitch invasion).

One walked past Calum shouting various anti-Celtic slurs at no one in particular. Moments later, slapping and thudding signalled the start of a fight — friendly fire, as it turned out the man had got in a scrap with another Rangers supporter. Nearby police stepped in to break it up.

From Gordon and West Nile Street’s junction, the firefighting operation was in full view. Firefighters unravelled hose after hose, unveiling hidden spouts in the pavement. Shortly before the top floor collapsed in, they’d managed to get a new hose working, hauled it up 13-metre-tall ladders, and sprayed it at Union Corner. The various side streets and blocks of Glasgow’s historic grid structure provided sanctuary for exhausted responders, and when they had to move through the crowd, it parted, Moses-like. 

Liv, a Glasgow School of Art student originally from China, lives in a building just to the east of Central Station. She learned of the fire after trying, in vain, to return home. She wasn’t allowed in, for her own safety. So she had been watching the fire progress from the street since the middle of the afternoon. Waiting for her at home were the three cats and a dog shared with her girlfriend, but the couple couldn’t return until police deemed it safe (which they finally did at 2am). But Liv was only “worried about the people”, hoping “everyone escaped”. She, like the rest of the crowd, couldn’t look away from the disaster in front of her. Each moment the flames burned brought the risk of another structural collapse closer.

Although no human casualties were reported, there were already those on the scene mourning the loss of another piece of Glasgow’s architectural heritage. We bumped into Niall Murphy, director of Glasgow Heritage Trust, who’d arrived an hour after Calum. The sight of Union Corner, a building dating back to 1851, going down was “deeply depressing”, he told us. “It just shows us how fragile our heritage is”.

Hi, we're Calum and Robbie, and we run The Bell. This story is in the public interest and totally free to read.

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