On fast track in style
Villa is just the ticket for city commuters, as Paul Drury discovers
IT must have been quite a restaurant that Andrew Pollock owned in Glasgow’s Argyle Street at the dawn of the 20th century. The turnover it generated allowed him to buy the impressive detached sandstone villa which had just been built in Ossian Road, in the city’s Newlands.
The Glasgow of the early 1900s was a city of dramatic contrasts, with great wealth and pitiful poverty flourishing at either end of its most famous thoroughfare.
In the tenement closes of the High Street, children walked barefoot and were visibly malnourished. Near Buchanan Street, coachmen in fine livery awaited ladies in crinoline dresses who were shopping in expensive emporiums.
It must have been at this end of Argyle Street that Mr Pollock earned his living.
The arrival of the railway at halts in the south side in the last years of the 19th century allowed developers to begin fashioning what we now know as the suburbs.
Mr Pollock and his family were the first occupants of the house named Selamath in 1903 or 1904. What appealed to the businessman then is what makes the sixbedroom property attractive today – it sits cheek by jowl with Langside railway station.
Mr Pollock would have been able to hop on board a steam train at Glasgow Central Station and ten minutes later find himself in clean and airy Newlands.
Today, with four trains an hour to Central, you could time things so that you leave the house and 60 seconds later find yourself sitting on the train (now electric, sadly).
Newlands has changed little in the century since it emerged from the rolling fields of Cathcart. Nearby Newlands Park is one of the finest open spaces in Glasgow.
Selamath is unusual in that it has an original wooden staircase that reaches all the way to the second floor of the property. Not for this house the rickety handrail arrangement normally installed to reach an extension in the eaves.
The house has always had this permanent approach to a roomy level that now boasts two handsome bedrooms, a shower room and den.
The first floor has four bedrooms and a study that may, in the past, have served as a sewing room.
The lower level is rich in hardwood, from the high archway arrangement in the hallway to the lovely, curved bench under the stained-glass window on the landing.
There’s a neat snug near the front door, sitting room, extensive kitchen and a drawing room adorned by magnificent cornicing on the ceiling.