Calton

The Calton — poor, proud and defiantly itself — is one of the oldest working communities in Glasgow, and one of the most storied. A weavers’ village that became a self-governing burgh, it was the scene of Scotland’s first great labour tragedy, the shooting of the Calton weavers in 1787; it is the home of the Barras, Scotland’s most famous street market, and of the Barrowland Ballroom; and it sits, as it always has, right on the doorstep of Glasgow Green. The history of the Calton is the history of the East End in miniature.

This page tells its story: the weavers’ village on the old Blackfauld lands, the weaving trade, the martyrs of 1787, the self-governing burgh, the Barras, the Barrowland, and the district’s hard times and enduring pride.

Blackfauld & the weavers

The district’s name comes from the Gaelic for ‘wood on the hill’, though for a long time this was simply part of the Barrowfield estate, known as Blackfauld. Its life as a distinct community began in 1705, when John Walkinshaw, the laird of Barrowfield, started to develop the lands as a weavers’ village. Walkinshaw was a committed Jacobite, ruined by his part in the rising of 1715, and the Glasgow authorities acquired the ground in 1723, giving it the name Calton. The village passed to the Orr family in 1730 and spread steadily eastwards — a growing settlement of weavers on the very edge of the city, just beyond the reach of Glasgow’s own trade guilds.

A weaving village

For its first century, the Calton lived by the loom. Its people were handloom weavers, working linen and later cotton, and weaving so dominated the district that by 1819 it accounted for around two in five of all workers here and in neighbouring Bridgeton. The bleaching fields where the finished cloth was whitened lay close at hand on Glasgow Green. The weavers had begun as independent, self-respecting artisans, well known for the value they placed on education and on their own dignity; but as the eighteenth century wore on, most came to depend on piecework set by large manufacturers — and it was a cut to those rates that led, in 1787, to tragedy.

The Calton weavers

In the summer of 1787 the weavers of Calton, faced with a sharp reduction in their wages, gathered in mass meeting on Glasgow Green and went on strike. The dispute hardened over the following weeks, and on the 3rd of September, when the authorities moved against the demonstrators, soldiers opened fire and six weavers were killed. It was the earliest major industrial dispute in Scottish history, and the Calton weavers are honoured as Scotland’s first working-class martyrs. Some six thousand people attended their funeral, and they were laid to rest in the Calton Burial Ground on Abercromby Street, where their memorial still stands. Their sacrifice is commemorated, too, in a powerful painted panel by Ken Currie in the People’s Palace. The story is told more fully in our account of the cotton mills and the weaving trade.

The burgh of Calton

By the early nineteenth century the Calton had grown into a large and crowded community, and its people wanted proper government of their own. In 1817 it was raised into a self-governing burgh of barony, with its own provost and town council, responsible for the affairs of the district. Small as it was, the burgh of Calton earned a name for the efficiency and good sense of its administration — so much so that when it was finally annexed to the growing city of Glasgow in 1846, several of its practices were taken up by the larger corporation. For thirty years, this working district had run its own affairs, and run them well.

The Barras

The Calton is known across Scotland as the home of the Barras — the country’s most famous street market, and one of Glasgow’s best-loved institutions. Its name comes from the barrows, or handcarts, from which its traders first sold their wares. The market was the creation, in the years between the wars, of Maggie McIver, remembered as the ‘Barras Queen’, and her husband James: to give the district’s hard-pressed street hawkers a settled place to trade, she hired out hundreds of barrows from her yard, and the great weekend market grew from there. Roofed over to shelter its stalls from the weather, the Barras has drawn Glaswegians in search of a bargain, a laugh and a bit of patter for a hundred years.

The Barrowland

Out of the market grew one of Glasgow’s greatest music venues. Maggie McIver built the Barrowland Ballroom in 1934 as a dance hall for the Barras traders’ annual gatherings; after a fire it was rebuilt in 1960, complete with the sprung floor, the starlit ceiling and the great neon sign that generations of Glaswegians have known and loved. Today the Barrowland is celebrated far beyond the city as one of the finest concert halls in Britain, its atmosphere unmatched, and bands from all over the world count a night at the Barrowland among the highlights of any tour. From weavers’ village to world-famous stage, the Calton has always had life in it.

Poor & proud

The Calton’s modern history has not been easy. As its industries faded, the district became one of the poorest in the city, and it has long carried some of the sharpest marks of Glasgow’s deep-rooted inequalities in health and life chances — part of the wider pattern sometimes called the ‘Glasgow effect’. These are hard facts, and they are not to be glossed over. Yet the Calton has never been defined by hardship alone. It remains a place of fierce local pride and strong community, home to a market and a ballroom loved across the land, keeper of the memory of the weavers’ martyrs, and, as ever, the East End’s own back yard beside the Green.

The essentials