Parkhead

Few Glasgow districts have worked and roared quite like Parkhead. It began, like so much of the East End, as a small weaving village gathered round an inn at a crossroads; it grew into one of the great industrial quarters of the city, dominated by the vast Parkhead Forge, the largest steelworks in Scotland and the empire of William Beardmore; and it is known the world over as the home of Celtic Football Club, whose stadium at Celtic Park — ‘Paradise’ — is the biggest club football ground in Scotland. Forge and stadium, work and football: Parkhead has always been a place of muscle, noise and passion.

This page tells its story: the weavers’ crossroads, the making of the forge, Beardmore’s great steel empire, the coming of Celtic, the district’s other landmarks, the closing of the works, and the Parkhead of today.

The weavers’ crossroads

Parkhead began as a small weaving hamlet clustered around an inn where several roads met, at the spot still known as Parkhead Cross, some two miles south-east of the city centre. Like neighbouring Bridgeton and the Calton, it lived at first by the handloom, a village of weavers on the eastern approaches to Glasgow. The crossroads gave it its shape and its centre, and as Glasgow’s industry spread eastwards in the nineteenth century, this modest weaving settlement was swept up into the age of coal, iron and steam — and transformed into one of the hardest-working districts in the whole of the city.

The Parkhead Forge

The making of industrial Parkhead began with its forge. The Parkhead Forge was established around 1837 and, in 1841, was acquired by the great shipbuilder Robert Napier, who needed forgings and iron plates for the marine engines and hulls of his Clyde shipyard. Under Napier the works grew, drawing on the wider iron industry that was making Glasgow one of the workshops of the world. It was a business built to serve the river and its ships — and in the decades that followed it would grow into something far larger than Napier can ever have imagined, and give the district its industrial soul.

Beardmore’s empire

The name for ever linked with the forge is Beardmore. William Beardmore became a partner in the business in the 1860s, and his son, William Beardmore junior, took full control and founded William Beardmore & Co in 1886. Under him the Parkhead Forge grew enormously: by 1896 it covered some twenty-five acres and was the largest steelworks in Scotland, specialising in armaments and armour plate for the warships of the Royal Navy. It was one of the greatest armament works in Britain, and a huge employer — the workforce reaching a peak of more than twenty thousand during the First World War. It was here that the explorer Ernest Shackleton was briefly employed, and it was Beardmore who funded his Antarctic expedition, his name preserved to this day in the vast Beardmore Glacier.

Celtic Park

If steel made Parkhead work, football made it roar. Celtic Football Club, founded in the East End in 1887, settled at Celtic Park in 1892, and the ground — known to all simply as ‘Parkhead’, and to the faithful as ‘Paradise’ — has been the club’s home ever since. Rebuilt and expanded over the years into a great modern stadium holding around sixty thousand, Celtic Park is the largest football stadium of any club in Scotland, and one of the best-known grounds in Britain. On match days its roar carries across the district, and for supporters the world over the name of Parkhead means one thing above all: the home of Celtic.

Irn-Bru & the Cross

Parkhead has other claims on Scotland’s affections. It was here, from 1887, that the firm of A.G. Barr made Irn-Bru, the bright orange soft drink often called Scotland’s other national drink; the factory remained a Parkhead landmark until 2007. At the district’s heart, Parkhead Cross preserves a fine set of Victorian and Edwardian buildings, a reminder that this was once one of the most important commercial centres in the East End, with its own banks, shops and grand tenements. The Cross is now a conservation area, its handsome architecture carefully looked after as a record of Parkhead’s confident industrial heyday.

The forge closes

The twentieth century brought hard times. After the enormous demands of the First World War came the slump of the 1920s and 1930s, then a revival during the Second World War, and finally a long decline as the world’s need for warships and armaments fell away. The great Parkhead Forge finally closed in 1976, ending well over a century of steelmaking and taking with it thousands of jobs that had been the district’s livelihood. It was a heavy blow, felt across the whole East End, and Parkhead — like Bridgeton and the other industrial districts around it — faced the difficult task of finding a new way forward without the works that had defined it.

The Forge & the Emirates

Where the steelworks had stood, a new Parkhead rose. In 1988, as part of the great Glasgow Eastern Area Renewal scheme, the Forge Shopping Centre was built on the former Beardmore site, keeping the old name alive and giving the district a new commercial heart. Nearby, for the 2014 Commonwealth Games, came the Emirates Arena and the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome — a world-class sporting complex named for Glasgow’s greatest Olympian. Between the shopping centre, the arena and the ever-present roar of Celtic Park, the old weavers’ crossroads has found new life. Parkhead works and roars still — only the nature of the noise has changed.

The essentials