IT WAS an unassuming nightclub in a building you would not have looked twice at until Trainspotting put it on the map….

The Volcano on Glasgow’s Benalder Street had a starring role in the hit movie, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this week.

It’s not the only city location which featured in the film, despite the fact its central story was set in Edinburgh. Following the misadventures of a group of young men struggling with drug addiction, joblessness and relationship problems, the hard-hitting movie made stars of Ewan McGregor and Kelly Macdonald.

Glasgow Times:

Heather Suttie, TV presenter and activist who now works in PR, has fond memories of the club - long since demolished and replaced with flats - and of the buzz Trainspotting created as it filmed around the city.

“I used to work for Big Beat, the company who owned Volcano and it was our regular club to visit when we weren’t working at The Tunnel,” she says.

“I remember seeing the flyers looking for people to go to casting auditions for the role of Diane, and thinking what an amazing opportunity for someone - and of course Kelly Macdonald got the part and she was utterly brilliant in her first ever acting role.”

Glasgow Times:

Heather adds: “I have so many memories of seeing snippets of it being filmed in and around Glasgow, knowing people who worked on the production, then going to the cinema to see it and seeing those posters everywhere..

“The film blew my mind so much I had to go back the following week to watch it again. I was living in London at the time, and when the Volcano popped up on the screen I jumped out my seat and shouted, ‘there’s the Volcano’, which was mortifying….”

“That book and movie changed lives and launched so many amazing careers. For me, it started my love affair with Danny Boyle’s work.”

Glasgow Times:

An old tobacco factory on Alexandra Parade also played its part in Trainspotting’s success – not as a location, but as the main studio for interior scenes.

At its peak, the WD & HO Wills cigarette factory employed 3500 people and produced 260 million cigarettes a week.

It stopped making cigarettes in 1983, and cigar manufacture was transferred to it from Bristol. In May 1990 Imperial Tobacco, Britain’s biggest cigarette and cigar maker, announced the closure of the Wills cigar factory, with the loss of all 530 jobs as part of a pre-European Single Market rationalisation designed to make the company ‘’the most efficient tobacco manufacturer in Europe.’’

Glasgow Times:

In 1999 it was reported in our sister newspaper The Herald that developers were to turn the factory into offices. Today the building houses City Park.

Other Glasgow locations featured in Trainspotting include Jordanhill School, where Diane is a pupil, Firhill Sports Complex, where the football match is played during Renton’s famous ‘Choose Life’ speech, and, on the southside, Rouken Glen Park, where Renton and Sick Boy discuss what it means to get old.

One of Maryhill’s famous haunts, Cafe d’Jaconelli, is featured on screen – it’s the bit where Renton and Spud have a strawberry milkshake – and the old Crosslands pub on Queen Margaret Drive in the west end was used as the pool hall in which Begbie kicks off and starts a huge bar fight. The building has changed names a couple of times and it is now Franco’s Beer Garden and Kitchen.

Trainspotting also used Canniesburn Nursing Home, which was part of the burns hospital at the time, as an actual nursing home from which Renton and Spud steal a TV, and the now demolished George Hotel on Buchanan Street, which stands in for the interior of the London hotel where Renton meets a drug dealer. It stood on the site of what is now the Buchanan Galleries shopping centre..