Day 91 Part 1: Drumpchapel to Central Station, Glasgow

Virtual Walk: Scotland 2021

5th April 2021: 30.84km walked today taking the total to 8716.37/8868km. 4.5% of 86 entries submitting 670.56km.

An Easter treat: 2 parts today! A shorter distance as there is so much history about Glasgow itself and so many places to tell you about; it’s an interesting city! 

Part 1 we walk from Drumchapel through the west end and walk along the Clyde for a short time before heading into the city centre to explore.

Route 23: St Andrews to Glasgow

Route 24: Glasgow to Edinburgh

As we walk, I’ll tell you a brief overview of Glasgow (as brief as I can make it!) - most places of interest I’ll mention as we walk through on our route.

There are many theories as to how Glasgow got its name, but it was first recorded as Glasgu in 1116. It's never been a capital or a residence for monarchs and has humble beginnings as a fishing community. Its origin lies with a Christian missionary called Mungo, who was the Archbishop of the Kingdom of Strathclyde by 600 AD. The King’s seat was at Dumbarton Castle and Glasgow was a major church centre, with the founding of Glasgow Cathedral by St Mungo at the site of Molendinar Burn. It remained so for 1000 years until the Scottish Reformation swept it all away; however, Glasgow Cathedral miraculously survived. Glasgow Fair was granted a charter in 1190, its structure changing over the centuries with a semblance of it remaining today, marked by a public holiday in July.

By the 1700s Glasgow was thriving again on the transatlantic trade of predominantly tobacco from North America and the West Indies. However, the American War of Independence in 1775 killed the trade overnight. Rebuilding yet again, by 1800 foreign trade and domestic industries had seen major growth based on textiles, chemicals and engineering, marine engineering and shipbuilding contributed to this. The River Clyde had been dredged and widened to allow shipping into the upper stretches of the river, enabling shipbuilding to take place. Robert Napier was one of the marine engineers who helped pioneer this.

With these expansions came an influx of workers, particularly from Ireland and the Highlands; the Irish fleeing the potato famines of the 1840s and over 30,000 Gaelic-speaking Highlanders fleeing from the Highland Clearances. From all this industry and trade came great wealth. Central areas of Glasgow, such as the gridiron road layout, West End and the Merchant City, were transformed by beautiful architecture, featuring parks, museums, art galleries and churches; then the railway arrived in the 1870s.

In the 20th century, fortunes changed with the depression of the 1930s, the World Wars, then the demise of shipbuilding in the 1960s. Glasgow is referred to as the world’s first post-industrial city. Having, for the most part, recovered from these losses, it is the most populated city in Scotland (3rd in the UK) whose statistics state it is still one of the most deprived areas in Scotland.

The city has constantly been selling itself to the world in recent decades with Glasgow Garden Festival (1988), Glasgow City of Culture (1990), UK City of Architecture and Design (1999), hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2014 and the first European Championships in 2018. It also received UNESCO City of Music status in 2008. They have had a slogan for the city since the 1980s, the first being ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ to the most recent ‘People Make Glasgow’. The people are known as Glaswegians or ‘Weggies’ and have their own ‘patter’ or dialect of the Scots language.

It's a cosmopolitan city where art and culture are incredibly important. Little remains of its medieval heart but its diverse architecture, educational institutions, entertainment venues and visitor attractions make it memorable, not forgetting the sport with its famous ‘Old Firm’ rivalry between Rangers and Celtic (just 2 of the numerous clubs who play for the city). It must be said the city is also well known for athletics, rugby, tennis, golf, and swimming!

The city has many notable people, the most famous of which are: Peter May, crime writer; John Barrowman, singer and actor; Billy Boyd, Peter Capaldi, Robbie Coltrane, Graham McTavish, Richard Rankin, Gary Lewis, all actors; Billy Connolly, Rikki Fulton, Susan Calman, comedians; Deacon Blue, Texas, Del Amitri, Simple Minds, Travis, all bands; Angus, Malcolm & Stevie Young, Lulu, Lewis Capaldi, Eddi Reader, Paolo Nutini, Gerry Rafferty, Mark Knopfler, all musicians….the list goes on and on!

