Look upwards all around Glasgow and you’ll find some amazing sights.

A statue of liberty here; an abstract carving there.

And all over the city you can find something fresh every day.

Look down and you can also come across a treasure trove of facts and findings about the city and its story.

Walking to the top of Hope Street, heading towards the Theatre Royal, there will be memories of times gone by when this was the original home to Scottish Television, later to become STV.

Here was the land of the One O’Clock Gang with Dorothy Paul, Dateline with Bill Tennant and Scotsport with Arthur Montford.

And if you look down just outside the theatre, you will see a plaque that reveals the old STV was also home to a tragic fire back on November 3, 1969.

On that day, sub officer Archie McLay of the then Glasgow Fire Service, perished.

Described as “an extensive and difficult fire” in the sub-basement of the studios, the alarm was raised in the late afternoon.

The fire had started 30ft below ground.

Within minutes, the fire crews arrived to find the building consumed with thick, black smoke.

At one point 90 firemen were fighting the blaze and the decision was taken to use, for the first time in Glasgow, high expansion foam to quell the blaze.

Glasgow was the first city across Britain to adopt the technique, usually used in mine fires, for regular firefighting.

Foam was pumped into the studios at such a rate that fresh supplies had to be brought in from Paisley.

Around 11pm it became clear that Archie McLay, who was 35 at the time, had not returned from inside the building.

Glasgow Times:

Fire crews wearing breathing apparatus went back in to STV, fighting their way through foam 6ft deep to search for him.

He was found under the stage, his breathing line out of his mouth.

Glasgow Times:

One of his colleagues told the Evening Times: "At some point the trap door on the stage must have been opened and he would have stepped back and disappeared through it.”

During the fire, three other crew members had collapsed from a lack of oxygen. A couple of their colleagues heard them fall and managed to pull them out.

Later, sub officer John Jamieson, a friend of Archie’s, developed an alarm that would sound when firefighters were knocked unconscious or overcome by fumes.

It was called the Strathclyde, was used by the brigade and earned John an Empire Medal in 1981.

Fire crews still use a version of the original alarm, now called the Bodyguard.

The fire at STV burned for 10 hours and it coincided with the day the station, which then broadcast in black and white, was holding trials with colour television for the first time.

The plaque outside the Theatre Royal is one of 12 on Glasgow’s Firefighters’ Heritage Trail, commemorating the lives of fire crews and members of the public who have been lost in fires.