Six lost Edinburgh pubs and clubs you'll remember.Thirteen years later, and after the non-arrival of a long-promised Selfridge’s store, the gap site still lies vacant. Within days, and despite a last-minute, rear-guard campaign to save the historic howff, the bulldozers moved in and wiped Granny Black’s off the city map. Sadly, in 2002, just as the Merchant City redevelopment was hitting its stride, a burst water pipe saw the pub’s adjoining tenement, fortunately then empty, collapse into the street. In the days before lap-dancing clubs, it was also one of the few Glasgow pubs to put on strippers, earning the owners a stern rebuke from the city’s licensing board. Those too busy to pull up a chair could carry away one of Granny Black’s famous hot pies.Įstablished in 1820, as The Stag, the pub once offered a range of upstairs function, meeting and private dining rooms.īy the 1960s, the bar had become a favourite bolthole for wabbit and foot-weary husbands, escaping a day’s shopping with the wife in the next-door Goldberg’s department store.īefore Glasgow vanished under the current avalanche of bearded hipsters, craft beers, pulled pork and brioche buns, regulars could tuck into a ‘mince pot’, before enjoying a night of fizzy lager and karaoke. Located right beside the city’s wholesale fruit and vegetable market (today’s Merchant Square), it was abuzz from breakfast time, as tired traders downed dawn pints and tucked into full, fried breakfasts.
A popular pub and meeting place when the ‘Merchant City’ really was home to merchants and traders, as opposed to pram-pushers, tourists and Sunday-lunching suburbanites, Granny Black’s claim to fame was that it was the first hot-food takeaway in Glasgow.