We walk up past the Cloberhill Lock flight and onwards to reach Temple Locks, passing the areas of Netherton and Temple, before passing under Clevedon Road Bridge. The canal then narrows in Kelvindale as it prepares to pass over the Kelvin Aqueduct via a four arched bridge constructed in 1790; this gives Glaswegians a strange view of boats floating above their heads as they walk along the Kelvin Walkway by the River Kelvin below. Here we say farewell to the canal for now, following the River Kelvin along its tree-lined western bank, through Kelvindale streets to cross Kelvindale Road.

We continue along the riverside and streets until we reach the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. We are now in the city’s West End, where the gardens sit on the banks of the river and you can pick up the Kelvinside Walkway by crossing the Humpback Bridge here. The gardens were relocated to this site in 1842 after outgrowing their original site, founded in 1817 near what is now Fitzroy Place. As we explore, we see numerous plant collections, woodlands and glasshouses, the most notable of which is Kibble Palace. Designed by John Kibble and erected in 1873, it is a wrought iron frame structure containing tree ferns from New Zealand and Australia, as well as a collection of statues. The curator's house is now the garden’s tearooms.

We exit the gardens onto Great Western Road junction with Byres Road. Oran Mor, meaning ‘the great melody of life’, sits on this junction, reopened in 2004 as an events venue and bar. Its grand auditorium with its meticulously hand-painted ceiling and walls by Alisdair Gray depicts Birth, Life and Death, and is a fantastic venue for weddings. It also became famous for its ‘a play, a pie and a pint’. Originally built for use as Kelvinside Parish Church in 1862 by J.J. Stevenson, it was used for this purpose until 1978 when the congregation merged with another in the area.

We walk Byres Road, turn onto Great George Street then bear first right into Great George Lane leading us onto Ashton Lane. This quaint cobbled back street owes its fame to ‘The Ubiquitous Chip’, a popular restaurant which relocated here in 1976. Previously run down, other bars and restaurants began to move in alongside ‘The Chip’, then the Grosvenor Picture Theatre was relaunched in 2003 as Grosvenor Cinema. It has established itself on the tourist trail today, particularly picturesque at night with its fairy lights aglow.

We emerge from the cosy lane onto University Gardens, then take steps down to the Hunterian Art Gallery and Mackintosh House, also the location of the University of Glasgow’s Library. As the name suggests we are now in the University of Glasgow area. The Hunterian Art Gallery (and Museum, which we’ll see shortly) opened in 1807.

After William Hunter died in 1783, he donated his collections to the university along with money for a building to house them. The gallery has one of the most distinguished art collections in Scotland, including the largest permanent collection of James McNeill Whistler. It also houses one of the most important collections of work by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, the Mackintosh House, entry to which is through the main gallery; it contains reassembled rooms saved from the Mackintoshes’ Glasgow home which was demolished in the 1960s.

From the gallery, we head down Hillhead Road, past the McMillan Reading Room onto University Avenue where we cross to the main Glasgow University Campus, the Gilbert Scott Building. The university is the 4th oldest in the UK, founded in 1451 when permission was granted to add a university to the cathedral; initially, wealthy students were taught in the Chapter House, then moved out to buildings nearby. In 1563 Mary Queen of Scots gave them a 13-acre site and by 1800 there was a building on High Street.

