History of Glasgow

Glasgow's City Chambers, mosaic ceiling of the ground floor Loggia

By the 16th century, the city's trades and craftsmen had begun to wield significant influence, particularly the Incorporation of Tailors, which in 1604 was the largest guild in Glasgow; the merchant and craft guilds accounted for about 10% of the population by the 17th century.[8] With the discovery of the New World and the trade routes it opened up, Glasgow was ideally placed to become an important trading centre with the Clyde providing access to the city and the rest of Scotland for merchant shipping. Its path to success was not to be easy, however: in 1651, the English Navigation Acts were passed, making it illegal for non-English ships to trade with English colonies. Non-English ships were also banned from carrying goods from outside Europe to England or its colonies.Scotland's first attempt at transatlantic trade had failed in 1629, when the Anglo-French Wars led to the loss of Scotland's fledgling colony of Nova Scotia.[9] A second attempt at a Scottish colony, the Darien scheme, ended in disaster, bankrupting the country in 1700.[10] They were not deterred, continuing small-scale smuggling with English colonies until the Act of Union in 1707.

Access to the Atlantic Ocean allowed the import of goods such as American tobacco and cotton, and Caribbean sugar, which were then traded throughout the United Kingdom and Europe. These imports flourished after 1707, when union with England made the trade legal. By 1760, Glasgow had outstripped London as the main port for tobacco in the United Kingdom.[11] The American War of Independence put an end to most American trade, leading to financial ruin for some; trade turned to sugar, which largely came from the Caribbean.

Glasgow's transformation from a provincial town to an international business hub was based originally on its control of the 18th-century tobacco trade with America. The trade was interrupted by the American Revolutionary War, and never recovered to even a fourth of its old trade. The tobacco merchants grew rich as their stocks of tobacco soared in value; they had diversified their holdings and were not badly hurt. Merchants turned their attention to the West Indies and to textile manufacture. The trade made a group of Tobacco Lords very wealthy; they adopted the lifestyle of landed aristocrats, and lavished vast sums on great houses and splendid churches of Glasgow.[12] The merchants constructed spectacular buildings and monuments that can still be seen today, and reinvested their money in industrial development to help Glasgow grow further.

George Square and Glasgow's City Chambers

As the city's wealth increased, its centre expanded westwards as the lush Victorian architecture of what is now known as the Merchant City area began to spring up. New public buildings such as the City Chambers on George Square, Trades Hall on Glassford Street, and the Mitchell Library in Charing Cross epitomised the wealth and riches of Glasgow in the late 19th century with their lavishly decorated interiors and intricately carved stonework. As this new development took place, the focus of Glasgow's central area moved away from its medieval origins at High Street, Trongate, Saltmarket and Rottenrow, and these areas fell into partial dereliction, something which is in places still evident to the present day.

Largely due to the money generated by trade, but also thanks to the opportunities created by the different industries present in and around the city, Glasgow's population boomed. Where in 1750 it had numbered 32,000 inhabitants, by 1850 it counted 200,000.[13] Town planning began in earnest in about 1770, under the guidance of James Barrie, who in 1772 implemented a new grid system above Ingram Street,[14] but could not keep pace with the increasing population, and conditions in the overcrowded slums were notoriously bad.

The de-silting of the Clyde in the 1770s allowed bigger ships to move further up the river, thus laying the foundations for industry and shipbuilding in Glasgow during the 19th century.

The abundance of coal and iron in Lanarkshire led to Glasgow becoming an industrial city. Textile mills, based on cotton and wool, became large employers in Glasgow and the local region.

"Shipping on the Clyde", by John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1881.

In 1893 the burgh was constituted as the County of the City of Glasgow. Glasgow became one of the richest cities in the world, and a municipal public transport system, parks, museums and libraries were all opened during this period.

Glasgow became one of the largest cities in the world, and known as "the Second City of the Empire" after London [although Liverpool, Dublin and several other British cities claim the same].[15] Shipbuilding on Clydeside (the river Clyde through Glasgow and other points) began when the first small yards were opened in 1712 at the Scott family's shipyard at Greenock. After 1860 the Clydeside shipyards specialised in steamships made of iron (after 1870, made of steel), which rapidly replaced the wooden sailing vessels of both the merchant fleets and the battle fleets of the world. It became the world's pre-eminent shipbuilding centre. Clydebuilt became an industry benchmark of quality, and the river's shipyards were given contracts for warships.[16]

In the late 17th century, Scottish linen was a major export to England. In 1680, the linen industry employed about 12,000 people in the Glasgow area, and the industry was heavily promoted by the government.[17] Thanks to a series of government acts and beneficial tax measures, by 1770, Glasgow had become the largest linen manufacturer in Britain. Tastes, however, were shifting towards ever more diaphanous fabrics, and Scottish manufacture could not compete in terms of quality. The climate was ideal for processing cotton, and Glasgow textile manufacturers turned their attentions to the production of fine cotton muslins, at which they came to excel, challenging the dominion of Indian muslins traded by the East India Company by the 1780s.[18] Textiles, including plain, chequered and printed linens,[19] and clothing items were among Scotland's main exports to the tobacco-producing colonies from the 1720s onwards;[20] while the majority of these exports initially consisted in linen, by the close of the 18th century cotton had taken its place.[21]

