Old Norwich Union Building, St Vincent Street

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 9 Sep 2022

There are countless beautiful buildings along St Vincent Street as you head out West from Glasgow city centre, but this one really caught me eye. It is described on Wikipedia as the 'masterpiece' of its architect, John Hutchison, who, perhaps unfairly, is best known now as being the mentor of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a far more famous one. The building went up in the 1890s, which, on the grounds of it not being quite far enough in the past to make it truly historic, can surely be the only reason it is merely listed as a Category B building by Historic Environment Scotland, the body that decides these things. Because it really is quite a building. Norwich Union was an insurance company, dating from the late 18th Century, which merged with someone or other relatively recently, and the name they settled upon was Aviva. Initially, most bits of Norwich Union kept the old name, but eventually it was decided to use the Aviva name for everything the new bigger company oversaw. All these really old insurance companies once dealt in fire insurance predominantly. So much so that they all used to have their own private fire brigades which would only put out fires in the buildings of their customers, though it seems that if a customer's next door neighbour was on fire they had to do their stuff too. The fact that the people who were paying for the insurance were often paying for other people's fires to be put out too, in order to stop them spreading to their own more impressive properties, is undoubtedly part of what led to the fire brigade eventually becoming a public thing.

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