The Long View from the Trongate

Just before Christmas, I found myself standing on the Trongate in Glasgow, outside the Panopticon Music Hall.

A quick photo. A quiet moment. And then, as often happens in this city, time folded in on itself.

Because long before the Panopticon was reclaimed as a place of performance, history and culture, this was Lennards Shoes. And long before I was talking about purpose, progress or People-Planet-Progress, I was a school kid with a Saturday job, selling sensible footwear to sensible Glaswegians.

That shop paid for gigs, pints, books, records. It taught me how to talk to people who weren’t like me. It taught me that turning up on time matters. It taught me that work is rarely glamorous—but often formative. I worked there while still at school. I worked there while at university. Same floor. Same stockroom. Same smell of polish and cardboard boxes. Different version of me.

8am on the Trongate

One morning—early, about 8am, when we were just trying to get the shutters up and the tills on—a small group appeared outside the shop. They were members of The Desert Song (clue below). They wanted in. Not to buy shoes. But to access “the old theatre.”

At that point, this was simply annoying. We had deliveries to deal with. Customers to serve. A shop to open. We turned them away, slightly baffled and more than a little grumpy. What old theatre? To us, this was retail. End of story.

A Few Days Later

A few days on, Norma Green intervened. Norma was the matriarch of Lennards. Calm, authoritative, utterly unflappable. She listened, nodded once—and disappeared.

When she came back, she was holding a key. Not a shop key. A different key. She led us upstairs, through the stockroom, past racks of unsold shoes and half-forgotten boxes, and through a door I had never noticed before. And suddenly, the building changed.

We were standing in the old theatre. Semi-derelict. Dusty. Silent. Magical. We stood in what had once been the circle, looking down—not onto a stage—but onto the fluorescent lights of the stockroom ceiling below. Above us were the ghosts of seats, balconies, plasterwork and ceilings from another age. A famous old building hiding in plain sight. A music hall masquerading as a shoe shop. Culture layered directly on top of commerce.

From Shoes to Songs (and a Donkey)

The Panopticon opened in 1857. Britain’s oldest surviving music hall. Stan Laurel performed here. Music, comedy, variety—working-class culture in full voice.

By the time I arrived, all of that had been covered over with shelving, price tags and “Back to School” signage. Which is perhaps why I smile now at another confession. I am unapologetically a fan of amateur drama. Not ironically. Properly.

My own Bottom once appeared—loud, proud and unmistakable—for ten nights in the grounds of Windsor Castle, in an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fairy lights. Summer evenings. A man in donkey ears taking himself just seriously enough to make it work.

There’s something quietly radical about people choosing to preserve and perform old stories, rather than constantly replacing them with the next new thing. In an age obsessed with upgrades, disposals and frictionless AI-driven efficiency, there’s value in restoration—in maintaining what already works, in reusing spaces, skills and stories instead of throwing them away. Sometimes sustainability looks less like innovation—and more like remembering.

The Third Half Bit

The Third Half has always been about perspective. About what you see when you stop sprinting and start noticing the layers.

Standing outside the Panopticon now, I wasn’t nostalgic for my Saturday job (retail at Christmas cures you of that forever). I wasn’t wishing anything away.

I was recognising continuity. The shoe shop wasn’t a detour. The university years weren’t a waiting room. The corporate decades weren’t the “main act”. They’re all part of the same building—just viewed from different floors. Progress doesn’t always mean demolition. Sometimes it means restoration.

Sometimes it means finally understanding what your earlier selves were quietly standing inside—without knowing it. We were just trying to open the shop at 8am.

Turns out we were standing in a theatre.