In 1870 the university was moved to its current site, the new design by Sir George Gilbert Scott in revival style, reflecting the structure of the High Street Campus but on a larger scale. The main building surrounds 2 quadrangles with an undercroft, or ‘cloisters’, in the centre, over which the Gothic bell tower and Bute Hall is located (used for exams and graduations). The university also occupies numerous sites in the surrounding Hillhead area. It has high educational standards and, as a result, strict entry requirements for its c26,500 students; its medical school is regarded as one of the best in the UK. The cloisters are a popular place for photographers and filming, having been used in Outlaw King (2018), Cloud Atlas (2012) and Outlander (S3). The Hunterian Museum is also accessed through the cloisters; the museum collection from 1807 is housed here but has grown considerably, reopening in 2011 with a ‘Romans in Scotland’ exhibit.

After exploring the Gilbert Scott Building, we head down the hill onto Argyle Street, the beginning of one of Glasgow’s famous streets which runs 3.8 kilometres to Trongate. We follow it to reach the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Kelvingrove Park. This is a world-class museum which opened in 1901, partly financed by the proceeds of the 1888 International Exhibition held in the Park. It was designed by Sir John W. Simpson and E.J. Milner Allen in the Spanish Baroque style using Locharbriggs red sandstone, popular in Glaswegian buildings of the period. The concert pipe organ which dominates the central hall was made by Lewis & Co. It was used in the International Exhibition Hall and was purchased to be played at concerts in the new hall. Recitals are still held each day, light pieces during the week and more classical at the weekend. There is an amazing range of art history and nature exhibits, including the collections from the McLellan Galleries and the Old Kelvingrove Museum. It was refurbished and reopened in 2006 and is one of Scotland’s most popular visitor attractions.

Having had our fill of floating heads, taxidermy and famous paintings, we make our way across the park area. The park was founded in 1852 as the West End Park for recreational opportunities for the residents. 34 hectares of parkland straddling the River Kelvin and a haven for urban wildlife. It became the site of 3 exhibitions from 1888-1911 seeing structures built and demolished over this period. We wander past the skatepark and the Cyprus Duck Pond to the Stewart Memorial Fountain (1872), built to commemorate Lord Provost Robert Stewart who saw clean drinking water piped into the city from Loch Katrine. There is the Kelvingrove Bandstand also in the park as well as a good number of other statues and monuments.

Exiting this area, we head down Kelvingrove Street to join Argyle Street for a short time again. We are now in the trendy neighbourhood of Finnieston, so much so that in 2016 it was labelled one of 20 hippest places to live in the UK. It's an area full of fantastic bars and restaurants including the Ox and Finch and The Gannet. Blink though and you may miss a quirky hidden gem. Besides a florist shop is The Hidden Lane established in 2009, a community of c100 studios where creatives have their workshops in old stables and warehouses behind Argyle Street. It does have a tea room and other services - there’s a whole map available (online) should you be interested in a visit! Worth a venture, even if it is just with your camera.

We walk to the end of the block, on returning to Argyle Street from our secret visit, and turn onto Minerva Street walking down past the Exhibition Centre Railway Station, over the railway bridge and Clydeside Expressway, onto the Scottish Event Campus. Here many major events happen for Scotland at the Scottish Event Campus Centre (SECC), SEC Armadillo Conference Centre (1997) and the SSE Hydro (2013). They are all top-class show, conference and concert venues for large scale events. The site began life in 1985 and has developed over the decades. The SECC has made news recently as the location of NHS Louisa Jordan (named after a Scottish nurse who died during WW1), a critical care hospital for NHS Scotland during the COVID pandemic in 2020. It was due to host the 2020 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which has been postponed till at least 2021, along with many other usual events, of course.

We walk through the site to join the Clyde Walkway on the riverside, a walk which starts at the Riverside Museum, to our right, and ends at the Cambuslang Bridge. We’ll be visiting the Riverside Museum on our way out of Glasgow. For now, we pass Bells Bridge (1988) then cross the Millennium Bridge (2002); these footbridges link to Pacific Quay on the south side which is the new name for Plantation Quay and Prince’s Dock Basin, used by the Clyde Port Authority as commercial docks until the 1970s.

