The History of the University of Glasgow

Founded by papal bull in 1451, the University of Glasgow is the oldest institution in the city after the cathedral itself — the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world, and one of the four ancient universities of Scotland. It began as a single room beside the cathedral, nearly died at the Reformation, and then, in the eighteenth century, became one of the places where the modern world was thought into being. For close to six centuries it has been the machine by which a trading town turns its children, and its incomers, into its professors.

This page tells that long story: the bishop who gambled on it, the centuries on the High Street, the Reformation crisis and the revival that followed, the golden age of the Scottish Enlightenment, the great Victorian removal to the West End, and the global university of today.

A bishop’s gamble

The university was the creation of one far-sighted churchman. William Turnbull, Bishop of Glasgow from 1447 and a graduate of St Andrews and of Pavia in Italy, understood that a city with a great cathedral ought also to have a university, and that Glasgow could not afford to be outshone by St Andrews, which had held its charter since 1413. With the backing of King James II, he petitioned Rome, and on 7 January 1451 Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull that founded a studium generale in the city, empowered to teach theology, canon and civil law, and the arts. It was the second university in Scotland and the fourth-oldest in the English-speaking world, after Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews — its foundation older than the birth of Columbus.

It began with nothing but the authority to teach. For its first years the fledgling university met in the chapter house of the cathedral and in borrowed rooms, its handful of masters training the clergy and lawyers who ran medieval Scotland. The emblems it took for its coat of arms were those of the city’s patron, St Mungo — the bird, the tree, the bell and the fish — binding the new university to the ancient church from which it had sprung.

From Rottenrow to the High Street

Teaching soon moved to a building in Rottenrow known as the ‘Auld Pedagogy’, and then, from 1460, to the High Street, where lands granted by Lord Hamilton gave the university its first real home. It would stay there for four hundred years. The site was enlarged in 1563 when Mary, Queen of Scots granted the university thirteen acres of land that had belonged to the Black Friars, the Dominican house whose grounds lay along the High Street — a gift that anchored the college on the spot for centuries to come.

One casualty of these turbulent years never came back. The university’s original founding bull — the very document by whose authority it granted degrees — was lost in the chaos of the Reformation, when Archbishop James Beaton fled to France in 1560, carrying off many of the treasures and archives of the cathedral and the college for safe keeping. They were never recovered, and Glasgow has run, ever since, on the memory of a bull it no longer holds.

Reformation & revival

The Reformation of 1560 nearly finished the university off. A Catholic foundation in a suddenly Protestant land, stripped of its endowments and its documents, it dwindled at one point to a mere handful of students and teachers, and for a time its survival was genuinely in doubt. Its rescue came from one of the great figures of the reformed Scottish church, Andrew Melville, who became principal in 1574 and set about rebuilding it as a serious seat of learning. Melville reformed its teaching and its constitution, and in 1577 a new foundation — the Nova Erectio — gave the university the settled shape and endowment it had lacked. From near-extinction, Glasgow was made once more into a working university.

The Old College

The revival was crowned, in the seventeenth century, with buildings worthy of the institution. On the High Street rose the Old College — a great range of courts, a tower and a handsome frontage, built largely between the 1630s and 1660s and reckoned the finest group of buildings in Scotland. For two hundred years this was the university: its quadrangles the setting for the whole golden age that followed, its Lion and Unicorn Staircase and inner courts among the noblest sights in the city. In the eighteenth century the college also housed the celebrated printing house of the brothers Robert and Andrew Foulis, whose beautifully made books carried the name of Glasgow across learned Europe. It is one of the tragedies of Glasgow’s architectural history that this incomparable complex would later be swept away entirely.

Where the modern world was thought

In the eighteenth century, in those High Street courts, Glasgow helped to think the modern world. The university became one of the powerhouses of the Scottish Enlightenment, beginning with Francis Hutcheson, the moral philosopher often called its father, who taught here and shaped the generation that followed. Chief among his heirs was Adam Smith, a student and later professor at Glasgow, who worked out in its classrooms the moral philosophy and political economy that would become The Wealth of Nations, and who called his years here the happiest and most useful of his life.

Beside them worked men who remade the sciences. Joseph Black discovered latent heat in the university’s laboratories; the surgeon Joseph Lister would later pioneer antiseptic surgery from its medical school, saving untold lives. And in a workshop granted him by the college when the city’s trades guilds would not admit him, its mathematical instrument-maker — a young James Watt — repaired a model steam engine and conceived the improvement that would drive the Industrial Revolution. Few institutions anywhere did more, in a single century, to shape the age that was coming.

The removal to Gilmorehill

By the middle of the nineteenth century the university had outgrown its ancient home, and the High Street around it — once a genteel quarter — had become crowded, industrial and unhealthy. After one abandoned scheme to move nearby, the university took the momentous decision to leave the city’s old heart altogether. In 1870 it sold the High Street site to the City of Glasgow Union Railway, which demolished the Old College and built a goods yard on its ground, and removed three miles west to a green hill above the River Kelvin: Gilmorehill, in the growing West End.

There it built anew on a scale to match its ambitions. The new campus was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott in a soaring Gothic Revival style, its great tower and spire rising over the West End as a landmark visible for miles — a single one of its new quadrangles could have swallowed the whole footprint of the Old College. The move placed the university beside the new Western Infirmary, built to give its medical students a teaching hospital, and near the park and museum of Kelvingrove. The grand Bute Hall was added in the following decade, and in 1892 the university at last opened its degrees to women, who had until then been taught separately; the first woman graduated two years later.

Kelvin & the modern university

The new age was above all an age of science, and its presiding genius was William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, who held the chair of natural philosophy for fifty-three years, from 1846 to 1899. From his Glasgow laboratory Kelvin laid down much of the science of thermodynamics, gave his name to the absolute scale of temperature, and helped engineer the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable, marrying pure science to the industrial power of the Clyde. He was the most famous of a long line: the university counts eight Nobel laureates among its people, along with two British prime ministers, the television pioneer John Logie Baird, the surgeon Joseph Lister, and Donald Dewar, the architect of Scottish devolution and its first First Minister.

The modern university is a global one — a member of the Russell Group, home to tens of thousands of students drawn from almost every country on earth, and consistently ranked among the leading universities in the world. In recent years it has also confronted the darker sources of its historic wealth, publishing research into the money it received from families enriched by Atlantic slavery and committing to a programme of reparative justice in response — part of the same reckoning with the slave economy that runs through so much of Glasgow’s story. In 2026 it marks its 575th anniversary: an institution older than the printing press in Europe, still doing, in a changed world, exactly what Turnbull’s bull created it to do.

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