Savings Bank Headquarters, 177 Ingram Street, Glasgow

The Savings Bank Headquarters, located at 177 Ingram Street, Glasgow, is an imposing Italianate banking building constructed between 1865 and 1866, originally designed by John Burnet. A single-story banking hall was added to the Ingram Street frontage in 1894-96 by J J Burnet (Son), and a further storey was added to the original structure between 1898 and 1899. Sculpture was undertaken by George Frampton. The building is constructed of cream-coloured ashlar sandstone, channelled at ground level.

The Glassford Street elevation is symmetrical and comprises seven bays, featuring a channelled pilastered doorpiece with a broken segmental pediment and cartouche flanked by a lion and unicorn. Tall windows are positioned on either side of the door. A mutuled cornice sits above the ground floor. All windows have architraves. The first floor features a tripartite window, broken by the door pediment, with a consoled cornice. Corniced windows flank smaller windows on the second floor, with carved panels surrounding the centre window. A frieze above incorporates a cornice and a balustrade leading to a Doric columned loggia of the third floor, an addition by J J Burnet (Son), with eight round-arched windows and a main modillion cornice. Similar detailing extends over the eight bays behind the banking hall on the Ingram Street elevation.

The Ingram Street banking hall has a recessed central bay with a wide, composite, columned entrance. Above the door is a cartouche within a shallow segmental pediment, enclosed by open and broken pediments supported by crouching Atlantes, encompassing an aediculed niche containing a figure of St Mungo by George Frampton. Carved panels and urn finials decorate the parapet die flanking the entrance bay. Broken and open segmental pediments overlay the windows in the outer bays, sheltering initialled cartouches, and featuring cavetto reveals. A dentil row sits below the mutuled cornice. Rounded corners are slightly recessed, with taller parapets each adorned with carved panels. The return elevations each feature a tripartite window centrally positioned, flanked by slightly recessed bays, and incorporating broken, open segmental pediments and cartouched segmental designs over the centre light, but lacking the aediculed niche. A leaded and glazed dome crowns the hall, topped by a diminutive, domed stone tempietto with an obelisk finial. The interior of the banking hall, a fine Edwardian Baroque space currently serving as the bank’s main entrance following modifications in 1975, boasts ornate plasterwork, fine woodwork including benches and masques to the consoled counter, two sets of gilded two-leaf gates to the earlier building, fine stained-glass windows, including the dome's oculi, and marble columns. Decorative wrought-iron gates, partly gilded, provide access.