The south side area has now been redeveloped but it wasn't always the case. This is Govan area, once a town in its own right becoming part of Glasgow in 1912. Bustling docklands and shipyards once lined the river, the area also became associated with deprivation, poverty and crime. The site was cleared in the 1980s and the Glasgow Garden Festival held on part of the site in 1988, designed and built by the Scottish Development Agency, with a view that Clyde waterside regeneration would follow after the festival had ended. It took a further 10 years, becoming Pacific Quay before the Glasgow Science Centre (2001), BBC Scotland Pacific Quay (2007), then STV Studios headquarters and Capital Radio took up residence along with a few others.

We wander to the Science Centre, a 5-star rated attraction with over 250 interactive exhibits, and the most popular paid-for attraction in Scotland. The Glasgow Tower, part of the visit, holds a Guinness World Record for being the tallest full-rotating freestanding structure in the world. It stands at 127 metres and is currently the tallest tower in Scotland; we climb to the top for a great view of Glasgow.

Another place to mention further inland being on this side of the Clyde is Pollok House and Country Park. The Maxwell family has owned the land here since the mid-13th century. The house on the grounds today was built in 1752. Sir John Maxwell held a meeting there in 1931 which saw the birth of the National Trust for Scotland (NTS). In 1966, his daughter gave Pollock House, its art collection, library and 361 acres of land to Glasgow City Council who passed it to the NTS in 1998. The house is set within beautiful grounds alongside White Cart Water. As well as the house there is a water-powered sawmill and stables where Clydesdale horses are kept; there are also Highland cattle on the estate.

In 1983 a purpose-built facility was constructed on Pollok Park for The Burrell Collection. William Burrell, a shipping magnate, gifted his extensive collection to the City of Glasgow in 1944. When the park was donated to the city in 1966 it was deemed an ideal rural setting to build a new home for the collection. The Burrell Collection is currently closed for refurbishment and is due to reopen in 2021.

On our walk, we wander along Plantation Quay past the aforementioned buildings to return to the north side of the Clyde via Bells Bridge. We rejoin the Clyde Walkway continuing along the waterfront passing the Finnieston Crane, the last cantilever crane to be installed on the Clyde in 1931; the docks, which put it to work, closed in 1969 and have been redeveloped as we have just seen.

The North Rotunda stands nearby, part of a system built between 1890-96, which housed deep shafts to access the Clyde Harbour Tunnels under the river, another shaft on the opposite bank at the South Rotunda. Pedestrians, horses and carts, eventually cars, would be hauled up and down by Otis hydraulic lifts to access the tunnels leading to the other side of the river. The lift structures were removed during World War 2 to contribute to the war effort, but they reopened post-war, and the pedestrian tunnel operated till 1980 with the vehicular tunnel being filled in by 1986. The pedestrian tunnel still exists today but is inaccessible to the public. Both rotundas are in use, the north as a restaurant and the south as offices.

At the end of Finnieston Quay stands The Clyde Arc, officially opened in 2006; before the opening, it was called the Finnieston Bridge, nicknamed the Squinty Bridge (because it wasn’t straight). It was the first bridge to be built over the Clyde since the Kingston Bridge to carry the M8 in 1970. It was built to allow better access to Pacific Quay and other areas under regeneration. We walk Lancefield Quay, then Anderston Quay following the path under the Kingston Bridge to an area where the Renfrew Ferry, one of the old car chain ferries, is moored, now a hospitality venue. We continue along the Clyde Walkway, now on the Broomielaw, to the Tradeston Bridge (2009), nicknamed by locals ‘The Squiggly Bridge’.

The route we now take, as we walk the rest of central Glasgow, will not only visit highlights of the city but also cover the Mural Trail. Expanded ever since the first artwork appeared in 2008, there is now a great range of murals rejuvenating streets, buildings and vacant sites throughout the city centre. I won’t mention every mural en route, just the most famous. You can look online at all the current murals viewable on the route but do put in mind some will disappear given the content of the trail constantly evolves with the regeneration of areas.

