A notorious Glasgow hotel which housed homeless men in conditions described as “like a Soviet gulag” could be partially demolished under a new plan.
The Bellgrove Hotel on the Gallowgate was bought by Glasgow City Council and housing association Wheatley Group in 2021, with the last men moving out later that year.
It was previously criticised at Holyrood after an undercover investigation by the Daily Record exposed squalid conditions.
READ MORE: The squalid Glasgow hostel that was likened to a 'Soviet gulag'
Wheatley Group has now asked the council for permission to redevelop the hotel and surrounding land to provide 70 homes. The project would see part of the hotel knocked down as the “western wing is too narrow to accommodate flats”.
Flats would be available for “mid-market rent” — generally higher than social housing but lower than private rents. Wheatley Homes’ website states mid-market properties “offer alternative affordable housing for customers who work and who earn between £21,000 and £40,000”.
The hotel redevelopment is part of wider plans for the regeneration of the Gallowgate area and includes brownfield land to the east.
Wheatley’s application stated: “The aims of the development are to provide new and exemplary homes for mid-market rent that integrate into the local context and reinforce positive active travel connections to Duke Street around new public green spaces.”
The converted hotel would include 14 flats, with eight wheelchair adaptable properties. Plans reveal full retention of the Bellgrove was “never a truly viable alternative due to constraints around the footprint of the building”. However, the council has “strongly maintained that it should be retained in some form”.
Collective Architecture found “some portions of the building were not viable for conversion” as the western wing is “too narrow” and reported council planners are “supportive of the proposal to downtake these parts of the building”. The ‘Bellgrove Hotel’ signage would be removed.
The homeless hostel was likened to “a Soviet gulag” and Dickensian poorhouses when it was raised in the Scottish Parliament, after a 2014 newspaper investigation found occupants were housed in tiny rooms looking onto a rat-infested courtyard.
It was also reported the hostel’s owners raked in £1.5m in annual fees from taxpayers. Following the investigation, Glasgow MSP John Mason raised a motion signed by 21 members from across the political divide calling for better regulation of the hostel “as a matter of urgency”.
At the time, he said the conditions could “generously” be considered “unsuitable” and “less generously, grim, Dickensian, like a Soviet gulag or similar descriptions”.
When the hotel was closed, over 50 men were offered new Glasgow Housing Association homes in a partnership with Lowther Homes, a subsidiary of Wheatley Group.
The B-listed hotel had originally been built in the 1930s to provide accommodation for working men.
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