From the 1750s, the fashion for silk gauze led to an industry being set up in Paisley, which was hugely successful. Silk gauze was worn by women of almost all social classes, and could not be washed without losing its lustre, so the market was immensely lucrative. By the 1780s, Paisley silk gauze was being exported to England, Ireland and Europe. As the fashion changed, cotton and muslin took over.[22]

The outbreak of the world war in 1939 temporarily arrested the ongoing decline, with the city's shipyards and heavy industries working at capacity to fuel the war effort, but this too came at a price - the Luftwaffe bombing of Clydeside (the worst of which was the Clydebank Blitz in March 1941 – albeit the shipbuilding town of Clydebank is just outside Glasgow itself).

Although ships and trains were still being built on Clydeside, cheap labour abroad reduced the competitiveness of Glasgow's industries. New shipbuilding superpowers such as Japan began to emerge as the competitiveness of the Glasgow shipyards began to decline. The major shipbuilders on the Clyde began to close down, but not before Clydebank had built one of its last great ships, Cunard's 'Queen Elizabeth 2'. As of today, three major shipyards remain on the River Clyde, two of which are owned by BAE Systems Naval Ships; Govan and Scotstoun, which focus principally upon the design and construction of technologically advanced warships for the Royal Navy and other navies. Glasgow's function as a port also diminished - the introduction of containerized freight spelled the end for the riverside's docks and wharves which had crumbled into dereliction by the late '60s.

As WW2 came to a close, the chief engineer of Glasgow Corporation - Robert Bruce - published the first of two highly influential studies into how the city could be regenerated in the future without the dominant heavy industries which had brought it much wealth in the past. The Bruce Report, as it would become known, would ultimately become the blueprint of the Glasgow of today. Its basic aim was to depopulate the overcrowded centre, dispersing the population to outer areas and new towns, in order to allow a new service based economy to flourish with the help of an overhauled transport system. Although many of its more radical proposals to rebuild the city centre were rejected - Bruce advocated the destruction of many now-cherished Victorian and Edwardian buildings, the report's housing and transport proposals were virtually followed to the letter. The infamous tenement slums (many of which had been destroyed or badly damaged by wartime bombs) were replaced by a new generation of high rise housing and large suburban housing estates (known locally as "schemes"). Whilst the hundreds of new tower blocks changed the city's skyline forever, the high rise edifices broke up long established community relationships and social structures. Coupled to poor design and low quality construction, some of the blocks created as many problems as they solved and became magnets for crime and deprivation. Thousands more Glaswegians were rehoused in the new towns of Cumbernauld and East Kilbride. Bruce also proposed a ring road scheme around the central area, the which would become part of the M8 motorway, which decimated the Charing Cross and Anderston areas beyond recognition, with many historic Victorian buildings being destroyed to make way for its construction.

The 1970s and early 1980s were dark periods in the history of the city, as steelworks, coal mines, engine factories and other heavy industries went out of business. This led to mass unemployment and high levels of urban decay. In the late 1960s a moral panic swept Glasgow with media and police attention focused on new youth gangs that were younger, more violent and more dangerous than the Glasgow razor gangs of the 1920s and 1930s.[25]

Since the mid-80s however, the city has enjoyed an economic and cultural renaissance — a financial district consisting of a number of new, purpose built office buildings has rapidly developed in the western end of the city centre, and this has become home to many well-known banks, consultancy and IT firms, legal practices, and insurance companies. Between 1998 and 2001, the city's burgeoning financial service sector grew at a rate of 30%.

In the suburbs, numerous leisure and retail developments have been built on the former sites of factories and heavy industries. Glasgow is the premier site for call-centres in Britain. Critics argue that such new developments are relatively fragile and do not offer as many highly skilled long-term employment opportunities, owing to their dependence on the service sector rather than manufacturing.

While manufacturing has dwindled in its relative importance to the city's economy, there is still a strong manufacturing sector (the fourth largest in the UK, accounting for well over 60% of Scotland's manufactured exports) particularly in the areas of engineering and shipbuilding, chemicals, food and drink, printing, publishing and textiles, as well as new growth sectors such as software and biotechnology. Glasgow also forms the western part of Silicon Glen which produces over 30% of Europe's PCs, 80% of its workstations, and 65% of its ATMs. A growing number of Blue Chip companies are basing major operations or headquarters in Glasgow, including BT, Abbey, National Australia Group Europe, Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS, Scottish Power, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Lloyds TSB. Glasgow-based Scottish Power is one of three Scottish companies to be included on the Fortune Global 500 rankings. These names rub shoulders with the more well established firms, which represent traditional sectors of Glasgow's economy, including; Diageo, Allied Domecq, William Grant & Sons, Tennent Caledonian Breweries, Whyte and Mackay, MacFarlane Group, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce Aero Engines, Imperial Chemical Industries, Weir Group, and Aggreko.

• Massie, Allan. "Glasgow--A moving portrait," History Today (1990) 40#5 pp 4–9, online