Glasgow’s Medieval Bridge

Today the River Clyde in Glasgow is crossed by more than twenty bridges. For most of the city’s history there was only one. From the thirteenth century until 1772, every traveller, cart and herd of cattle crossing the river at Glasgow had to use the same narrow bridge at the foot of what is now Stockwell Street. Its stone successor, built by a bishop in the fourteenth century, lasted for more than five hundred years, and the street that led to it, the Bridgegate, is still one of the oldest in the city.

A ford and a timber bridge

Glasgow grew up on the north bank of the Clyde where the river was shallow enough to ford. In the early medieval period the town itself lay up the hill around the cathedral, but the river crossing mattered from the beginning, linking the bishop’s town with the lands to the south and with the routes to Rutherglen, Renfrew and Ayrshire. The first recorded bridge was made of timber. It is believed to have existed by 1285, and the fifteenth-century poet Blind Harry, in his epic about William Wallace, describes a Glasgow bridge that was built of wood.

Bishop Rae’s bridge

Around 1345 the timber bridge was replaced by a stone one, built on the same site by William Rae, Bishop of Glasgow. Medieval bishops often paid for bridges, which were regarded as works of charity as well as useful public projects, and Glasgow’s bishops had a strong interest in the trade that passed through their burgh. The new bridge was a series of stone arches, just twelve feet wide, carrying the road from the town across the river to the small settlement on the south bank that became the Gorbals.

It became known as the Bishop’s Bridge, or simply Glasgow Bridge, and for centuries it was the only bridge across the Clyde at Glasgow, and one of very few anywhere on the lower river. Whoever wanted to cross the Clyde between the town and the south, whether merchants, drovers, armies or pilgrims, had to use it.

The Bridgegate

The road down to the bridge from the Saltmarket became the Bridgegate, or Briggait, and as the town expanded south from the cathedral towards the river in the late medieval and early modern period it became an important street. Merchants built fine houses there, and in the seventeenth century the Merchants’ House, the guild of the city’s merchants, built its hall on the Bridgegate. Its steeple, completed in 1665, still stands, now surrounded by later buildings. Later, in the nineteenth century, the city’s fish market was built on the same street, and the restored building, known as the Briggait, is now a centre for artists.

The south end of the bridge saw the growth of the Gorbals, which began as a small village and later became one of the most densely populated districts in Europe. For centuries the bridge was its lifeline to the city.

A bridge through history

The old bridge witnessed many of the great events of Glasgow’s history. Armies used it in the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in 1568 the forces of the Regent Moray are said to have crossed the river here on their way to defeat the supporters of Mary, Queen of Scots at the Battle of Langside. Floods regularly threatened it, and before the river was deepened the Clyde near the town was shallow enough in places to be waded in summer.

As Glasgow grew into a trading city in the eighteenth century, the narrow medieval bridge became a serious bottleneck. In 1777 it was widened by ten feet to cope with the growing traffic. By then, however, the city had already begun to build new crossings.

New bridges

The second bridge across the Clyde at Glasgow was built only in the eighteenth century. Authorised in 1758 and completed in 1772, it crossed the river further west at the Broomielaw, at the foot of what became Jamaica Street, and it was later rebuilt by Thomas Telford and again in the 1890s; today’s Glasgow Bridge, or Jamaica Bridge, stands on its site. More bridges followed as the city spread south and west and the river was deepened for shipping, as described on our Clyde deepening page.

The medieval bridge itself lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century. By 1851 Glasgow’s population had reached around 329,000, having doubled in twenty-five years, and the old bridge could no longer cope. It was demolished, and in its place a new stone bridge with five arches, designed by the engineer James Walker, was built on deeper foundations. Opened in 1854 and named after Queen Victoria, it was one of the widest bridges in Britain when it was built.

Victoria Bridge today

Victoria Bridge, at the foot of Stockwell Street, is now the oldest surviving bridge in Glasgow and is listed at Category A. It stands on the site of the first recorded crossing of the Clyde in the city, the place where the timber bridge of the thirteenth century and Bishop Rae’s stone bridge of 1345 once carried travellers across the river. Standing on it, looking along the River Clyde, it is possible to imagine the medieval town on the slope behind, the village of the Gorbals across the water and the single narrow bridge between them on which so much of Glasgow’s history once depended.

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