Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to exploit as an antidote to the sooty images of popular imagination. It is generally
agreed that the first settlers arrived in the sixth century to join Christian missionary
Kentigern - later to become St Mungo - in his newly founded monastery on the banks
of the tiny Molendinar Burn.
5
The growth of the city
William the Lionheart gave the town an o cial charter in 1175, after which it
continued to grow in importance, peaking in the mid-fifteenth century when the
university - the second in Scotland after St Andrews - was founded on Kentigern's
site. his led to the establishment of an archbishopric, and city status, in 1492, and,
due to its situation on a large, navigable river, Glasgow soon expanded into a major
industrial port .
he first cargo of tobacco from Virginia o oaded in Glasgow in 1674, and the 1707
Act of Union between Scotland and England - despite demonstrations against it in
Glasgow - led to a boom in trade with the colonies until American independence.
Following the Industrial Revolution and James Watt's innovations in steam power, coal
from the abundant seams of Lanarkshire fuelled the ironworks all around the Clyde,
which were worked by the cheap hands of the Highlanders and, later, those fleeing the
Irish potato famine of the 1840s.
Victorian Glasgow
he Victorian age transformed Glasgow beyond recognition. he population
mushroomed from 77,000 in 1801 to nearly 800,000 at the end of the century, and
new tenement blocks swept into the suburbs in an attempt to cope with the choking
influxes of people. Two vast and stately International Exhibitions were held in 1888 and
1901 to showcase the city and its industries to the outside world, necessitating the
construction of huge civic monoliths such as the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and the
Council Chambers in George Square. At this time Glasgow revelled in the title of the
“Second City of the Empire”, an unexpected epithet for a place that rarely
acknowledges second place in anything.
The shipbuilding era
By the turn of the twentieth century, Glasgow's industries had been honed into
one massive shipbuilding culture. Everything from tugboats to transatlantic liners
was fashioned out of sheet metal in the yards that straddled the Clyde from
Gourock to Rutherglen.
In the harsh economic climate of the 1930s, however, unemployment spiralled,
and Glasgow could do little to counter its popular image as a city dominated by
inebriate violence and (having absorbed vast numbers of Irish emigrants) sectarian
tensions. he Gorbals area in particular became notorious as one of the worst slums
in Europe.
Renaissance
Shipbuilding, and many associated industries, died away almost completely in the
1960s and 1970s, leaving the city depressed, jobless and directionless. hen, in the
1980s, the self-promotion began, starting with the upbeat “Glasgow's Miles Better”
campaign in 1983, and snowballing towards the 1988 Garden Festival and the
year-long party as European City of Culture in 1990.
Glasgow then beat off competition from Edinburgh and Liverpool to become
UK City of Architecture and Design in 1999, and in 2007 won the right to host
the Commonwealth Games of 2014. hese various titles have helped to reinforce
the impression that Glasgow, despite its many problems, has successfully broken
the industrial shackles of the past and evolved into a city of stature and confidence.
 
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