The long ordeal of Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art

I was working on the final edit of my book — a fictionalised account of the year Charles Rennie Mackintosh spent in Suffolk — when news came in that his most famous architectural creation, The Glasgow School of Art, was on fire. My heart lurched. This was an unimaginable tragedy, not just for Glasgow, but for Britain. Students were weeping in the street. I struggled not to cry myself. Poor old Mac (as the Suffolk locals called him). He’d had enough bad luck already.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a student at the Glasgow School of Art in 1895 when a competition to design a new art school was announced. He was also a junior assistant at the architectural firm of Honeyman and Keppie, and it was on behalf of this firm, at the age of 28, that he won the commission to create the building that would define him.

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