THIS tobacco merchant's house, hidden away in Miller Street, had seen better days when this picture was taken sometime in the 1950s

THIS tobacco merchant's house, hidden away in Miller Street, had seen better days when this picture was taken sometime in the 1950s

The house was built by John Craig in 1775 as one of a row of villas, and bought in 1782 by Robert Findlay of Easterhill, a tobacco importer. His son, also Robert, developed the Virginia Buildings in 1814 as premises for his generation of tobacco traders.

The classical proportions of the house echo the much larger Palladian mansions built in the city by the Tobacco Lords, the Glasgow merchants who made millions by cornering the sugar and tobacco trades with the US colonies and the West Indies after the 1707 Act of Union.

The street names in the Merchant City - Virginia, Jamaica and Tobago - bear witness to Glasgow's historic trading links with the colonies.

As the profits flowed in, across the developing city a whole host of fine houses were erected, including this little beauty which, by the late 1950s was operating as a dress shop, offering 'gowns and mantles'.

Between 1912 and 1954, the building also housed Stirling's Library.

Restored and renovated in 1995 by the Scottish Civic Trust, which is now headquartered there, they removed the later third floor loft extension to return the building to its original, elegant proportions.

If you are ever wandering through the Merchant City, take the cut at the side of this building, through Virginia Court, to Virginia Street. It's like stepping back in time. At once you are in a quiet and traffic free square, overshadowed by restored Georgian buildings.

Oh, if only those stones could talk, the stories they could tell.