A symposium is to be held to discuss the future maintenance of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s buildings in Glasgow.
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00:00 Tell me about the symposium, why is it happening in June?
00:03 Well the reason we're having a symposium, I think, well last year we're into our 50th anniversary of the Society
00:09 so the Society's been very much at the core of protecting and promoting Macintosh in the last 50 years.
00:16 We've seen the sort of highs and lows of his heritage buildings
00:22 and it's a small collection but it's vulnerable.
00:25 But at the same time it's so precious and valuable and it's looked across the world, it's so important.
00:32 The reason we wanted to have the symposium was, well it's 12 years since the last one,
00:38 we highlighted points at that time, what was happening.
00:41 We've seen some good things, we've seen improvements to like the Willow Tea Room's been restored
00:46 in Suckey Hall Street, we've now started work on Scotland Street School, although it's gone into the education side.
00:53 The Hill House is currently under restoration and trying to protect it.
00:59 But there's other buildings like in the city, we've lost the School of Art, we hope that that'll be a rebirth on that.
01:06 Part of the symposium will cover all these types of things.
01:09 The Lighthouse hasn't reopened since the pandemic, we're not sure what the plans are for it.
01:17 Do you see other buildings like Lady Artists Club in Blytho Square?
01:21 I think they talked about turning it into a boutique hotel.
01:25 Yeah, I remember that plan already.
01:26 There's other wider buildings in the city, like Egyptian Halls, Lion Chambers, St Vincent Street Church.
01:34 They're all heritage buildings that just seem to be being allowed to sort of rot, really deteriorate.
01:41 And a part of that is also these people that buy these properties, they're selling them for so long.
01:47 It's a game, going on to get to a stage a bit like the Indian building that recently had the collapse.
01:54 I think it's part of the idea of having the symposium to highlight that.
01:58 Baltas showing day two cities like Brussels, Dermgate, which is in Northampton, which McIntosh did,
02:06 has had a fantastic period and doing really well and just had an extension.
02:11 So it's all these types of things that we'll try and show the good.
02:14 The idea is Queen's Cross, the society took this over this building in 1977.
02:19 It was in a really poor state.
02:22 It was from a small organisation to show what they could do and look after this building to bring it to life.
02:27 There's other things we'd like to do.
02:29 We'd love to have a piazza out there to take the road away from Garscobe Road,
02:35 because it's doing a long time damage to the building with the amount of traffic that goes through there.
02:39 So there's a number of cases there that we'd highlight.