Warehouse blocks in blond and red sandstone stand along wide straight streets. The grid has been dressed as Philadelphia and as New York.
What Merchant City looks like
The Merchant City runs east from to Glasgow Cross, with George Street along the north side and Trongate along the south. The streets are wide and straight and they cross at right angles.
That grid was drawn on purpose. From the 1750s the ground west of the medieval High Street was laid out as Glasgow's first planned New Town, and the tobacco merchants who built there gave the streets their names. was Back Cow Lone until 1781, when it was renamed after Archibald Ingram, a tobacco lord who had been Lord Provost.
The merchants moved west in the nineteenth century and warehouses took their plots. Those are the buildings on and now. They run four and five storeys in blond and red sandstone, with tall windows and heavy cornices. Ground floors are shops and bars now and the floors above them are flats.
stands at the top of Hutcheson Street. David Hamilton designed it between 1802 and 1805, and two carved figures of the founding brothers sit in niches on the front. has the City Halls, which opened in 1841. The Old Fruitmarket beside them was a working market into the 1970s. Merchant Square a few doors along is a courtyard with a glass roof over it.
The Daily Express Building on is the exception. Sir Owen Williams put it up in 1936 as a printing works and offices, and the front is black glass set in thin metal. A rooftop extension went on in 1988.
Films shot in Merchant City
Productions have been dressing these streets as somewhere else for fifteen years. The location manager on World War Z told the BBC that Glasgow was chosen for its architecture and for the wide roads on its grid. In Hobbs & Shaw the same stretch of Cochrane Street plays London, and Brixton is thrown off his bike outside The Piper bar.
World War Z, 2013
Gerry Lane and his family are stuck in traffic here when the attack starts, and the City Chambers behind them plays Philadelphia City Hall. The Evening Times counted the new signs while the crew was still in town. Cochrane Street had become John F Kennedy Boulevard and had become Market Street. Philadelphia-plated buses and taxis were shipped in for the jam.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, 2023
Indy teaches at Hunter College in the 1969 half of the film, and the door he walks out of is the City Chambers at the corner of Cochrane and John Streets. The streets were dressed for the Apollo 11 parade in July 2021, with American bunting and US fire hydrants along Cochrane Street. The two arched bridges over John Street are part of the City Chambers.
What Merchant City can double for
Merchant City can stand in for Philadelphia in World War Z, 1969 New York in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and central London in Hobbs & Shaw.
