The steep hill east of the cathedral was once the Fir Park, a wooded knoll owned by the Merchants’ House of Glasgow. In 1825 — before a single grave was dug — the merchants crowned it with a great Doric column bearing a statue of John Knox, glaring down over the city whose Reformation he made. Eight years later they opened the hill itself as the Glasgow Necropolis: a commercial ‘garden cemetery’ consciously modelled on Père Lachaise in Paris, at a time when the city’s old kirkyards were overflowing and insanitary.
It became at once the place where wealthy Victorian Glasgow chose to be remembered. Mourners crossed from the cathedral precinct over the ‘Bridge of Sighs’ spanning the Molendinar ravine, and climbed paths winding among monuments commissioned from the city’s best architects — Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, Charles Wilson, J. T. Rochead and the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh among those who designed memorials here. The result is an open-air museum of nineteenth-century architecture in miniature: temples, obelisks, Celtic crosses, catacomb façades and mausoleums jostling up the hillside.
Around fifty thousand people were buried here, though only a tenth have monuments, and the roll-call maps the Victorian city: tobacco and chemical dynasties like the Tennants, shipbuilders and engineers, publishers, theatre managers — and William Miller, the poet of ‘Wee Willie Winkie’. The cemetery was proudly multi-denominational from the start; its first burial, in 1832, was in fact in its Jewish enclosure, which predates the official opening.
As with the city below it, the Necropolis declined in the twentieth century and has been revived in the twenty-first, cared for by the council with an energetic Friends organisation whose guided walks are among the best things a visitor can do in Glasgow. The view from the summit — cathedral below, the East End and the whole valley beyond — is itself worth the climb.
More than anywhere else, the Necropolis expresses Victorian Glasgow’s idea of itself: confident, ecumenical in commerce if not always in life, and determined that death itself should be met with good architecture.