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.

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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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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Due to the distances involved, dredging the channel wasn't a feasible option in the 1770s, so instead John Golborne designed and constructed a massive, 800 yard long, retaining wall to narrow the main channel.

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This meant ships could finally sail into the city itself and be unloaded on the Broomielaw rather than twenty miles to the west in Port Glasgow (after which goods needed to be transported to and from the city by cart).

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However, Smith's career came to a rather abrupt end when he felt forced to leave Glasgow after his daughter, Madeliene, went on trial for the murder of her former lover in 1857. Overtoun house was one of his final projects before his death in 1863 aged just 55.

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Overtoun House in Dumbarton. Built in the early 1860s, it was designed in a Scots Baronial style by James Smith. Smith was a well respected architect who married the daughter of another famous Scottish architect, David Hamilton.

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