Glasgow
is believed to have grown up round a Christian settlement established
in the late 6th century by St Mungo, whose church was probably on
the site of the present cathedral.
Glasgow University was founded in 1451,
making it the fourth oldest in the United Kingdom and the second oldest
in Scotland (St. Andrews was founded in
1411).
Glasgow's commercial prosperity dates from the 17th century when the
port on the River Clyde began importing tobacco, sugar, cotton and
other goods from the Americas. A large percentage of these goods were
then re-exported to France, Germany, Italy, Holland and Norway. After
the inventions of James Watt and Richard
Arkwright, Glasgow became involved in the textile
industry when cotton mills were built
in the city.
Glasgow became involved in shipbuilding and by 1835 half the tonnage
of steam ships produced in Britain were built on the River Clyde.
The centre of the city was not accessible to shipping until improvements
were made to river navigation in the 1840s.
The economy of the city was benefited by the development of the railway
system. Important lines included the Garnkirk & Glasgow (1831),
the Edinburgh & Glasgow (1842) and the Caledonian
Railway (1845) that linked the main industrial centres of England
with Glasgow.
In the 19th century the population of Glasgow grew rapidly going from
a population of 77,000 in 1801 to 420,000 in 1861. Low standard working-class
housing was built quickly to meet this increase in demand. By the
early 1860s the city centre was an unhealthy, overcrowded ghetto,
with population density levels of 1,000 people per acre.
(1)
Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole
Island of Great Britain (1724)
There are some villages and fishing towns
within the mouth of the Clyde, but the first town of note is called
Greenock. It is not an ancient place, but seems to be grown up in
later years. The merchants of Glasgow who are concerned in the fishery,
employ the Greenock vessels for the catching and curing the fish,
and for several other trades.
Glasgow is, indeed, a very fine city; the four principal streets are
the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen
in one city. The houses are all of stone, and generally equal and
uniform in height, as well as in front; the lower story generally
stands on vast square Doric columns, not round pillars, and arches
between give passage into the shops, adding to the strength as well
as beauty of the building; in a word, it is the cleanest, the most
beautiful, the best built city in Britain, London excepted.
(2)
Neil Arnott & James Kay, Report on the Prevalence of Certain
Physical Causes of Fever (1838)
In Glasgow, which I first visited, it was
found that the great mass of the fever cases occurred in the low wynds
and dirty narrow streets and courts, in which, because lodging was
there cheapest, the poorest and most destitute naturally had their
abodes. From one such locality, between Argyle Street and the river,
754 of about 5,000 cases of fever which occurred in the previous year
were carried to the hospitals.
We entered a dirty low passage like a house door, which led from the
street through the first house to a square court immediately behind,
which court, with the exception of a narrow path around it leading
to another long passage through a second house, was occupied entirely
as a dung receptacle.
(3) Crystal
Eastman, The
Liberator
(October, 1919)
The
Clyde is a muddy, uninteresting river 100 miles lone
which rises fifteen hundred feet up in the hills of Lanarkshire, and
flows west across the narrow part of Scotland into the sea. Fourteen
miles up from its mouth lies Glasgow. The history of Glasgow and the
Clyde is the history of the industrial revolution. For along the valley
of this river lie the largest coal fields and the richest iron-ore
mines in all the British Isles. It happens that Fulton, Bell and Watt
were all originally Clyde men. After the invention of machinery, Glasgow
which had been a thriving little seaport of 14,000, serving an agricultural
and wool-producing hinterland, became in one short century a great
dark smoky city of a million people, surrounded by a dozen ugly industrial
suburbs. And half a century later, when men learned to make ships
of steel, the Clyde became the greatest shipbuilding river in the
world. The Pittsburg worker must bring his iron-ore from some place
away up in the Great Lakes region, a thousand miles away, and he must
send his finished steel to far-off harbors to be made into ships.
But the Clyde worker finds iron-ore, coal, and a 200-acre harbor right
at hand. No wonder that more ships were built on the banks of the
Clyde before the war than in England, Germany and America put together.
But the Clyde workers
do not all build ships. The kindred trades flourish there. They make
boilers, locomotives, bridges, machinery, tools. And thousands of
them are miners. Bob Smillie, a Lanarkshire miner, is a Clyde man.
Keir Hardie, too, worked in the coal-fields area of the Clyde valley.
Last
updated: 25th July 2002
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