Gallus Glasgow Blog

The second of our blogs by Morag Cross detailing the loves and lives of those connected to Queen Arcade, focusing on dressmaking and the refurbishment of the mall which took place in the 1870s.

This blog explores how Glasgow’s theatres attracted black performers to the city through plays such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, which proved extremely popular.

Focusing on the Garnethill Synagogue, this blog by Harvey Kaplan charts the waves of Jewish immigration to Glasgow throughout the years and the achievements of various members of the congregation.

This blog explores the history of rowing on the Clyde. As the most popular spectator sport in the city up until the 1870s, races often saw crowds in excess of 30,000 lining the riverbanks. Ladies races were also held, but were seen as a novelty, an ‘amusing spectacle’.

Explore our selection of free online learning resources!

This blog explores how Glasgow Green is arguably the home of football, with it and the surrounding areas being home to many football clubs who changed the Scottish Game into the World Game.

Glasgow’s oldest park has long been used as a space for leisure, entertainment and public events, but it also has a rich sporting heritage. This blog explores the sporting activities of the early days of the Green, including golf, shinty and cycling.

Opened in 1845, this new purpose built hospital at 41 Rottenrow was Glasgow’s only provision for women with venereal disease. The women were kept in reformatory conditions and subjected to treatments that were more experimental than effective…

In this guest blog, author Sara Sheridan gives us a rundown of Glasgow’s Top Twelve Unmemorialised Victorian and Edwardian women. Glasgow is great at claiming people as its own- so Sara has chosen women who contributed to the life of the city, who lived there but weren’t necessarily born there. That’s Glasgow.

Glasgow City Heritage Trust is inviting expressions of interest to create a contemporary illustration interpreting and bringing to the present day Thomas Sulman’s Bird’s Eye View of Glasgow, 1864. 

Deadline: Wednesday 7th February, 10am

What links Charles Dickens, women’s rights activists, dressmaking and the Glasgow Chess Club? No, this isn’t a bad Christmas cracker joke but an important piece of Glasgow history. The Glasgow Athenaeum, now The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, has played an important role in helping to shape Glasgow’s cultural training and commercial output. Read more about its history in this blog by Dr. Karen Mailley-Watt.

Are there women in Sulman’s aerial perspective of Glasgow?
Yes, they inhabit, own and work in the buildings he shows. The amazing image can been used to show the surroundings where female entrepreneurs and employers, shopkeepers and factory workers, lived, loved and laboured. Blog by Morag Cross.

Think tenements were just for the working classes? Then think again! In this guest blog Rachel Campbell from the Tenement House highlights how some tenements were built with the middle classes in mind, complete with ‘all mod cons’ including full indoor bathrooms with running hot water.

This fascinating blog tells the story of Scottish scientist Robert Angus Smith, who monitored air pollution in Victorian Glasgow and is known as the ‘father of acid rain’.

Between 1857 and 1908, four of Scotland’s most notorious murders took place in Glasgow, in an area of one square mile. This blog explores the stories of these murders, including the human crocodile and the first use of forensic photography in Scottish policing.

5 Blythswood Square – a blonde sandstone townhouse – now home to office workers, computers and time-consuming board meetings, contains within its walls a radical history not many Glaswegians, never mind many Scots, acknowledge…

Out and about in the city and looking for a bit of a steer? Why not check out our interactive Gallus Glasgow trails and find out more about the fate of the buildings that are depicted on Sulman’s map?

These tours explore the buildings shown on Thomas Sulman’s incredible Bird’s Eye View of Glasgow, 1864, that have survived or been lost, and what they can tell us about Victorian Glasgow.

Interested in writing for GCHT? We’re opening up a call for blog articles for our Gallus Glasgow project!

Thomas Sulman was an English architectural draftsman. He studied at The Working Men’s College between 1854 and 1858, where he was a student of, and later an engraver for, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 

“I feel like a bird soaring over the city when I gaze upon Sulman’s map, every nook and cranny with every detail so exact.

I can see where I came from and where I’m at.”