Thomas Gildard

In a short career as a private architect alongside Robert Macfarlane, before entering public service as deputy to Glasgow`s Master of Works, buildings designed by him and his professional partner are : the Clyde Thread Works, also known as Clyde Thread Mills; Belgrave Terrace on the southside of Great Western Road, Glasgow; Ardenvhor fronting the Gareloch; and in 1857/58 an Italianate warehouse in the Trongate, Glasgow for Archibald Blair, two floors of which opened on 25 December 1859 as the Britannia Music Hall (which continues today).

His family were from Luss near Loch Lomond but he was born in a cottage hospital at Bonhill to the south.

[2] He entered a partnership Robert Macfarlane, son of cotton merchants, in 1852, who later married his sister Eliza.

He is noted for a strong condemnation of Presbyterian Gothic in his paper "Church Architecture" of June 1856, and for strong condemnation of the National Monument Committee in their treatment of his lifelong friend, John Thomas Rochead, in relation to the committee's failure to pay Rochead for his work on the Wallace Monument.

He is buried in Glasgow Necropolis, his monument being designed by the Mossmans with a low-relief portrait head by William Shirreffs.