Above: Glasgow’s main public square, Royal Exchange Square. Above: The city’s most famous son, architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, designed many local attractions includ- ing the Glasgow School of Art (top right), The Willow Tearoom (above right) and House for an Art Lover (above
far right)
along with his prayer to “let Glasgow flourish”. Thanks in no small part to the river that brought St Mungo to settle there, flourish is exactly what the city has done. In 1707 the Union of the Scottish and English Parliaments
granted Scots access to the colonies in North America and the Indies, triggering a period of rapid expansion. Favourable trade winds gave Glaswegians up to three weeks advantage over their English competitors in the journey across the Atlantic, taking consumer goods out and bringing tobacco back. The Clyde was re-channelled and dredged in order to allow the three-mast merchant’s ships to bring their cargo straight into the hub of the city (though the largest vessels were unloaded down river at Port Glasgow and Greenock). The Tobacco Lords, as the merchants came to be known, saw themselves as the new aristocracy. In their black silk suits and red cloaks, they strutted from the warehouses where the hogsheads of tobacco were stored, to the Tobacco Exchange where the precious leaves were sold, home to their purpose-built town houses, perhaps stopping off on the way to do business at the Trade’s Hall, built by Robert Adam and serving the same purpose more than 200 years later. One of the grandest townhouses was built for merchant William Cunninghame.
78 BRITAIN
The original foyer now forms the entrance to the Gallery of Modern Art on Queen Street, in those days Cow Lone, a muddy track forming the main route to the common grazing grounds in Cowcaddens. Nowadays, the Merchant City is awash with trendy
bars and eating places but its tobacco heritage is commemorated in the streets named for the main trading houses and plantations, with the mortal remains of the merchants themselves buried in the graveyard at Ramshorn Kirk. American independence signalled the decline of Glasgow’s tobacco trade. First sugar and then cotton took its place. By the time the American Civil War put an end to the export of raw cotton, the city had turned to the industry for which it is most famous. Ship building. The Clyde Room in Glasgow’s Museum of Transport
has scale models of more than 250 Clyde-built ships, including the Queen Mary and both Queen Elizabeths. For over a hundred years, the shipbuilding and engineering works that made Glasgow great jostled for space along the Clyde. The city expanded rapidly, demonstrating its status in the magnificent civic buildings erected at the time, the most opulent of which is the City Chambers on George Square. A few steps from here in the city centre is Central
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