WE'VE seen some strange sights on Glasgow Green, but never a Chinese pagoda.

This unlikely oriental tea house was built in the late 1800s to provide shelter and a clubhouse of sorts for the park's bowlers. And, just to keep in on the act, the loos, built behind the pagoda, were topped off with a matching, Chinese-style pitched roof.

As China opened up to the West in the 1800s, its art and architecture became all the rage. In 1911, our own Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed a Chinese room, for Miss Cranston's Ingram Street tea rooms, which is now held in the Glasgow museums collection.

Quite what the locals made of this oriental interloper on the Green, we don't know, but with our unpredictable weather, we're sure the bowlers were glad of the shelter it offered.