Glasgow argues about which of its pubs is oldest and most of the numbers are confected, including one its own owner admitted inventing. Here are five rooms that do not need the argument: a listed island bar, a folk cellar, a burnt-down ballroom, and the stage every band you like has stood on.
- 1 · The Cold Open
The Horse Shoe Bar
John Scouller bought the place in 1884 and gave it the name. The building is about 1870 and the room you drink in is the 1901 refit, when the partitions between the sitting rooms and the bar came out. Category A listed, interior and all: the island counter, etched glass, a terrazzo spittoon trough, horseshoes worked into the fireplaces and the tops of the columns. A hundred and four feet three inches of bar, second longest in the country. Four cask ales. And upstairs the lunch that made it famous: two shillings in the sixties, three pounds into the 2000s, still under a tenner with a drink.
building c.1870, named 1884, the interior you see is 1901 · daily 11am till midnight · verified Aug 2026
- 2 · The Detour
The Scotia Bar
Our 1792 does not survive. The only thing carrying it is an uncited caption on an archive photograph, and CAMRA's surveyors put the first licence at 1815. It shut twice as well: from 1906 until 1929, and again from the seventies until Brendan McLaughlin brought it back in 1987. The mock Tudor front is 1929 and much of the back bar is 1987. The Scotia Music Hall opened next door in 1862, which is very likely where the name came from. Four changing Scottish casks, Cromarty and Fyne and Orkney, and a pizza to line it. Folk here since the sixties, and the Humblebums played it.
first licensed 1815, and dark for two long stretches since · from 11am, till midnight, 1am Fri and Sat · verified Aug 2026
- 3 · The Anchor
Barrowland Ballroom
Maggie McIver built this in 1934, four years a widow, because the traders' Christmas dance kept losing its hall to someone else's booking. She died in May 1958 and the ballroom burned that August. Her family rebuilt it and it opened again on Christmas Eve 1960. Dancing stopped in 1973 and it sat empty until Sunday 20 November 1983, when Simple Minds filmed Waterfront in it to six hundred people balloted on Radio Clyde, and the room came back as a rock hall. Nineteen hundred standing, on Canadian maple. Three bars, named for the family: Sam's in 2023, Kitty's and Victor's in 2024. Nobody publishes a drinks list and the only beer anyone reports is Tennent's. Historic Environment Scotland declined to list the place, sign and all, in 2006.
built 1934, burnt 1958, reopened Christmas Eve 1960, revived 1983 · show nights only, doors usually 7pm · verified Aug 2026
- 4 · The Wildcard
King Tut's Wah Wah Hut
Opened in February 1990, first band Martin Stephenson and the Daintees on the tenth, on a site that had been the Saints and Sinners club back in the seventies. Alan McGee watched Oasis play four songs here on 31 May 1993 to a room of about a dozen people and offered them a deal that night. They did not sign until October, twenty labels had a go in between, and Noel has called the story about threatening to smash the place up rubbish. The public bar is open to anyone, ticket or not, but only on show nights.
est. February 1990, first gig on the tenth · show nights only, plus Sat and Sun afternoons · verified Aug 2026
- 5 · The Last Call
Nice N Sleazy
The basement is the gig room and the bar upstairs gigs too, so it is a basement under a venue rather than a venue in a basement. Summer 1991, and we can show it now: the bar's own site was planning a thirtieth anniversary for summer 2021, and The Skinny ran twenty years of sleaze in November 2011 with detail that only works for 1991. Who actually started it, nobody will say. The building is Category B listed, an 1870 tenement by Horatio Bromhead. Drink the Buckaroo, which is Buckfast, peach schnapps and lemonade, by the pitcher. Trad session Thursdays.
summer 1991, and the founder is not on any record · programme-led, club nights till 3am · verified Aug 2026