The Industrial Revolution in Glasgow

If the Industrial Revolution has a birthplace, Glasgow can at least claim the birth-thought: the moment on Glasgow Green in 1765 when James Watt saw how to make the steam engine efficient, and a source of power that had been a curiosity became the driving force of the modern world. What Glasgow did with the century that followed was to take that thought and apply it to everything at once — cotton and coal, iron and chemicals, engines and ships — until a modest tobacco town of some eighty thousand people had become the Second City of the Empire and a workshop for the world.

This page tells that story whole: the tobacco wealth that supplied the capital, the steam engine that supplied the power, and the industries of cotton, chemicals, coal and iron that grew up around them — along with the human transformation, the steepest in Britain, that turned a walkable Georgian town into a vast and overcrowded Victorian city in a single lifetime.

From tobacco to manufacture

Glasgow entered the eighteenth century as a merchant town, and the fortune that founded its industry was made in Atlantic trade. After the Union of 1707 opened the colonial markets, the city’s Tobacco Lords came to dominate the trade in Virginia tobacco, and with it in sugar and cotton, amassing fortunes on a scale that built the mansions of the Merchant City — one of them, William Cuninghame’s, is now the Gallery of Modern Art. That wealth, and the commercial machinery of credit, shipping and warehousing built to handle it, rested in significant part on the labour of enslaved people on colonial plantations, a debt the city has come only lately to reckon with.

When the American War of Independence broke the tobacco trade after 1776, the merchants had capital to spare and looked for new places to put it. They reinvested in manufacture — in textiles, iron, coal, sugar-refining, glass, rope and chemicals — and in doing so turned a town that traded other people’s goods into a city that made its own. The counting-house became the works; the merchant became the manufacturer.

Watt & the power of steam

The technology that made it possible was Glasgow’s own. James Watt, an instrument-maker at the University of Glasgow, was repairing a model Newcomen engine when he grasped, on a Sunday walk across Glasgow Green in 1765, that fitting a separate condenser would stop the engine wasting most of its heat. His condenser roughly doubled the efficiency of the steam engine and made steam power an economic proposition for the first time — the single innovation on which the whole age would turn.

There is an irony Glaswegians tend to leave out: Watt could find no backing at home, went into partnership with Matthew Boulton, and built his engines in Birmingham, so that the profits of his invention were largely made in England. But the principle he had proved came back to Glasgow with interest. Steam freed industry from the fast-flowing rivers where the first mills had to be built, and let the manufacturer raise his works where the labour, the coal and the market were — which is to say, in the city itself.

King Cotton

The first great industry was cotton. Linen and its printing had long been Scottish trades, but the new spinning machinery, and above all Samuel Crompton’s mule of 1779, suited cotton, and cotton took over. The earliest mills needed water power and so were built out in the countryside — the celebrated village of New Lanark on the Clyde, founded by David Dale in the 1780s and made famous as a model community under his son-in-law Robert Owen, along with mills at Catrine, Deanston and Blantyre. By 1793 there were already some forty water-powered cotton mills across the west of Scotland.

Steam changed the geography. Once an engine could drive the spinning frames, the mills came off the rivers and into Glasgow and its suburbs, and cotton-spinning, weaving, bleaching and printing became the city’s largest employers. It was volatile work, thrown into crisis by the American war, the wars with France and the slump that followed Waterloo in 1815, and the handloom weavers who had once been a prosperous aristocracy of labour were reduced, as power looms spread, to some of the poorest people in the city.

Chemicals & the tallest chimney

Cotton needed chemicals — to bleach the cloth and fix the dye — and out of that need grew one of Glasgow’s defining industries. In 1799 Charles Tennant founded the St Rollox chemical works on the north edge of the city, built on his patent for a dry bleaching powder that could do in hours what months of sun-bleaching had done before. His partner Charles Macintosh, who gave his name to the waterproof raincoat, was of the same restless chemical world. Within a few decades St Rollox was the largest chemical works in the world, supplying the bleach and alkali of the global textile trade.

It announced itself on the skyline. To carry off the choking fumes, the Tennants built a colossal chimney — Tennant’s Stalk, raised in 1842 to some 435 feet, for a time among the tallest structures on earth — that ruled the northern sky for a century. The height did little for those below: the works poisoned the ground and air of Sighthill so badly that locals called the waste-choked land around it the ‘Stinking Ocean’. It was a pattern the industrial city would repeat everywhere — extraordinary wealth and extraordinary pollution rising from the same chimney.

Coal & iron

Underneath everything lay coal. The Lanarkshire coalfield on Glasgow’s doorstep fed the engines, the furnaces and the hearths, and the sinking of ever deeper pits — and the hard, dangerous lives of the miners who worked them — was the unseen foundation of the whole edifice. On that coal, Glasgow built iron. The district held vast reserves of blackband ironstone, identified by David Mushet in 1801, but it was expensive to smelt until 1828, when the Glasgow gasworks engineer James Beaumont Neilson patented the hot blast — blowing pre-heated air into the furnace, which cut the fuel needed to make iron by something like two-thirds at a stroke.

The effect was transformative. Scottish pig iron went from marginal to world-beating within a decade; the furnace districts of the Monklands, east of the city, blazed day and night; and dynasties such as the Bairds of Gartsherrie rose to vast wealth on the difference the hot blast had made. In the Gorbals, the furnaces of Dixon’s Blazes lit the south side of Glasgow red every night. Coal and iron together turned the west of Scotland into one of the great heavy-industrial regions of the world, and laid the metal foundation for the engineering and shipbuilding that would follow.

A city remade

The human transformation was the steepest in Britain. Glasgow held around 77,000 people in 1801; a hundred years later, more than three-quarters of a million. They came from the Highlands, cleared from the glens; from Ireland, above all during and after the Famine; and from the Lowland countryside emptied by agricultural change — drawn into the mills and works and the tenements thrown up around them.

The city that made such wealth could not house or drain the people who made it. Whole families lived in single rooms; the crowding bred the cholera and typhus epidemics that swept the poorest districts, and the sanitary catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth-century Gorbals and the wynds off the High Street became a national scandal. Nor was the new working class quiet: the weavers’ strikes, and the Radical War of 1820, when a general strike and a march toward the Carron ironworks ended on the gallows, were as much a part of Glasgow’s Industrial Revolution as the hot blast. It was, in the phrase, cholera and Chartism as much as chemistry.

The Second City of the Empire

By the 1830s the machine was assembled, and its shape would define Glasgow for a hundred years: coal and iron below, engines and chemicals above, cotton in the mills and, increasingly, ships on the river and the world for a market. The marine engineering of pioneers like Robert Napier married the city’s iron and steam to the deepened Clyde, and turned Glasgow from a maker of cloth into the greatest shipbuilding city on earth.

On the strength of it, Glasgow claimed the title it wore with such pride through the Victorian age — the Second City of the Empire, after London alone. The wealth built the grand Victorian city of banks and warehouses, galleries and terraces that still stands. The dependence on a few heavy industries would, in the twentieth century, prove a terrible vulnerability, and the long decline when the ships and the furnaces went would be as painful as the rise had been swift. But for a century, the machine assembled in one lifetime on the banks of the Clyde ran flat out, and much of the world was built with what it made.

Engines of change