In 1451 Bishop William Turnbull obtained from Pope Nicholas V a bull erecting a studium generale — a university — in his cathedral city, making Glasgow the second university in Scotland and the fourth oldest in the English-speaking world, after Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews. It began with no buildings at all, teaching in the cathedral precincts and a house in Rottenrow: a medieval start as modest as the town around it.
The Reformation nearly killed it — a papal foundation orphaned in a Protestant land, reduced at one point to a handful of students — until Andrew Melville’s principalship from 1574 rebuilt it as a powerhouse of reformed learning. Its physical golden age followed on the High Street: the Old College of the seventeenth century, whose courts and tower grew into the finest group of buildings in Scotland, housed the university for two hundred years.
There, in the eighteenth century, Glasgow helped think the modern world. Adam Smith taught moral philosophy in its classrooms, working out the ideas that became The Wealth of Nations; Joseph Black discovered latent heat in its laboratories; and the college’s mathematical instrument maker — a young man named James Watt, given workshop room when the trades guilds would not have him — repaired its model Newcomen engine and, on a walk described elsewhere on this site, conceived the improvement that powered the Industrial Revolution. The Scottish Enlightenment had several homes; few worked harder than this one.
The nineteenth century brought the great removal to Gilmorehill in 1870 — the next page’s story — and the age of scientific empire: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, held his chair for fifty-three years, laying transatlantic cables and the foundations of thermodynamics from a West End laboratory, while the medical school fed the hospital revolutions told in this site’s Health pages.
The modern university — ancient arms, world rankings, tens of thousands of students from every country on earth — remains what Turnbull’s bull made it: the city’s longest-running institution bar the cathedral, and the machine by which a trading town has, for close to six centuries, turned its children and its immigrants into its professors.