Royal Buildings, 7, 9, 11 Main Street, Uddingston

Royal Buildings at 7, 9, 11 Main Street and 4 Bellshill Road, Uddingston, is a substantial three-storey tenement building of nineteen bays, built by Wilson Walker in 1876 at a cost of £12,000. It occupies the former site of the village common green and its accompanying row of thatched cottages. The building incorporates a former hotel at the corner with Bellshill Road, marked by a distinctive conical-roofed corner tower.

The structure is constructed in red and polished ashlar sandstone, with channelled red ashlar at ground floor to numbers 23 and 25. Ground-floor shopfronts with mostly original glazing are interspersed with close doorways. The building is articulated by a base course, continuous cornice above shop fascias, cill cornices to the first and second floors (these features running around the corner tower), and string course with consoled cornice above, plus a further cornice between the first and second floors to the tower. The tower features a consoled and scalloped cornice. Windows throughout have moulded architraved margins, with pedimented examples at first-floor level; the tower windows have chamfered reveals. Channelled quoins accent the angles.

The Main Street elevation comprises nineteen bays grouped as four, ten, and five bays, with the ten-bay central section slightly recessed. This central block contains four shopfronts with two close doorways and ten single windows grouped three-two-two-three at each upper floor, with tall wallhead stacks evenly disposed above. The four-bay block to the left is slightly advanced and contains two shopfronts with an intervening close doorway, pedimented windows flanked by segmental-pedimented bipartites at first floor, and a date plaque with fan motif and arched cornice at second floor. The four-bay block to the right, similarly advanced, features a moulded round-arched doorway with mask keystone, flanked by channelled pilasters with heavily carved consols supporting a segmental pediment, set to the left at ground level; a shopfront and single window occupy the remaining ground-floor bays. Bipartite and single windows follow at the upper floors. The corner tower contains a modern door (formed from a former three-light window), three-light windows at each floor, and three narrow windows below the truncated conical roof, which is adorned with decorative wrought-iron brattishing.

The Bellshill Road elevation comprises four bays. The bay to the left of centre displays a highly decorative doorpiece with Ionic colonettes and piers, entablature with bracketed cornice and balustraded parapet, angle dies, and central segmental panel bearing a harp motif with acroterion; the replacement door is two-leaf timber panelled. A window occupies the bay to the left, with a barfront spanning the two right bays. Upper floors follow the fenestration pattern of the four right-hand bays of the Main Street elevation, with a tall wallhead stack at centre.

Shop fronts feature plate glass; upper windows are two-pane timber sash and case, though some have been replaced with uPVC and hardwood. The roof is covered in grey slate, with slate also applied to the conical tower roof; modern tiles have been substituted on numbers 7, 9 and 11. Cast-iron rainwater goods, some with moulded replacements, complete the external finishes. Tall multiflue ashlar corniced and shouldered wallhead stacks punctuate the roofline; these have been truncated above number 9, although seven original cans remain at numbers 23 and 25.

The date panel bears the initials WW, confirming Wilson Walker's role as builder. A contemporary photograph in Jamieson's book captures the former Royal Hotel nearing completion in 1875–6. The hotel proved unsuccessful, partly due to abuse of the Sunday licensing law: as the only place permitted to sell alcohol on the Sabbath, it attracted locals under the pretext of being bona fide travellers, leading to drunken behaviour that undermined the enterprise. The building forms an important townscape element alongside the contemporary structures at 2, 6 and 8 Old Glasgow Road, and appears on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1899.