Let’s have a look at this patch of central Glasgow as drawn by George McCulloch in 1852. It’s not spectacular; there are only a handful of recognisable buildings; but it tells a few tales about the growth of Glasgow and the human lives — and deaths — that underpinned it.

Detail from George McCulloch’s View of Glasgow (1853). [Photo from the copy in the Mitchell Library.]

First, let’s orient ourselves. Hope Street runs diagonally across the map; near the centre is the junction with Gordon Street. Near the bottom is Argyle Street, and rising towards the top left is the ridge of Blythswood Hill.

Detail from Joseph Swan’s map of Glasgow (1854-5). [National Library of Scotland]

The empty plots in the middle lie between Bothwell Street and Waterloo Street. They would be the last part of central Glasgow’s grid to be completed, and to understand that we need to look at how the city spread.

By the early nineteenth century, Argyle Street was an urban tentacle running parallel to the Clyde, toward the village of Anderston. The space between it and the river, with easy access to the quays, was filling up with works and warehouses. To the north and west lay a feued but undeveloped region, belonging to the Campbell family and marked on the map as the Blythswood Building Ground.

Extract from Peter Fleming’s “reduced” map of Glasgow (1807). [National Library of Scotland.]

Development of the Blythswood lands had been projected by the entrepreneur William Harvey, who in 1802 had purchased the estate of Sauchy Hall and anglicised it to Willowbank. (The ubiquitous James Cleland also had property nearby.)

Detail from Fleming’s (1807) map showing Willowbank to the west and Baillie Cleland’s wee pad a little to the north of “Sauchyhall Road”. [National Library of Scotland.]

To the south was Grahamston: an odd enclave shaped by Alston Street and Union Place, defiantly squint — as it still is — to the Blythswood grid.

Left: Grahamston in Fleming’s map (1807) [National Library of Scotland]. Right: the same area in satellite view [Bing Maps].

Grahamston, just beyond the old city limits, was largely owned by John Alston, heir of the maltman John Miller who’d developed Miller Street. It was also the site, from 1764-80, of one of Glasgow’s earliest theatres.

Grahamston in James McArthur’s map of Glasgow (1778). [National Library of Scotland]

As Glasgow grew, the commercial zone edged northwards. On Alston Street lay Alexander Galloway’s brewery, and next to it Wilson, Strang & Co.’s sugar house. (The sugar house was built in 1809, a reminder that Glasgow’s involvement with enslaved labour didn’t end with the slave trade.)

James Lumsden’s map of Glasgow (1830). [National Library of Scotland.]

Meanwhile, the elegant townhouses of Blythswood were advancing downhill towards Grahamston. The awkward area between the residential and commercial districts saw a few changes of street plan before it was soldered together, and the grid still takes a wobble there.

Detail from McCulloch’s View, showing the awkward join at the end of Gordon Street.

McCulloch’s View also bears witness to Scotland’s national genius for inventing new flavours of Protestant. In sight are seventeen churches from nine denominations, all building keenly for the future, and offering over eighteen thousand seats between them.

Extract from McCulloch’s View with all seventeen churches marked.

A decade on from the Disruption there were five Free Churches to three Established. Others — United Presbyterian, Reformed Presbyterian, Original Secession, Episcopal — reflect earlier splits. Others still, like David Dale’s Old Scotch Independents, followed their own course.

Three of those seventeen churches were Gaelic-speaking, serving generations of new Glaswegians displaced from the Gàidhealtachd. The most prominent was St Columba’s, originally the Gaelic Chapel on Ingram Street, which in 1904 would be displaced again to St Vincent Street. Gàidhlig-language worship in the “Highland Cathedral” lasted until 2021. A few decades later, the stretch of Argyle Street to the east of Hope Street would become a less official gathering-place for Gaels: the Hielanman’s Umbrella.

Missing entirely from the scene is any Roman Catholic church, despite the city’s growing Irish population. (There were at this time eleven Catholic churches in the city and surrounding burghs. The Free Kirk had 37; the Established Church had 38.)

On the corner of Waterloo Street and Hope Street is the Corn Exchange, opened in the 1840s, and conveniently located near the great grain stores towards the wharves.

Detail from McCulloch’s View: the Corn Exchange and some of the grain stores.

There’s also evidence of the labour behind the ongoing building boom. There are about a dozen timber, slate and stone-yards: much of the land that looks empty on the maps was anything but.

