Glasgow, Partick - Whiteinch, General

PARTICK

The Archbishop had a summer palace at Partick, where there was a small group of church tenants in the 16th century. By the 18th century the palace was gone, but the Younger and Cumming families still represented the 'Old Rentallers'. The Youngers had owned the Bishop's Orchard, the Brewlands and part of the Mill lands during the 17th century and the rest of the Mills had become the property of the Baxters' Guild. In 1611 Partick Castle was built for George Hutcheson by the mason William Miller, whose accounts survive to this day (see Central Glasgow Guide). Close to the Crawford bridge that replaced the ancient ford across the Kelvin in 1611, on the ancient route from Glasgow to Dumbarton, the 18th-century village of Partick stretched from the Cross to the River Clyde. There was another ford here across the shallow Clyde to Govan, the biggest settlement on the Archbishop's lands. The Clyde then spread much farther north than today's channel.

Print and dye works were begun about 1800, followed by power-loom weaving. In the 1840s, shipyards arrived: Pointhouse (later to become A & J Inglis) in 1842 at the Printfield site on the east bank of the Kelvin, followed by the Meadowside yard of Tod & McGregor in 1845 on the west bank. The resulting employment required tenements to house the labourers as well as the middle-class clerks and shopkeepers. Dumbarton Road was the class divide between them: on the workers' south side coal cost 'half a crown' a bag but, on the middle-class north side it cost 'five bob'. Partick had a population of 5,000 when it became a Burgh in 1852. When Glasgow swallowed the Burgh 50 years later, its population had expanded to 70,000.

WHITEINCH

An island until the 18th-century river improvements created Glasgow harbour and drowned the ancient Clyde fords. Dredged material was deposited on the island now linked to the north bank. Barclay Curle's 1855 Clydeholm shipyard, employing 1,000, prompted more tenement building. Meadowside granaries were built in 1912 by the Clyde Port Authority and extended in the 1930s but, like the yards, the shipping has all but gone and the granaries are demolished.

Taken from "Greater Glasgow: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Sam Small, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk

EXTERNAL REFERENCE:

Mit. Lib. 'Wm Graham 1' p.43 - Drawing of View from Kelvin

Mit. Lib. 'Bygone Glasgow No 26' - Reprod of drawing 1871