The remarkable past lives of this Glasgow cocktail bar and club. This Glasgow building has been a home, a bank, a court, and now a club and restaurant, The Corinthian, but it has remained virtually unchanged since the 19th century. Long before it served cocktails in the late-night piano bar and hosted fashion shows in the private rooms, 191 Ingram Street was a house known as Virginia Mansion.
(Image: Jamie Simpson) It was one of the city’s first and grandest private residences which was commissioned by the Glasgow tobacco merchant George Buchanan and completed in 1752. The mansion passed through several other merchants until it was bought and completely remodelled in the 1870s to serve as the headquarters of the Glasgow and Ship Bank, which later merged with the Union Bank of Scotland . The building when it was a bank (Image: Newsquest archive) Many more elaborate changes were made to the bank during its time, such as the introduction of a large new telling room with a glass cupola and a new entrance from Virginia Place.
With its high ceilings, towering pillars and Gringotts-like polished desks, the bank served the people of Glasgow with all their monetary needs until the 1920s when it relocated. So, what came next for this opulent palace with so many lives? Tellers in the bank (Image: Newsquest archive) What is quite rare and special about 191 Ingram Street is not that it was a bank in a such a grand, classical building, but that it was adapted from a bank to offices, then.
