Hidden History

Beneath and behind the city everyone knows lies another Glasgow of lost rivers, sealed tunnels, vanished villages and forgotten trades, and this chapter goes looking for it. Start with the water. The Molendinar Burn, beside which St Mungo is said to have founded his church, now runs largely underground in culverts, along with the other streams described in the buried rivers of Glasgow.

The city grew by swallowing its neighbours, and lost villages traces settlements such as Grahamston, demolished in the 1870s to make way for Central Station. Lost streets and forgotten buildings recover places erased by clearance, motorways and redevelopment, and historic maps, from Timothy Pont’s sketch of the 1590s to the Victorian Ordnance Survey, show how much has changed.

Underground Glasgow is full of surprises. Secret underground Glasgow and hidden tunnels explore crypts, vaults, worked-out coal and disused railways, among them Botanic Gardens station, closed on 6 February 1939, and the Glasgow Harbour Tunnel of 1895, which carried pedestrians beneath the Clyde until 1980 and whose rotundas still stand on both banks.

The dead have their own stories. Historic cemeteries looks beyond the Necropolis to the Southern Necropolis in the Gorbals, which holds more than 250,000 burials, and where in September 1954 hundreds of children went hunting the so-called Gorbals Vampire, an episode recounted in Glasgow ghost stories. Forgotten industries recalls the clay pipes, pottery and glass that Glasgow once sold to the world, and historic pubs visits some of the oldest drinking places in the city.