Look to your left for a tall, slim concrete-and-glass tower rising above the campus buildings, the kind of high-rise that’s easy to spot because it’s basically trying to be seen from half of the East End.
This is Livingstone Tower, part of the University of Strathclyde’s John Anderson Campus, and it’s the big vertical exclamation point of this area. It sits up on Rottenrow’s little hillock of land, which is why it pops into view from far away-Glasgow didn’t exactly hide it behind a shrub.
The tower went up in the early 1960s, from 1962 to 1964, when Glasgow was in one of those determined “modern city” moods. Back then it wasn’t even a university building. It started life as “Alec House,” planned as commercial offices through a partnership that included the city and the then-Royal College of Science and Technology. The ground you’re standing near had been a row of houses and a church, cleared as Townhead was reshaped under big postwar redevelopment plans. It’s a familiar story in this part of town: old streets swept away, new concrete optimism poured in.
And optimism is kind of the aesthetic here. The structure is reinforced concrete, but it dressed up for the occasion with a curtain wall and dark green glass panels, held in place by orange metal uprights. It’s very “International Style,” while the surrounding buildings lean more Brutalist-chunky, heavy, and not especially interested in flirting with sunlight. The tower, by comparison, at least pretends to be sleek.
It also came with the sort of tech swagger that made 1960s developers feel futuristic. The lifts were Otis Autotronic high-speed models-four of them-designed to respond to traffic patterns during the day. In other words, even the elevators were trying to be efficient, which is more than you can say for most of us before coffee. Inside, staircases sat in a central service core, and when Strathclyde took over, a third staircase was added for the lower floors once those spaces became classroom-heavy.
Here’s the twist: after the University of Strathclyde was created in 1964, the shiny new office tower struggled to attract private tenants. So in 1965 the university leased it for 99 years and renamed it after David Livingstone-yes, that David Livingstone-the explorer and missionary, and also a former medical student at Anderson’s College, the ancestor institution of Strathclyde. The name quickly shortened to “Livingstone Tower,” and students, being students, made it “Livvy Tower.”
Over the years it kept evolving. A rooftop penthouse was added in 1967 as a residence for the Principal-nothing says “campus life” like living above everyone else, literally. In the early 1970s the ground-level layout got reworked, with entrances moved and new buildings filling in what had been an open plaza. Then in 2000, the roof space was expanded again for the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, funded by Sir Tom Hunter’s five million pound endowment-about nine to ten million pounds in today’s money, depending on how you measure it. Later it shifted out, the departments shifted in, and by 2010 the tower had a major refurbishment: new exterior panels, internal reshuffling, and even a bit of floor-number gymnastics.
It’s so recognizable that a Strathclyde alumnus, game developer Chris Sawyer, turned it into a skyscraper sprite in Transport Tycoon. Not every building gets immortality as pixel architecture.
When you’re set, Buchanan bus station is about an 11-minute walk heading west-just go west along Richmond Street.
