Film City Glasgow

Business resilience themes: Premises, People, Processes

Business Profile

Film City Glasgow is a vital production base for much of the feature film and television industry within Scotland.

The facilities comprise of production office space, studio/build space, workshop areas, rehearsal/meeting rooms, a café and creative business officers. It is home to over 25 permanent tenants from the screen and wider creative industries. It also has flexible low-cost short-term space hire. Users of the space include Film City Glasgow workers, tenants, short term production teams, freelancers, interns, and occasionally members of the public.

The core of the site is the Victoria-era former Govan Town Hall, a Category B listed building. The redevelopment of the site has retained many of the original features of the building. A new extension was added in 2008.

Climate impacts

Film City Glasgow is exposed to a number of climate risks which have affected the businesses operations in recent years . These include:

• Disruption for freelancers and lone workers: Production company teams often include a high proportion of freelancers whose job security may be precarious, for example when schedules are interrupted or delayed because of extreme weather events. Reducing the likelihood and or extent of delays is financially beneficial to production companies and their freelancers. Out of hours lone working is common, especially in post-production. Lone workers can be at risk on large complex multi-use sites from extreme weather events because their whereabouts may be unknown.
• Flooding to basement and outdoor areas: The boiler plant, main electricity supply to the building and the switch gear are in the basement, which has experienced flooding. More significant flooding is possible, as building is in a medium flood risk area, which could cause significant damage to both the building and critical infrastructure.
• Storm and freeze/thaw damage to external masonry: The building has ornate sandstone features and details. Several elements of the building require maintenance or reinstatement works to maintain their structural integrity to be resilient to extreme weather conditions.

Actions taken

In 2023 Film City Glasgow took part in a pilot project as part of Glasgow City Council’s Green Business Support programme, which helps local companies transition to Net-Zero, reduce their energy costs and become more resilient to climate change.

As part of this project, the sustainability charity Sniffer supported Film City Glasgow to understand its climate risks and prioritise the resilience actions the business can take. These included:

• Wellbeing, and health and safety policies: climate change risks and resilience actions have been integrated into the organisation’s health and safety policies and plans. This has included input from the individuals working in the facility and their support and health and safety requirements from the risks posed by climate change impacts.
• Business risk assessment: The potential risks associated with the climate change hazards identified in the work with Sniffer has helped to strengthen Film City Glasgow’s approach to business risk assessments, and identified a number of actions they can take immediately to ensure all relevant risk are considered. This has included more comfortable temperatures in all areas of the building for all users.
• Flood risk management: Critical items are raised on a 30cm concrete plinth to minimise flood damage. Film City Glasgow are also exploring further flood prevention measures, and have signed up to the SEPA flood alert system.