GLASGOW 's earliest history,
like so much else in this
surprisingly romantic city, is
obscured in a swirl of myth. The
city's name is said to derive from
the Celtic
Glas-cu , which
loosely translates as "the
dear, green place" - a tag that
the tourist board are keen to
exploit as an antidote to the sooty
images of popular imagination. It is
generally agreed that the first
settlers arrived in the sixth
century to join Christian missionary
Kentigern - later to become
St Mungo - in his newly founded
monastery on the banks of the tiny
Molendinar Burn.
William the Lionheart gave the
town an official charter in 1175,
after which it continued to grow in
importance, peaking in the
mid-fifteenth century when the university
was founded on Kentigern's site -
the second in Scotland after St
Andrews. This led to the
establishment of an archbishopric,
and hence city status, in 1492, and,
due to its situation on a large,
navigable river, Glasgow soon
expanded into a major industrial port
. The first cargo of tobacco from
Virginia offloaded in Glasgow in
1674, and led to a boom in trade
with the colonies until American
independence. Following the Industrial
Revolution and James Watt's
innovations in steam power, coal
from the abundant seams of
Lanarkshire fuelled the ironworks
all around the Clyde, worked by the
cheap hands of the Highlanders and,
later, those fleeing the Irish
potato famine of the 1840s.
The Victorian age
transformed Glasgow beyond
recognition. The population boomed
from 77,000 in 1801 to nearly
800,000 at the end of the century,
and new tenement blocks swept into
the suburbs in an attempt to cope
with the choking influxes of people.
At this time Glasgow became known as
the "Second City of the
Empire" - a curious epithet for
a place that today rarely
acknowledges second place in
anything.
By the turn of the twentieth
century, Glasgow's industries had
been honed into one massive shipbuilding
culture. Everything from tugboats to
transatlantic liners were fashioned
out of sheet metal in the yards that
straddled the Clyde. In the harsh
economic climate of the 1930s,
however, unemployment spiralled, and
Glasgow could do little to counter
its popular image as a city
dominated by inebriate violence and
- having absorbed vast numbers of
Irish emigrants - sectarian
tensions.
Shipbuilding, and many associated
industries, died away almost
completely in the 1960s and 1970s,
leaving the city depressed, jobless
and directionless. Then, in the
1980s, the self-promotion campaign
began, snowballing towards the 1988
Garden Festival and year-long party
as European City of Culture in 1990.
More recently, Glasgow was UK
City of Architecture and Design
in 1999, an event which strove
valiantly to showcase the city's
rich architectural heritage.
