While the People's Palace is the arguably more well-known grand building in Glasgow's East End, its neighbour has an interesting history and was inspired by a very famous palace.
The Templeton on the Green was once the home of James Templeton's carpet factory.
The son of a farmer, Campbeltown-born Templeton came to Glasgow at a young age to work in a draper’s shop. After opening a shawl factory in Paisley, he established the Templeton & Son carpet firm in Bridgeton in 1839.
Templeton would go on to become one of the most successful carpet manufacturers in Britain, making carpets for domestic use as well as grand state occasions, for venues such as parliament buildings, Westminster Abbey and the White House, and luxury ocean liners including the Titanic.
When Templeton wanted to expand his site in Glasgow Green, he was faced with multiple rejections from the city. He hired famous architect William Leiper to design a building that had no danger of being rejected, something that would not be met with discontent from those who didn’t want something resembling a large, industrial factory planted in the heart of the community.
As was the style at the time, it was not uncommon to disguise industrial-use buildings in Glasgow with designs inspired by Ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and the Italian Renaissance.
Leiper created perhaps the most visually captivating of them all. His design for the front façade of the Templeton factory is directly inspired by the Doge’s Palace, and if you were to compare the two you would notice similarities in from the elaborate brick pattern to the marble colonnades.
Many architects looked at the buildings of Venice for inspiration, and its style is also prevalent in the Ca d’Oro building on West Nile Street – which was also used as a carpet warehouse.
The main difference is the use of red brick, a staple style of 19th-century Glaswegian architecture. The patterns also pay homage to the styles of the carpets the factory produced, with Asian-influenced designs.
Women were employed in a number of roles within the factory, such as operating the machinery, dying the wool, laying out new carpets or hand-painting carpets to add final flourishes and intricate details to the design.
The building’s history is not without tragedy, and the female figure standing at its top represents that. On November 1, 1889, while the new factory was being constructed, scaffolding had not been attached properly and the front façade of the building collapsed when the wind blew it down.
Workers were already on-site as they had been crafting carpets there since 1857, and the wreckage crashed onto nearby weaving sheds where the women were working. They were buried under the rubble, and a frantic search began by the fire brigade, Glasgow Salvage Corps and policemen. While many were rescued, 29 women were killed.
The building eventually opened in 1892 at a cost of £20,000, but restoration of the collapsed facade and weaving sheds added £3000.
By 1980, the factory stopped making carpets. The Grade A listed building is now home to the Templeton Business Centre, which was opened as part of a major regeneration project to transform the building into a mixed-use 'lifestyle village'. It is made up of apartments, office space, and the WEST brewery, bar and restaurant.
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