Glasgow was never a garrison town, but the wars of Scotland and Britain have passed through it again and again. In the Wars of Independence, Bishop Robert Wishart of Glasgow was one of the staunchest supporters of the Scottish cause, and the city’s own legend of William Wallace is the Battle of the Bell o’ the Brae on the High Street. Wishart later absolved Robert the Bruce after the killing of John Comyn in 1306 and helped to set him on the throne.

The Battle of Langside, fought on the city’s southern edge on 13 May 1568, lasted around three quarters of an hour and ended the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots in Scotland; within days she had crossed into England and a captivity that ended only with her execution. The Battle of Langside walks the ground, now the streets around Queen’s Park.

The Jacobite risings found the city firmly on the government side. In 1715 it raised around 600 men for the Hanoverian army. In 1745 it paid for that loyalty when Charles Edward Stuart occupied it over Christmas and the New Year and demanded 12,000 shirts and 6,000 coats for his ragged army. The Napoleonic Wars brought volunteer regiments, invasion fears and the distress that lit the fuse of the radical rising of 1820.

The twentieth century brought total war to the Clyde. In the First World War the city’s shipyards and munitions works became an arsenal for the whole Empire. In the Second World War the river was a target: the Clydebank Blitz of March 1941 killed around 1,200 people across the area, and of roughly 12,000 houses in Clydebank only eight escaped damage. The air raid shelters that survive in back courts are its quiet reminders. Two months later, on 10 May 1941, Rudolf Hess landed by parachute near Eaglesham, one of the strangest episodes of the whole war.

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