History

The Maryhill Free Church congregation commissioned a new building in 1896. Mackintosh, then twenty-seven and a junior draughtsman at the Glasgow practice of Honeyman and Keppie, was given the job. It was one of his first significant independent design responsibilities. The commission asked for a functional Protestant church on a tight urban corner plot, and Mackintosh turned that constraint into an opportunity: the asymmetric plan, with a tower placed off-centre at the junction of Garscube Road and Maryhill Road, responds directly to the street geometry rather than to any conventional ecclesiastical template.

Construction ran from 1897 to 1899, and the congregation used the building for worship through most of the twentieth century. By the 1970s, falling attendance and the costs of maintenance had made the building financially unviable for the dwindling congregation. It was deconsecrated, and its future became uncertain at a time when many Victorian church buildings across Glasgow were being demolished.

The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society, founded in 1973 by a group of architects and scholars concerned with the neglect of his legacy, purchased the building in 1977. A programme of restoration followed, returning the interior to something close to its original condition. The church has operated as the society’s base ever since: part archive, part exhibition space, part working office for the organisation that keeps Mackintosh’s name and buildings in public consciousness.