18th-century Glasgow

Introduction

Bitter political and religious conflict had retarded the city's growth and commercial development from the 1660s, but the Revolution Settlement of 1688-90 radically reorientated the prevailing power structure. The accession of William and Mary as joint monarchs and the legitimisation of Presbyterianism as the established faith within the Church of Scotland engendered considerable popular support in Glasgow. Erected at Glasgow Cross in 1733, the equestrian statue of William of Orange was intended as the city's tribute to the deceased king's 'immortal honour'; a tangible, if romanticised, representation of the benefits that his regime had fostered. The progressive image of the 'merchant city' was fixed from the 1690s because constitutional change was inextricably identified with modernity, liberty and the spirit of enterprise.

Jacobite challenge

Nevertheless, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were volatile times for Glasgow. The increasing likelihood of parliamentary Union between Scotland and England was regarded with unease by those who feared the fragmentation of national identity, notably the distinctive character of the Church of Scotland. Such anxieties underlay the city's anti-Union riots in 1706, which Daniel Defoe attributed to the machinations of the 'Jacobite party'. However, Defoe, a pugnaciously pro-Union English government propagandist, was being deliberately mischievous. The Jacobite challenge did not inspire a significant following among Glaswegians, who demonstrated unswerving loyalty to the Protestant Stuarts and their Hanoverian successors. In 1715, when Jacobite rebels attempted to restore the Catholic Stuarts to the British throne, Glasgow's magistrates raised a 500-strong citizens' militia against them. During the second major Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46, a brief sojourn in the city by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the flamboyant 'Young Pretender', met with truculent silence from Glaswegians when he appealed for their support.

Trading elite

Virginia Mansions, erected in 1752 by George Buchanan  © Yet if Defoe had been caustic in his description of the 1706 'rabble and riots', he was far more favourably impressed when he paid a visit to Glasgow some twenty years later. As he famously put it, 'tis one of the cleanest, most beautiful and best-built cities in Great Britain'. The physical attractiveness of Glasgow reflected the buoyancy of trade and commerce, which Defoe, not surprisingly, claimed to be the economic consequence of Union. According to his effusive assessment, Glasgow's trading elite had thrived after 1707 as they shrewdly 'embraced the opportunity' to enter English colonial markets previously closed to the Scots.

However, the reality was less clear-cut. In the quest for lucrative imports, especially tobacco and sugar, connections with North America and the Caribbean had been established long before 1707. English trade barriers had been overcome by the simple expedient of smuggling. Nor was prosperity an overnight phenomenon after Union. The city's colonial merchants began to consolidate their trading position only by the 1740s, although thereafter progress was spectacular. Annual tobacco imports increased from some eight million lbs to 47 million lbs by the 1770s, and Glasgow became the premier tobacco port of the United Kingdom.

The tobacco merchants were eventually Scotland's richest trading elite and, significantly for the future, they reinvested their wealth in economic growth areas such as land, shipping and industry. This merchant aristocracy was a close-knit group which controlled the city's political destiny by means of its deeply entrenched civic position, and became even more concentrated as a result of intermarriage and kinship connections.

Splendid residences

Conspicuous consumption was a defining feature of the wealthiest, and related especially to their residences in the heart of the city. For instance, John Glassford, who had diversified his tobacco fortune into banking, dye-making and textiles, occupied Glasgow's most splendid townhouse, the Shawfield Mansion in Trongate, until his death in 1783. George Buchanan erected his Palladian mansion in Virginia Street in 1752, while William Cunninghame's townhouse was built in 1778 for the enormous sum of £10,000. Unlike the other dwellings, which were demolished as the city built up rapidly towards the end of the century, the last property still survives. Although not immediately obvious behind imposing classical pillars added during the late 1820s, the Cunninghame Mansion forms the core of the municipally-run Gallery of Modern Art in Royal Exchange Square.

Stone stateliness

Glasgow's old Town Hall - built in 1737  © Defoe's 1726 remarks about the quality of building in Glasgow were revealing, as the merchant-dominated civic leadership had endeavoured to regulate structural development from the late seventeenth century. Security was their prime rationale, in response to the devastation caused by extensive fires during 1652 and 1677. Timber dwellings were prohibited and the stone edifices that replaced them were built according to a uniform pattern. As a consequence, eighteenth century visitors to Glasgow invariably commented on the city's imposing stone 'stateliness'.

