The Herald

Modernists may mock but admirers of Alexander "Greek" Thomson have reason to feel paranoid. The ongoing demolition of his A-listed office block on the corner of West Regent Street and Wellington Street is hardly a solitary insult. Even before he died in 1875 several of his most impressive designs fell victim to the Victorian craze for reinvention. The Luftwaffe destroyed his church at Queen's Park and whole streets of Thomson dwellings were levelled in the 1960s. Last year his warehouse in Wilson Street was demolished. Disregard for Thomson's work might be dismissed as carelessness. But Glasgow's hostility seems to extend to the man himself. His plot in the city's Southern Necropolis stood derelict and unmarked for half a century. He bought it in 1854 when grief-stricken by the death from cholera of his daughter, Agnes. Thomson was buried at his daughter's side but after the 1950s no visitor to the site could locate his grave. The family headstone was wrecked by vandals and discarded by the municipal authorities.