Few know of the link between Cathcart and the origins of helicopters. However many are aware of the Weir Group, probably one the last remaining great Glasgow engineering firms. Started by the Weir brothers, they developed innovative devices for steamships and set up at the Holm Foundry, Newlands Road in 1886. Running of the […]

  Many will be familiar with the Glasgow Southside suburb of Mount Florida with its tenements and impressive terraces and, of course, the home of Scottish Football, Hampden Park. But how did this place gets its name?   The district grew in and around the “Lands of Mount Floridon”, which consisted of 15 acres of […]

  On re-reading Jean Marshall’s history of Cathcart ‘Why Cathcart?’ (published 1969) I puzzled again over this mention of the change in local industry towards the end of the 19th Century … “several local firms closed down, among them …Verel’s Photographic Works and the Cassel (Castle?) Gold Extracting Company …”   I knew about the […]

  Let Glasgow flourish, but do not let her forget the example of the curlers to whom she owes so much of her success, and who owed so much of their success to the curling by which they lightened the burdens of civic and commercial care. [1.] The remaining pond   I was taking a […]

A reflection of history and the spirit of a community   Mrs. Barbour’s Army spread through Glesga like the plague The maisters got the message and the message wisnae vague While oor menfolk fight the Kaiser we’ll stay hame and fight the war Against the greedy bastards who keep grindin’ doon the poor Alistair Hulett, […]

  The St. Andrew’s Quoiting Club on Butterbiggins Road   From the late 1890s until about 1928, a small patch of ground just off Butterbiggins Road, near what we now call Eglinton Toll, was used to play one of the oldest games in the world – quoits – and was home to one of Glasgow’s […]

  If you’ve ever been to Pollok House and stood on the old bridge across the White Cart River you might be forgiven for believing that the view you see is timeless. On one side sits the stately mansion, high on its mound surrounded by rich foliage; on the other side, empty fields with an […]

  Local folk passing the unloved and empty Poundworld shopfront on Kilmarnock Rd may not know of its colourful past and the contribution it made to the Scottish music scene in the 1970s and 1980s.     Some key and influential names in Scottish, UK and global rock and pop plied their musical skills and […]

  This is a place founded on being ‘on the outside’—sited just beyond the original city limits, the Gorbals built its formidable reputation on the ability to accommodate migrants from around the world, give them a start, and then watch them leave to make way for the next arrivals. A tight community that paradoxically eulogises […]

  Places have their own private and public life and can feel haunted in multiple ways: some because they’ve changed but remain familiar; others because they spark vivid personal memories difficult to express in words, embodying fragments of times past that we can’t – for better or for worse – return to.   They help […]