Also famous were the distinctive arcaded streets and piazzas, especially those around the Tolbooth at Glasgow Cross. The traditional centre of trading activity, a new town hall was erected there in 1737, to accommodate assorted municipal functions and festivities. As a symbol of civic aspirations a peal of 28 'musick bells' was commissioned for the Tolbooth Steeple, their melodious tone focusing public attention even more on the embellishment of the commercial and civic heartland. Today little remains of Glasgow's 'Rialto', which attempted to emulate the style of Renaissance Venice. Only the Tolbooth Steeple survived the major restructuring of Glasgow Cross in 1921, and stands as a rather solitary monument to the district's historic importance.

Planned development

Civic control of Glasgow's eighteenth-century street formation meant that the irregular contours of the medieval town gradually gave way to more planned and prestigious development. A striking early example was King Street, created during the 1720s to serve as a market centre for the city. Meat, fish and dairy produce were the main commodities on offer, together with fruit and vegetables in nearby Candleriggs. All this was a conscious effort by commercially-minded magistrates to regulate arrangements for the sale of foodstuffs, and the market character of the area endured until the late twentieth century.

A new town

Buchanan Street  © Over time, more ambitious and extensive schemes were promoted by the civic leadership. In 1772, growing pressure on available building space prompted the acquisition of the outlying lands of Ramshorn and Meadowflat. James Barrie, the city surveyor, was called upon to draft development plans, which although not implemented, served as a prototype for subsequent proposals to create a new town in Glasgow. The innovative example of Edinburgh's New Town provided the aesthetic inspiration, but the venture was also speculative: it was intended to make the most financially out of demand for property in the city. Lucrative market opportunities mirrored the precipitant rise in Glasgow's population, from 23,500 inhabitants in 1755 to 42,000 by 1780.

George Square was patriotically named after King George III, and was laid out in the Ramshorn grounds during the early 1780s. Although the focal point of the burgeoning New Town, it remained conveniently close to the University, then located in High Street, and the commercial centre around Glasgow Cross. Yet the Square was still sufficiently separate from the congested urban centre to mark a territorial distinction for the status-conscious merchant, manufacturing and professional classes. By the turn of the century, James Denholm, a pioneering historian of Glasgow, was making glowing reference to the 'elegant' buildings that had been erected there.

These were starkly contrasted with the 'dark and gloomy' tenements surviving in the Drygate, Glasgow's oldest street, to the north of the Cross. In an effort to eradicate the inconvenient remnants of medieval Glasgow, new thoroughfares cut across the central 'merchant city' area. Buchanan Street, Glassford Street and Miller Street were names that celebrated individual city merchants. The rustic-sounding thoroughfare of Back Cow Loan was transformed into Ingram Street, where stylish Assembly Rooms opened in 1796, designed by the Edinburgh-based architects, James and Robert Adam. The brothers were also responsible for Royal Infirmary, which became a striking symbol of modernity, made all the more apparent by its proximity to the thirteenth century Cathedral. Ironically, these two examples of Scottish classicism were demolished in the late nineteenth century, their style by this time regarded as outmoded.

Seaport status

The structural transformation of the late eighteenth century did not just relate to the built environment. A civic preoccupation was the notoriously shallow River Clyde which did not allow for vessels of substantial size to penetrate as far as Glasgow. In 1770, as part of the civic improvement programme, the civil engineers John and James Golborne initiated the first phase of a prolonged project to widen and deepen the river. Glasgow's status as a seaport grew accordingly, at a time when industry was beginning to emerge as a vital component of the urban economy.

Textiles

The tobacco boom years were emphatically over by the 1780s, the colonial trading base having been lost as a result of the American War of Independence. Yet the diversification of tobacco fortunes stood Glasgow's elites in good stead, and their interests turned to other promising sources of investment. Textiles, notably linen, had long been an important manufacturing outlet, but technological developments, especially steam power from the 1800s, enhanced industrial potential. Glasgow became a major cotton-producing centre which increased its overseas trading importance.

By 1801, the city had over 77,000 inhabitants, representing one of the fastest population growth rates in the United Kingdom. The compact and attractive community of the eighteenth century was on the cusp of profound social change, as the momentum of industrialisation and urban expansion swiftly gathered pace.

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About the author

Irene Maver was born and grew up in Glasgow. She is currently a lecturer in Scottish history at Glasgow University. Her main research interests are the history of urban Scotland since the eighteenth century. Her most recent publication is Glasgow (Edinburgh University Press 2000).