Hotels near ABC
In Sauchiehall Street, the centre of Glasgow's entertainment heartland, the ABC occupies the distinctive Art Deco building that once housed Scotland's first cinema. Reborn for the 21st Century with a £2 million refit, the ABC now incorporates two cutting edge live music and club spaces with four bars and an overall capacity of 1600 - the biggest music venue to launch in Glasgow's city centre since the legendary Apollo.
A starkly elegant and refreshing younger sibling to those much loved venues; Barrowland and The Academy, the ABC challenges the notion of the live music venue as a bleak, inhospitable place; where poor surroundings and low standards are sold as underground, dissident and charming. Thus the ABC has been passionately and meticulously crafted to offer music lovers an extraordinary experience.
This is the 3rd century of entertainment at the ABC. Scotland saw its first cinema show here in 1896 and over the following thirty years the building was known as The Ice Palace, The Hippodrome and Hengler's Circus and which was home to lions, tigers and a polar bear family of four. They didn't stay long; the circus closed in 1924 with people more interested in moving pictures than performing monkeys. And so, for over three quarters of the 20th Century, this was one of Glasgow's best loved cinemas, in various incarnations as the Regal, the MGM, the Cannon, and of course, the ABC, which eventually closed its doors for the last time in 1999, making way for this extensive refit.
Spread over four floors, the ABC incorporates two live music and club spaces and four bars. The ABC2 (350 capacity) on the first floor is a essentially a windowless basement, yet eschews the old black-box club ethos for a bright richly colour laden experience. There is a real sense of space and openness on the slightly oversize stage, in the generous artist's dressing rooms, and in the public space. The seats are arranged in a series of three parallel benches with the central wooden bench doubling as a table. The reason for this is simple: on a long bench with others, you're in your own space yet also in a community. There are a few dark intimate seating booths at the back for the separatists, the individualists, the oddities who make a place interesting. Behind the booths, the four two metre long wall panels each have a ghostly imprint of a bewildered polar bear rummaging among the gothic fronds of the original ABC motif.
136 hotels
HOTELS
Location: Glasgow
Distance: 0.04 miles
Rating: 2*
Prices From: £28.00
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Distance: 0.05 miles
Rating: 3*
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Location: Glasgow
Distance: 0.05 miles
Rating: 2*
Prices From: £26.00
Location: Glasgow
Distance: 0.06 miles
Rating: 1*
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Distance: 0.06 miles
Rating: 2*
Prices From: £33.00
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Distance: 0.07 miles
Rating: 4*
Prices From: £129.00
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Distance: 0.08 miles
Rating: 3*
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Distance: 0.12 miles
Rating: SELF CLASSIfIED
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