VICTORIAN Glasgow produced two great architects who enjoyed international renown. One was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, but I suspect most Scots would be hard pressed to name Alexander Thomson as the other – except if you use his nickname.

Far better known as Alexander “Greek” Thomson, his name has featured regularly in the press and broadcasting media over the decades, usually because someone wanted to knock down one of his creations.

Born in this week of 1817, Thomson would become the pre-eminent Scottish architect of his day and his designs hugely influenced other architects, especially in Glasgow where a number of his works survive, though many more have perished, especially in the rush to modernise the city in the 1960s and 70s.

He was influential in the USA, too. The Victorian look of Glasgow pioneered by Thomson was copied by architects across the Atlantic and it can be fairly said that Thomson is the reason why American filmmakers come here to use Glasgow as a double for American cities.

The man who would change the face of a city was actually a country boy, born in Balfron in Stirlingshire on April 9, 1817, to a book-keeper, John Thomson, and his wife Elizabeth née Cooper. Alexander was the ninth of 12 children and by the age of 13 he was an orphan, his father dying when he was just seven and his mother and three brothers all dead before 1830.

Thomson moved to live with his elder brother William, a teacher, and having been well tutored at home, the teenage Thomson was apprenticed to an architect in the city, Robert Foote, before completing his studies as a draughtsman in the architectural practice of John Baird.

He grew close to Baird’s architect son, also John, and the two young men even courted two sisters, Jessie and Jane Nicholson, Baird marrying Jessie and Thomson marrying Jane in a double wedding ceremony.

Alexander and Jane Thomson would have 12 children in all, seven of them surviving to adulthood.

In 1848, the two men set up their own practice, Baird and Thomson, and Greek soon became the latter’s nickname as he produced design after design that was clearly heavily influenced by classical Greek architecture.

There is no doubt that the lustre of Edinburgh as the Athens of the North influenced Thomson’s designs. He once wrote: “Donaldson’s Hospital in Edinburgh, of which great things were expected, fails to excite even a passing remark; while the High School, the fragments of the National Monument, Dugald Stewart’s Monument, Surgeon’s Hall, and the Institution on the Mound, continue to illuminate their respective localities with the light of truth and beauty, giving to our northern metropolis an air of refinement which no other city in the kingdom possesses.”

Thomson became fascinated with the possibility of making buildings and housing developments that would last much longer than expected – what we would now call sustainability. In Glasgow and its suburbs, he designed what were almost small villages, and there was no shortage of buyers as the middle classes of the city wanted to move away from its industrial areas.

The late Gavin Stamp, the architectural historian who was Piloti in Private Eye for three decades, conducted a long personal campaign to preserve Thomson’s work. Indeed he once bought and restored a Thomson house in Moray Place in Glasgow.

Stamp once wrote: “Thomson carefully designed his villas with symmetries within an overall asymmetry in a personal language in which the horizontal discipline of a continuous governing order—whether expressed or implied—was never abandoned.”

Thomson did lose out on one major commission in 1864. Sir George Gilbert Scott beat him in the competition to design Glasgow University’s Gilmorehill campus.

Thomson duly delivered a devastating critique of the neo-Gothic design by Scott.

Nowadays the Alexander Thomson Society does great work in keeping his name alive, and also campaigns against any attempt to raze any of his buildings.

The Society’s description of Thomson is succinct and exact: “Thomson was extremely successful with a large clientele for medium-sized villas and terraces of cottages in Pollokshields, Shawlands, Crossmyloof, Cathcart, Langbank, Bothwell and Cove and Kilcreggan.

“In his day, Thomson was conspicuous for his originality in producing a distinctive modern architecture from the lessons and precedents provided by the Greeks, Egyptians and other ancient civilisations, and made extensive use of new materials like cast-iron and plate-glass.

“His personal Graeco-Egyptian style was almost entirely confined to Glasgow, where he designed commercial warehouses, blocks of tenements, terraces of houses, suburban villas and three extraordinary Presbyterian churches, of which the St Vincent Street Church is the only intact survivor.

“Other important works still standing include Moray Place, Great Western Terrace, Egyptian Halls in Union Street, Grecian Buildings in Sauchiehall Street, and his villa, Holmwood, at Cathcart, which is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland.”

Thomson died in 1875, and was buried in the Southern Necropolis in the Gorbals.

In his memory the Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship was established. Its second winner was none other than Charles Rennie Mackintosh.