1 He was the man who designed one of Glasgow’s grandest stores and many other notable buildings but not many people are aware of the sad story behind James Sellars’ untimely death. Born in 1843, he was apprenticed to Hugh Barclay at the age of 13, but came to prominence 15 years later when he won an international competition.
2 James defeated 75 other architects to win the contract to design a monument to late Lord Provost Robert Stewart, the man responsible for establishing Glasgow’s first permanent water supply from Loch Katrine. (Incidentally, the result was declared null and void and the competition ran again – and James won for the second time.)
3 James was heavily influenced in his designs by another notable Glasgow architect, Alexander Greek Thomson, and it was Thomson and John Baird who signed James’s certificate on admission to the Glasgow Institute of Architects in March 1872.
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4 In 1883, James designed the department store building which is now House of Fraser on Buchanan Street. He also helped design St Andrew’s Halls (now the Mitchell Theatre); our newspaper’s original home on Buchanan Street, plus Netherhall House in Largs for Lord Kelvin and Ayr Town Hall. He was a modest man who shied away from the spotlight and he declined an offer of a knighthood, claiming he ‘could not live up to it’. He always took a particular interest in the housing of the working classes and the poor.
5 Sadly, at the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1888, Sellars stood on a rusty nail, which did not heal and led to his death by blood poisoning. He is buried in Lambhill Cemetery, for which he had designed the entrance archway eight years previously.
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