The former Sorn Dairy building on Sanda Street in Glasgow. Built in the 1890s, it was originally a distribution centre for dairy farms near Sorn in Ayrshire.

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#glasgow #maryhill #northkelvinside #glasgowhistory #ghostsign

This photograph shows the motorway running through the south side of Clifford Street, an area previously occupied by tenements, a large recreation ground and tennis courts, during its construction in 1976. 

📷 D Wilson Laing

#OnThisDay #GlasgowHistory #M8

Both Jessie and Annie survived on Lifeboat No. 11, while Harper died in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic along with around 1,500 others.

In 1921, the church he'd founded on Craigiehall Street was renamed the Harper Memorial Baptist Church in his honour.

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A memorial to John Harper, the founder of Paisley Road Baptist Church, in Craigton Cemetery on the Southside of Glasgow.

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The three stages of John Ewing Walker's development of North Kelvinside in Glasgow as viewed from the southern side of the River Kelvin. At the bottom is the remains of Walker's Bridge.

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So, a dispute between two rival developers some 150 years ago was directly responsible for the creation of one of Glasgow's most impressive pieces of Victorian structural engineering designed by one of its greatest architects.

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He first built his own bridge over the river and then commissioned Alexander 'Greek' Thomson to design the structure we now know as the Sixty Steps.

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How to get people across the River Kelvin and up the steep slope on the opposite bank to the land he wanted to develop at the top of the hill? His solution was ingenuous, if rather expensive.

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Yesterday, I was telling the story of a large spite wall built in 1869 in the North Kelvinside area of Glasgow, but there's another, even bigger wall which was constructed in the same area just a few years later, and which is still there to this day (top photo).

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Rather oddly, on Doune Gardens/Quadrant itself, a modern vehicle barrier has been erected at the exact spot where the wall once stood, so recreating Walker's spite wall in a new form some 150 years after it was initially built.

#glasgow #glasgowhistory #spitewall #northkelvinside

As each developer developed their own areas on either side of the wall, they gave streets different names and built different styles of buildings, and even though the wall itself is long gone, these differences can still be seen to this day.

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Rather than join forces and build a single bridge, the two developers fell out and in the end each built their own. The bank built the Belmont Street Bridge (which is still there) and Walker built another a short distance further west (now gone).

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In this case, it was a neighbouring developer, the City of Glasgow Bank. The main problem faced by both developers was how to connect their land to the city's rapidly expanding West End on the other side of the nearby River Kelvin.

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Well, it's because it was here, in 1869, that a developer by the name of John Ewing Walker built a spite wall (outlined in red on the 1892 map on the right). A spite wall is a one constructed purely to inconvenience or annoy a neighbour.

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#glasgow #glasgowhistory #spitewall #northkelvinside

If you walk west along Doune Gardens in the  North Kelvinside area of Glasgow, you may notice something odd. For no obvious reason, the buildings suddenly change and its name becomes Doune Quadrant. So, why does this happen?

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#glasgow #glasgowhistory #spitewall

On this day in 1993, Nelson Mandela came to Glasgow to receive the Freedom of the City in person. The council had granted it in 1981, when he was still a prisoner on Robben Island, making Glasgow the first city in the world to do so.

#Glasgow #NelsonMandela #OnThisDay #glasgowhistory

Another example of a carriage mounting step from Kirklee Terrace in the West End of Glasgow. Such blocks were used to help the owners of a property step up into their carriages in the days when most transport was horse-powered.

#glasgow #glasgowhistory #victorianglasgow #carriagestep #mountingblock

Love this old vent cover on a shop front on Maryhill Road in Glasgow. It indicates it was once home to a branch of the footwear manufacturer and retailer H. P. Tyler Ltd. Founded in Leicester in 1886, at one point they had over 100 branches around the UK.

#glasgow #ventcover #glasgowhistory

Within just a few years, this part of the Clyde went from being shallow enough to wade across at low tide to being seven feet deep.

#glasgow #riverclyde #portglasgow #dumbuckshoals #glasgowhistory

This caused the water flowing through it to move faster, which, in turn, resulted in an increase in scouring of the seabed. This increased erosion then permamently deepened the channel without the need for constant re-dregding.

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