Detail from the OS map of Glasgow (1857) with timber, slate and stone-yards shaded. [National Library of Scotland.] Detail from McCulloch’s View: timber yards on Waterloo Street and Cadogan Street. Detail from McCulloch’s View: the timber yard opposite St Columba’s on Hope Street.

With wealth being generated in the quays and factories and flowing uphill into Blythswood, raising churches and public buildings on the way, the city was a model of Victorian prosperity — the model Thomas Sulman would present a decade later.

Extract from Thomas Sulman’s Bird’s Eye View of Glasgow (1864), showing roughly the same area as our extract from McCulloch. [Glasgow City Heritage Trust.]

But.

Let’s turn our attention more closely to the blocks either side of Alston Street. In the 1870s everything in these blocks would disappear, replaced by the first phase of the Caledonian Railway’s Central Station.

Detail from McCulloch’s View showing the area surrounding Alston Street.

Much of the area is occupied by warehouses. The line of low buildings along Hope Street include a smithy, a reminder that it was not just human labour that kept the city running.

Behind St Columba’s Church is the windowless bulk of a gas holder, three or four storeys high and surrounded by highly inflammable grain and bonded warehouses. (Glasgow’s dire reputation for fire deaths was probably not helped by urban design like this.)

Dominating the block, with its tall chimney gushing smoke, is the Wilson sugar refinery, a legacy of the original industries of Grahamston that we’ve seen already. It was not, though, the original building, and the fate of its predecessor opens a grim but informative window into the age.

At about 7am on October 30, 1848, the sugar house on Alston Street suddenly collapsed. It took more than a week to clear the rubble and recover the bodies of the fourteen workers who had died, either crushed by debris or scalded to death by molten sugar.

Many of the victims were Irish. They ranged from middle-aged men with families who had been in Scotland for decades to Andrew Broadley, a lad of twenty who was sending money home each week to support his widowed mother in Tyrone.

Many of the victims’ dependents were left destitute. We know this because the Chief Superintendent of Police was sent to investigate their circumstances, to make sure charity went to those who deserved it. His appraisals — “dissipated habits”; “well spoken of” — appeared in the newspapers while they were still grieving.

Article from the Glasgow Chronicle (8 November 1848) describing the victims.

Even before the last body had been recovered, rumours started. The building had been repaired a few years earlier; there were hints that corners had been cut. The authorities found, and tersely reported, that there were no grounds for prosecution.

Nevertheless, the Dean of Guild’s Court – the equivalent of the Planning Committee – embarked on a programme of inspection, ordering the demolition of other dangerous buildings across the city. Many of the buildings they targeted were in the slum areas where the immigrant workers lived, and it seems that “being full of Irish people” was considered to be a risk factor. It’s the story of economic migrants through the ages: the young men come first; they do the dangerous, badly paid jobs; they send money home to their families; and everybody blames them for everything.

In total, the appeal for the victims’ families raised around £400. (For comparison, the cost to property was estimated at £15000.) The refinery, as we’ve seen, was soon rebuilt.

I came across the story of the Alston Street disaster by accident; it’s mentioned in passing in a few books. I don’t doubt that there are other disasters less well known. Cities rise on wealth; and wealth, too often, rises because we place too low a price on human lives.

Detail from George McCulloch’s View of Glasgow (1853). [Photo from the copy in the Mitchell Library.]

The last thing to notice in McCulloch’s picture: the thousands upon thousands of dotted windows.

Imagine the folk behind them. The natives, the immigrants; the workers, the wealthy; the citizens by whom, or for whom, this city rose.

What price on them?

Main sources

My access to McCulloch’s View was granted by the Mitchell Library. I’ve made heavy use, as ever, of the Post Office Directories and maps digitised by the National Library of Scotland, and of newspapers supplied by the British Newspaper Archive. Fhuair mi eachdraidh nan Gàidheal bho glaschu.net.

I’ve also used assorted information from Senex’s Glasgow Past and Present (vol. 1). After the Alston Street disaster, the Glasgow Herald ran a series of columns following the work of the Dean of Guild Court and commenting on the old buildings they were examining. These columns were written by Robert Reid, aka Senex, and when compiled as Glasgow Past and Present they became the basis for practically everything that’s since been written about Glasgow built heritage. If it weren’t for that atrocious industrial accident, you might not be reading this now.

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