The man who built Finnieston's creative backbone
When Joe Mulholland started buying up tumbledown buildings behind Argyle Street in the 1990s, people laughed about it in the pub.
By Anna Burnside
In 1990, when Joe Mulholland bought some tumbledown buildings behind Argyle Street, he was the talk of the lane. The guys who mended cars and parked their hearses nearby were astounded that a furniture maker had paid £18,000 for a roofless wreck.
“They said I should have been paid £18,000 as a demolition fee. They laughed about it in the pub.”
Safe to say that Mulholland, now 83 and the owner of 11 of the 17 properties in what he later christened the Hidden Lane, is the one laughing now.
The lane’s highly Instagrammable clutch of shops, studios and eating places started a slow process of regeneration. Today Finnieston regularly appears in lists of the UK’s coolest neighbourhoods and hippest places to live. It has caused the geographic expansion of what is even considered Finnieston, north to Sauchiehall Street and south towards the Clyde.
“They said I should have been paid £18,000 as a demolition fee. They laughed about it in the pub.”
Mulholland reckons this is estate agent inflation. “Sauchiehall Street still isn’t Finnieston. It really is just either side of Argyle Street. At the start, many of the locals said they lived in Anderston. Now it’s all Finnieston.”
Mulholland did not arrive at 1103 Argyle Street, a cobbled former marshalling yard for drovers bringing cattle to Glasgow, with a business plan. His vision was not to recreate Williamsburg or Shoreditch in G3. He needed a workshop to polish reproduction Rennie Macintosh furniture. Having been a lawyer, then a journalist with a chain of local papers in the city, he was then producing dining chairs and tables which were stocked in Liberty’s in London.
A few weeks in, the bank threatened to pull the plug. Mulholland had to find £40,000. He did not have £40,000. The bank shut down all his bank accounts. Unable to operate his business, he negotiated a cash-in-hand journalism gig and used these meagre funds to renovate one part of the derelict building.
It was hard, filthy work. “There were 12 toilets covered with shit,” he recalled. “I hosed and scrubbed them myself.” He also carried bricks up ladders and did other unskilled jobs required on site.
Soon he had one small space ready to rent out at £40 a week. He used that income to work on another. Eventually there were 16 dinky units in the yellow building now called Argyle House.
These would become the basis of what is now an extensive property empire. While Glasgow had plenty of industrial-scale commercial property, there was a serious lack of one-person studios. Mulholland said: “You could get a 100,000 sq ft factory space, probably free for three years then with tax advantages and so on. But you couldn’t get 150 sq ft to make jewellery or turn wood.
“I saw this as my niche market. It meant when other places came on the market I was able to acquire them. I had a history of showing this would work.”
Early tenants included the Blue Nile and a dodgy taxi company. “I tried to get people doing creative things but beggars can’t be choosers,” he recalled. “At least I had some money coming in.”
“I saw this as my niche market. It meant when other places came on the market I was able to acquire them. I had a history of showing this would work.”
Mulholland's wife Claire, a stained glass artist, advised painting the different buildings bright colours. They installed salvaged stained and painted glass - and sometimes whole tenement doors - as the work progressed.
When folk complained about how hard the lane was to find, hidden away behind Argyle Street, Mulholland's newspaper spider sense twitched.
“In a throwback to my days of writing headlines, I changed its name to the Hidden Lane.”
For decades, there were no restaurants nearby and Argyle Street remained an unlovely strip of boarded up shops, corner groceries and old man pubs. One or two are still there, including a convenience store that sells hammers and dish mops as well as cigarettes and sweeties. The off licence retains its metal grille separating the customers from the stock.
One of the first signs of change was Crabshakk opening in 2009. Architect John Macleod gave a tiny unit an urbane makeover and served scallops and decadent seafood platters at uptown prices.
Mulholland himself bought the dilapidated unit that is now The Finnieston. After a false start as a Russian restaurant, it became the thriving cocktail bar and restaurant it is today. Graham Suttie operates the business but Mulholland owns the building, a drovers’ inn in the 17th century.
“It was looking at me accusingly,” he remembers. “The people who had it were joiners, the upstairs was not being used except by squatters. It’s now worth more than 10 times what I paid for it.”
He claims this is not why he bought it. “It was a sore on the landscape. It was not good for the area.”
Mulholland laughs dryly that both Macleod and Suttie now claim the credit for regenerating Finnieston.
With the Hidden Lanes as its creative backbone, the mainstream buzz around Finnieston has always been created by hospitality. Much of the residential properties are the one-bed tenement flats that once housed shipyard workers. There’s also social housing, both new builds and older buildings bought by the council at the area’s nadir.
Mulholland thinks this may be about to change with 16 luxury flats coming to the Hive, the next door site on Argyle Street. He also owns this last remnant of the old Finnieston railway station, converted into artists’ studios and other creative businesses.
“I hope it won’t evolve like Berlin where the place becomes gentrified. Let’s hope it doesn’t become too popular.”
Up until now the area has been relatively chain-free. Apart from Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Greggs, retail is all independent. There’s Roots and Fruits, which opened on Argyle Street in 2011, plus barbers, hairdressers, beauty parlours and, further east, phone repair shops. Not a big-name chemist or coffee conglomerate in sight.
That’s the way Mulholland likes it and why he has turned down multiple funny-money offers to buy him out. “I hope it won’t evolve like Berlin where the place becomes gentrified. Let’s hope it doesn’t become too popular.”
Instead, he wants to keep Finnieston “just popular enough to bring people in and let them bring up families here”. And to keep it that way.
“When I first started here people said, nobody will ever work or live in Finnieston from choice. What I’ve done here is my gift to Glasgow. Further down the line, I want to have the lane listed so nobody can come in and change it.”
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Great piece by Anna. Such an elegant scribe.
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