Architecture

Glasgow is often called the finest Victorian city in Britain, and in 1999 it was the UK City of Architecture and Design. Its streets are a textbook of building from the twelfth century to the twenty-first, although very little survives from before 1700. The great exceptions are Glasgow Cathedral, the most complete medieval cathedral on the Scottish mainland, and Provand’s Lordship of 1471, the oldest house in the city. Glasgow Cross and the Trongate still mark the centre of the old town.

Georgian Glasgow grew west from the Cross as the tobacco lords built mansions and churches on the grid of streets now called the Merchant City. Victorian Glasgow, rich on ships, iron and trade, built on a heroic scale. George Square became the civic heart, overlooked since 1888 by the City Chambers, while the Necropolis, opened in 1833, became a city of the dead to match. Shopping streets such as Buchanan Street and St Enoch Square, and the great stations at Central and Queen Street, reflected the confidence of the age.

The city’s architects were equal to the moment. Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson created a unique classical style in churches, terraces and warehouses; Charles Wilson laid out Park Circus; and Charles Rennie Mackintosh invented a new architecture for the twentieth century. Culture and recreation had their palaces too: Kelvingrove, opened in 1901 during the International Exhibition; the Mitchell Library; and the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green, the city’s oldest park, granted to Bishop William Turnbull by King James II in 1450.

Above all, Glasgow is a city of tenements. The tenement tradition explains how the sandstone flat, from the grand terraces of the West End to the single-ends of the East End, shaped how most Glaswegians lived. Country houses such as Pollok House and Thomson’s villa Holmwood House show the other end of the scale.