The new Herald HQ shines like a beacon across the city, writes ROBERT JEFFREY

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‘Just drop me off at the courtyard beside the fountain” – that’s not the sort of request a Glasgow city centre taxi driver normally expects to hear. But from now on it’s going to be as familiar as “take me to the barras or Byres Road”.

When, back in 1996, SMG, owners of The Herald, the Sunday Herald, the Evening Times, and Scottish Television, decided to move their publishing HQ from the cramped and scenically-challenged surroundings of Albion Street, they planned ahead with style.

The new office complex was to be linked with the Scottish Television’s HQ in Cowcaddens with a dramatic new entrance built to overlook the city centre, the dominant position at the top of Renfield Street mirroring and underlining The Herald’s status as Scotland’s leading quality broadsheet.

It looked good on paper. And the reality has exceeded the dream. 200 Renfield Street – as the new HQ is called – with its courtyard and fountain, its sparkling central tower, its glass walkways, and bright and bustling offices has added a new dimension to a part of the city that was much in need of some tender, loving, architectural care.

Now to that eye-catching fountain: older Glaswegians will recognise that its practical use was as a trough, for draymen to water their horses in the days when the streets had special cart tracks and friendly citizens carried bread in their coat pockets to feed the toiling beasts.

The cobbles and the courtyard may be a nod in the direction of history, but 200 Renfield Street is all about the future, a fitting state-of-the-art home for Scotland’s largest media group.

In addition to the newspapers and Scottish Television, the new landmark in the city centre is home to SMG magazines (including Scottish Farmer, the Home Show magazine, and The Great Outdoors), and the internet divisions Delphic and S1. The £16m project, which included refurbishment of the existing structure, virtually doubles the size of the old Cowcaddens site.

The Herald doesn’t change HQ with any regularity. Before the move to Albion Street in 1980, it had spent 111 years in the Charles Rennie Mackintosh building in Mitchell Street.

Albion Street, built originally for the Express Group in the late 1930s, had a striking art-deco frontage similar to Beaverbrook’s London and Manchester offices, but inside it had become a far from user-friendly place to publish newspapers using modern technology. Its reputation as a Black Lubyanka was much overstated – but it was time to break out.

200 Renfield Street has been designed with the new age of newspapers in mind, a purpose-built base for the journalists who produce some of Scotland’s most influential and popular newspapers and magazines. The online editors for the newspapers’ websites work side by side with the journalists and photographers (equipped with the latest digital cameras and technology) who put together the text editions.

To create the newspaper office for the new millennium and maximise the forward-looking investment involved, has taken years of detailed planning. Project leader Sara Clarke has been working on the new HQ since 1996.

She is keeping her fingers crossed that the advance planning of her team that has seen the Evening Times, the Sunday Herald, and the circulation and advertising departments make largely untroubled moves across town to the HQ on the Hill continues this weekend with the move of The Herald’s journalists.

She is also delighted with the improvement the new building has brought to the area and the positive reaction it gets from city strollers. “People are really excited by it,” she says. This is largely due to the eye-catching design with its spectacular glass central tower linking both buildings.

Inside, perhaps the most visually dramatic part of the new HQ is the roomy, open, reception area. Black stone on the floor and vast, uncluttered, white walls are the ideal gallery for the colourful artwork of TV presenter and interior designer John Amabile. His modern, attacking splashes of colour complement the minimalistic exterior.

The Herald’s Mitchell Street premises are now the Lighthouse gallery and it is perhaps serendipitous that when the giant SMG logo in the Renfield Street tower is lit up, the effect will be akin to a beacon shining over the city.

SMG is looking to the future and MD Des Hudson points out the new building is only part of a major investment in the newspapers. “It is obviously very important for Glasgow that as a major media group in Scotland we are investing in the city.” SMG has also signed an £18m contract for new presses to print the group’s newspapers at a site still to be announced. Meantime, the Albion Street presses will continue to roll albeit that their rumble and roar are too far away to be heard by the journalists who make the newspapers.

The journalists may miss the company of their printing brethren but there will be no shortage of media chat around Cowcaddens . . . SMG has created Scotland’s largest multi-media centre (it also hosts the Daily Mail’s Scottish operation) and just up the road is the venerable Sunday Post.

Cowcaddens could be renamed Media Cross. Eat your heart out Fleet Street, once again Glasgow is showing that it is the most vibrant newspaper city in Britain.

Journalism is often described as the first draft of history and this weekend marks the beginning of another era in the history of The Herald, the oldest daily newspaper in Britain.

The Herald has travelled a long way from its beginnings in 1783 in Gibson’s Wynd near Glasgow Cross.

200 Renfield Street with its digital technology would be as unfamiliar as the dark side of the moon to the eighteenth-century compositors who produced the first Herald.

But the Herald’s commitment to quality is unchanged and unchanging. For more than 200 years and into the new millennium.

Click here for Farewell to the past

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