Glasgow LGBT Centre

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The 'Glasgow LGBT Centre' was a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community centre located at 84 Bell Street, Glasgow G1 1LQ. It was fully wheelchair-accessible, with a chairlift. It closed in April 2009, following withdrawal of funding from Glasgow City Council. This in turn was caused by reported concerns (unfounded, the Centre Board and AGM claim, and yet to be substantiated) of mismanagement. On 17 March 1991, the first ceilidh was held to raise funds for and awareness of the planned Centre, and this has since become an annual event. Other funding was received from sources such as Strathclyde Regional Social Strategy, Strathclyde Lesbigay Forum, and the Glasgow Development Agency. The chairlift was funded by a grant from Glasgow District Council. The Centre (then called Glasgow Gay and Lesbian Centre) was opened at premises in Dixon Street (just off St Enoch Square) on November 4, 1995. The building was converted from a file store for the Procurator Fiscal. The opening was attended by politicians George Galloway, Maria Fyfe, Mike Watson, and Bill Miller: also by singer Horse and poet Edwin Morgan, who read a poem specially written to mark the opening. The centre then closed for several months to allow building to continue, and was formally opened on March 20, 1996 by Joyce Keller, Mayor of Manchester. The old Centre included a cafe/bar, four offices which were rented to LGBT-friendly businesses, and two meeting rooms called the Jackie Forster Memorial Room and the Ian Dunn Memorial Room. It was regularly used by many LGBT community groups for meetings and events. In 2008, the Centre took the controversial step of banning ScotsGay magazine from its premises on the grounds that its adult content is incompatible with the Centre's status as a family-friendly venue. In 2008, the Centre moved to new premises in Bell Street, Glasgow. In 2010, the Centre, named Castro, was locked out of its premises in Bell Street after it emerged that the centre had serious financial irregularities.

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Glasgow Police Museum

The Glasgow Police Museum is an independent museum in the Scottish city of Glasgow. The museum opened in 2002 at the Glasgow Central Police Headquarters, before it was relocated to the Merchant City area of the city in 2009. The museum is dedicated to the history of the City of Glasgow Police, the United Kingdom's first modern-style municipal police force. It also displays a collection of over 2000 international police insignia and uniforms.

Glasgow City Halls

Glasgow's City Halls and Old Fruitmarket is a concert hall and former market located on Candleriggs, in the Merchant City, Glasgow, Scotland.

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Merchant City Festival

The Merchant City Festival is a major cultural festival taking place in Glasgow's Merchant City area. Attracting more than 55,000 people, the four-day Festival presents the cream of Scotland's theatre, music, visual arts, comedy, dance, film, fashion and food scene. The Festival presents opera singers in the courtyards and squares performing alongside cutting-edge live art, street theatre, iconoclastic comedy and music from every genre in the bars and on the street. It also has a quirky short film programme that places films in estate agents, hairdressers and tattoo parlours. Many of the events are free of charge. The Merchant City Festival has attracted an extensive range of supporters and contributors from festival directors to national organisations such as Scottish Opera, Scottish Ballet and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. A 'festival of festivals', it has worked with established festivals such as New Moves International, the Glasgow International Comedy Festival, Glasgow International Jazz Festival, Big in Falkirk and Glasgay! An international context is provided by the Directors' Choice programme that provides a remarkable range of street artists selected from festival directors throughout Europe. The 2008 Merchant City Festival was held in September. The Merchant City Festival is produced by UZ Events in partnership with Glasgow City Marketing Bureau. Celtic Music Radio broadcast live from the 2008 festival on 1530 kHz and on the internet, from an Outside Broadcast location in Merchant Square.

Candleriggs

Candleriggs is a street in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. It is located in the Merchant City area of the city centre. Candleriggs was historically the area of the old city of Glasgow where candlemakers plied their trade, at a safe distance from the crowded tenements clustered around the High Street. As the city expanded in the eighteenth century it became a thriving thoroughfare itself, lined with tenements and businesses typical of Glasgow at that time. Looking down Candleriggs from its northern junction with Ingram Street, stands St David's, later known as Ramshorn Kirk. It had been without a congregation for a long while before being purchased by the University of Strathclyde in 1982. The church dates from 1826, built in Gothic Revival style by an English architect, Thomas Rickman, whose plans featured the large central tower which dominates the structure. It now serves as the home for the University of Strathclyde's Confucius Institute for Scotlands Schools and Scotland's National Centre for Languages. Candleriggs is perhaps best known as the site of the City Halls, a musical venue operated by Glasgow City Council, home to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and a regular Glasgow performance base for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. It is the older purpose-built concert hall in Glasgow. The old Candleriggs Fruit Market building at the corner of Candleriggs and Bell Street housed a market for many years. With the opening of a purpose-built facility in May 1969, on the site of the old Blochairn Steelworks, it closed and was redeveloped as a complex housing pubs and restaurants which was renamed "Merchant Square". Towards the southern end of Candleriggs was the Goldbergs department store, which closed in 1991. It was then taken over by Vera Weisfeld (of What Every Woman Wants fame) and reopened in 1994 as Weisfelds - a budget clothing store. Weisfeld's closed in 1999. Granny Black's was a well known pub on Candleriggs housed in an old tenement building which collapsed due to a burst water main in the basement one night in February 2002. The building was empty at the time of the incident and there were no reported injuries. The site subsequently fell into dereliction and the land was acquired by the luxury retailer Selfridges of London, although their plans to build a department store there were later dropped. In late 2013, Selfridges began demolition of the former Goldbergs buildings and works began in early 2014 to landscape the area. Following Selfridges selling land to a property developer, approval was granted in May 2020 for mixed-use development of the site by Drum Property. The first phase of the development will include a 500-room hotel and 300 apartments and is currently under construction.