The Glasgow City Mission

In 1826 a young Glasgow clerk named David Nasmith founded an organisation to take the Christian message, and practical help, into the poorest streets of his rapidly growing city. The Glasgow City Mission was the first city mission in the world, and the model it created was copied in Edinburgh, London, Dublin and across Britain and North America. Almost two centuries later it is still at work in Glasgow, now focused on people affected by homelessness and poverty.

A city outgrowing its churches

In the early nineteenth century Glasgow was growing faster than almost any city in Europe. Tens of thousands of people arrived from the Highlands, from rural Lowland Scotland and from Ireland to work in the mills, foundries and workshops, and they crowded into the old wynds and closes around the Trongate, the Saltmarket and the High Street. Disease, drink and destitution were everywhere. The parish system of the Church of Scotland had been designed for a much smaller town, and huge numbers of the new city’s people had no contact with any church at all.

Evangelical Christians were increasingly troubled by this. The most famous of them, Thomas Chalmers, had experimented from 1819 with dividing his Glasgow parish of St John’s into small districts, each visited regularly by elders and deacons. The City Mission took a similar idea and applied it across the whole city.

David Nasmith

David Nasmith was born in Glasgow in March 1799 and began his working life as an apprentice in manufacturing. He was a deeply religious young man with an extraordinary gift for organisation. In 1821, still in his early twenties, he became secretary of a union of the city’s religious societies. In 1824 he founded a society for the religious improvement of young men, an early forerunner of the later young men’s associations.

In 1826 he founded the Glasgow City Mission. Its idea was simple but new: to employ full-time lay missionaries, each responsible for a district of the city, who would visit every household, read the Bible with families, hold meetings, encourage people to attend church and send their children to school, and help them find practical assistance. Crucially, the mission was supported by Christians from different Protestant churches working together, rather than by a single denomination.

Into the wynds

The city missionaries became familiar figures in the poorest parts of Victorian Glasgow. They climbed the stairs of crowded tenements, sat with the sick and dying during the cholera epidemics, ran Sunday schools and evening meetings, and reported in detail on the conditions they found. Their reports became an important source of information about how the poor lived, and they fed into the campaigns for better housing, clean water and public health described on our public health reforms page.

The missionaries’ work had limits, and critics then and since have pointed out that moral and religious improvement could not solve problems caused by low wages, overcrowding and disease. But for many people in the slums, the missionary who called regularly was one of the few outsiders who took an interest in their lives.

A worldwide movement

Nasmith did not stay in Glasgow. He went on to found or inspire city missions in Dublin, in several American cities and, in 1832, in Edinburgh. In 1835 he founded the London City Mission, which became one of the largest organisations of its kind in the world. He was said to have been involved in founding so many missions and societies that he could hardly keep count of them.

His energy was not matched by money. He died poor in 1839, aged only forty, at Guildford in Surrey, and was buried in Bunhill Fields in London. Friends from the missions later raised a memorial describing him as the founder of city and town missions throughout England, Scotland, Ireland and America.

The mission today

The Glasgow City Mission has continued its work through every period of the city’s history since 1826, adapting to changing needs. Today it is a Christian charity whose main focus is on people affected by homelessness, poverty and isolation. Its city centre base on Crimea Street offers meals, advice and activities, it runs a winter night shelter known as the Overnight Welcome Centre, and since 1986 it has run a child and family centre in Govan, with a nursery and support for parents.

Its history is a reminder that Glasgow’s churches, whatever their divisions, played a large part in the city’s response to the social crisis of the industrial age. The wider story of faith in the city is told in our religion chapter.

Timeline