With Glasgow Central Station in the headlines following the devastating fire that has closed the station and shocked the city, there has never been a more poignant moment to reflect on what this extraordinary building means to Glasgow and to the people who have dedicated themselves to keeping its stories alive.
In the opening episode of Series 3 of our podcast If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk, released in June 2024, we went beneath the concourse with Jackie Ogilvie, one of the station’s most passionate tour guides, to discover the human stories hidden in every brick, beam and pane of glass.
More Than a Station
Ask any Glaswegian about Central Station and you will rarely get an architectural critique. You will get a story. A granny collected from Platform 9. A first date. A farewell. Jackie Ogilvie, who gave guided tours of the station and took podcast hosts Niall and Fay around in 2024, knows this instinctively. ‘I defy anyone in Glasgow to not have a story about Central Station,’ she tells our hosts. ‘Most people have a love for it.’
Jackie came to tour guiding later in life after a long career in banking. A lover of storytelling, she began on the open-top buses before finding her true calling at Central Station. It was, she says simply, a joy. ‘There’s just so much that a lot of locals just don’t know.’ In April 2025, she delivered her last tour after six years on the job.
A Building That Grows As You Look
Opened on 1 August 1879 and built by the Caledonian Railway Company on the site of a village called Grahamston, Central Station has been constantly evolving ever since. The original platforms were swiftly overwhelmed by the pace of passenger growth and a major extension in 1901, designed by architect James Miller, more than doubled the station’s capacity.
Miller’s genius, Jackie explains, was in removing corners. Every internal space was designed to guide people through like a river, an idea informed by engineer Donald Matheson’s visits to stations in North America. The roof, meanwhile, with its great longitudinal ridge-and-furrow construction, was once so blackened by locomotive smoke that it barely allowed any light in. ‘People today accept that Central Station is a very light and airy place,’ Jackie observes, ‘Back then, it was dirty, filthy and very dark’. The glass roof, made up of 30,000 panels, was replaced in an ambitious refurbishment of the station which was completed in 2000.
Underground, Where the Real Stories Live
Central Station is the only Network Rail station in the UK to run formal guided tours and the hidden Victorian platform beneath the concourse is their centrepiece. Descending into this vast, dark space you quickly understand why Jackie insists that the tour’s power comes not from spectacle but from story.
During the Covid lockdown, Jackie channelled her isolation into building a museum in the station’s underground spaces to better tell this story. Gathering artefacts through networking and inspired detective work she was able to locate items such as the original departure boards, Victorian iron railings discovered propped against a corridor wall which were almost sent to the scrapyard and a working station clock which was lovingly restored by the maintenance team. Then there is the 36-inch wooden ruler brought in by an emotional visitor that once belonged to Sandy Moffat, Central Station’s sign writer, the man who very likely painted those original departure boards by hand.
Names in the Dark
Perhaps the most quietly devastating part of any tour is a darkened room where the names of Glasgow’s First World War dead flicker silently across a wall. Over 17,000 of them, drawn at random from a database, listed not just by name but by street address. It was created in collaboration with Glasgow School of Art and the effect on visitors is striking. Even more poignantly, the room was once used as a temporary mortuary for soldiers returning home.
History Still Being Made
The station is still accumulating stories. Looking into the future, there are plans afoot to bring a steam locomotive into the Victorian platform and to expand the museum further.
At a moment when the area around Central Station has been marked by loss, this episode is a reminder of how much remains and how much is worth protecting. As Jackie puts it: ‘We need to keep telling the stories, or the stories die.’
Find Out More
Central Station Tours are currently suspended due to the fire, however you can find out more about them and book a tour in the future by visiting https://glasgowcentraltours.co.uk/
Listen to the full conversation between Niall, Fay and Jackie in Episode One, Series 3 of our podcast If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk here, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find lots more conversations across all 3 series of the podcast, which aims to uncover the human stories behind the city’s built environment.