Pollok House

Pollok House is the ancestral seat of the Maxwells, one of the oldest families in Glasgow, set in the green expanse of Pollok Country Park on the south side of the city. A serene Georgian mansion of the mid-eighteenth century, it holds one of the finest collections of Spanish painting in Britain — canvases by El Greco, Goya and Murillo hang in its panelled rooms — and it carries one further claim on the memory of the nation: it was here, between the wars, that the National Trust for Scotland was born.

This page tells its story: the family that held the land for seven centuries, the building of the house, its Edwardian enlargement, its remarkable art, its part in founding the National Trust, its gift to the city, and its life today.

Seven hundred years of Maxwells

The story of Pollok is really the story of a single family. The Maxwells held the estate of Pollok from the middle of the thirteenth century, and would hold it, in an unbroken line, for very nearly seven hundred years — one of the longest such tenures anywhere in Scotland. Long before the present mansion was thought of, the family lived in a succession of castles on and around the site, guarding their lands on the wooded banks of the White Cart Water. That deep continuity — the same family, the same ground, century after century — gives Pollok House a character quite different from most of Glasgow’s great buildings, which belong to the age of industry and empire. Here, instead, is the seat of an ancient landed house, on land it had worked since the Middle Ages.

The Georgian house

The elegant house that stands today was built between 1747 and 1752 for Sir John Maxwell, the third baronet, replacing the last of the family’s castles. It is a model of restrained Georgian taste — a compact, dignified block, its design traditionally associated with the great Scottish architect William Adam, though his exact role is uncertain and he may only have been consulted. Whoever drew the plans, the result is a mansion of quiet Palladian grace, looking south over the White Cart towards its gardens and parkland. For two centuries it served as the family’s principal seat, a country house of the old style within what would, in time, become the boundaries of a great industrial city.

Rowand Anderson’s additions

The house owes much of its present appearance to a later Maxwell: Sir John Stirling Maxwell, who inherited in the late nineteenth century and set about enlarging and improving the mansion. In the 1890s he called in the eminent architect Robert Rowand Anderson, who added low flanking wings, garden pavilions and a handsome entrance portico, all designed to sit sympathetically with the older Georgian core. The interiors were modernised around the same time, and given the comfortable grandeur of an Edwardian country house. It is this house — Georgian at heart, gracefully extended at the turn of the twentieth century — that visitors see today, its rooms arranged to evoke the twilight years of the great stately homes.

The Spanish collection

Pollok’s greatest treasure is its art. If the house is owed to Sir John Stirling Maxwell, the collection is owed to his father, Sir William Stirling Maxwell — scholar, traveller and one of the first British connoisseurs of Spanish painting, who wrote the earliest major work in English on the subject. His journeys through Spain left him with a passion for its Old Masters, and he assembled at Pollok one of the finest collections of Spanish art anywhere outside Spain itself. On its walls hang works by El Greco, Goya and Murillo, and by Alonso Sánchez Coello — to whom the celebrated Lady in a Fur Wrap, long attributed to El Greco, is now generally given — alongside paintings by Rubens, William Blake and others. It is a private gallery of international importance, hidden away in a Glasgow park.

The birth of the National Trust

Sir John Stirling Maxwell was a man of wide public interests, a pioneer of forestry and conservation, and it is to him, and to Pollok House, that Scotland owes one of its great institutions. Alarmed at the losses of historic buildings and landscapes, he was among the leading founders of the National Trust for Scotland, and in 1931 it was at a meeting convened at Pollok House that the new body was set in motion. That the mansion should itself one day pass into the Trust’s care lent the story a fitting completeness: the house where the Trust was born became, in time, one of the properties it looked after on the nation’s behalf.

A gift to the city

Sir John had long wished to see Pollok preserved for the public and its estate kept whole, and after his death that wish was fulfilled by his daughter, Dame Anne Maxwell Macdonald. In 1966 she gave Pollok House to the City of Glasgow, together with its art collection, its library and hundreds of acres of surrounding parkland — a gift of extraordinary generosity that secured the house and its treasures for the people of the city for ever. The seven-hundred-year link with the Maxwells was not entirely severed even then, for the family retained a foothold in the house; but Pollok, and its great green park, now belonged to Glasgow.

The house & park today

That gift had a further, unlooked-for consequence. The parkland the Maxwells gave to the city provided, a few years later, the site for a building to house another great bequest — the vast art collection given to Glasgow by Sir William Burrell — and so the Burrell Collection came to stand in the same park as Pollok House, making the grounds one of the richest concentrations of art anywhere in Britain. Today the house, long in the care of the National Trust for Scotland, is open to visitors as a museum of country-house life, its Edwardian rooms and Spanish masterpieces set amid formal gardens famous for their rhododendrons. Around it spreads Pollok Country Park, the largest in the city, a green retreat with its own herd of Highland cattle — and, like the great galleries at Kelvingrove, a place where the citizens of Glasgow may enjoy, freely, treasures once held in private hands.

The essentials