At the Tradeston Bridge, we cross the Broomielaw and continue up James Watt Street turning right at the end along Argyle Street. We walk for a few blocks before we reach the ‘Hielanman’s Umbrella’. It is actually a bridge carrying the many railway lines over Argyle Street into Central Station which is based on Gordon Street. It was given the nickname because the 30,000 Gaelic speaking Highlanders who moved here used the bridge as a meeting place. They would gather at this junction, as a weekend evening meeting place and between services at the St Columba's Gaelic Church of Scotland located nearby, to catch up on each other's news and that of Glasgow. If it were raining, they would take shelter under the bridge, and the locals called it the ‘Hielanman’s Umbrella’. This tradition died out during World War 2 when the social disruption and blackouts stopped the gatherings.

We turn down Oswald Street and head back down onto the waterfront, still on the Broomielaw, and pass under the Caledonian Railway Bridge on to River Park at Customhouse Quay, a small area planted with a few trees and grass. Within this area, one of the most famous of the murals is located, the Glasgow Tiger, painted by James Klinge who has several works on the trail. We stop to pose for photos, which is a ‘must-do’; unfortunately, the tiger was defaced with graffiti in late 2019 but you can still get a sense of its impact. Hopefully, they’ll restore it to its former glory before long.

From here we cross Clyde Street to head up Dixon Street to St Enoch’s Square. This land was once part of Glasgow Green but changed hands to be eventually purchase Mural Trail, d by the Merchants of Glasgow. The foundation stone for St Enoch’s Church was laid in 1780 and the Square grew up around it. The church was demolished in 1926 after the congregation moved to another church; in fact, many of the buildings were demolished in this area in the 1860s to make way for the railway line.

The Subway Station arrived in 1896, sited in a Flemish Renaissance-style ticket office. The station was refurbished in the 1970s creating a new entrance further along the Square, so the old ticket office is used as a coffee shop today. The Glasgow Subway is the third oldest metro system in the world after London and Budapest, and the line hasn't been expanded since its introduction. It became known as the clockwork orange, after its new colour was launched in 1980 called Strathclyde Red, but it corresponded with the release of the film ‘The Clockwork Orange’ and the nickname was born (it's the only common ground they share); a nickname not used by locals who for once refer to it plainly as the ‘subway’ or the ‘the tube’.

The St Enoch’s Shopping Centre opened in 1989, replacing the St Enoch’s Hotel and station, and is the largest glass-covered commercial space in Europe. The square hosts the Glasgow Christmas Market every year.

We cross Argyle Street at the end of St Enoch’s Square onto the pedestrianised Buchanan Street. This is at the heart of Glasgow’s shopping area, Princes Square and Buchanan Galleries Mall are both accessed from this street. What we see today has been constructed from 1790 onwards, after the sale of the land after losses from the American Revolution in 1776 by the Buchanan family (when they saw the loss of their tobacco plantations in Virginia).

We turn onto Exchange Place which leads onto Royal Exchange Square, a beautifully appointed square at the centre of which sits the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). Initially built in 1778 as a townhouse for a wealthy merchant, it has seen several uses before becoming home to GOMA in 1996, housing contemporary works of art from artists including Andy Warhol and David Hockney. Outside the entrance is an equally famous Glasgow icon, a Duke of Wellington statue sculpted by Carlo Marochetti in 1844. For years, the Duke has worn a traffic cone on his head, and although continually removed by authorities, it always returned. The cone has come to represent the locals light-attitude to authority apparently, and the cone became such a talking point that even the Council now use it to promote tourism and culture within the city. Occasionally, the horse even joins in - a double-dose of traffic cone! 

We walk around the square and return to cross Buchanan Street onto Gordon Street. We walk to reach Central Station on the corner of Union Street.