Like a weight perpetually anchored around our shoulders, reality and our daily battles have taught us to forever look down, toward our phones, to our feet, to the path laid out directly in front of us.
Words and Images: Gregg James Kelly
Living in the West End of Glasgow, from the perspective of someone who is a relatively new resident, it’s important never to forget that the area’s beauty, carved around the totemic River Kelvin, should forever encourage us to look upwards, and remember what a privilege it is to live in a location unlike any other in Scotland.
The Sixty Steps
Across Great Western Road, beyond the new Queen Margaret Bridge, and down Queen Margaret Road rises one of famed architect Alexander ‘Greek’ Thompson’s final bursts of stunning creativity, The Sixty Steps, a historic, category B-listed pedestrian staircase.
Alongside the iconic steps sit the remains of the original Queen Margaret Bridge, known locally as Walker’s Bridge. Built in 1870, it was designed to assist in the development of the aspirational North Kelvinside neighbourhood, the origins of which can be traced to the 1860s.
Botanic Gardens
An immeasurable number of articles exist about Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, and rightly so, it’s a Scottish wonder of the world. Despite being founded in 1817, it would only move to its current Kelvinside residence 22 years later. This was due to the rapid expansion of the city and a speedily amassed 12,000-specimen botany collection.
Millions of locals and tourists will have regularly and casually walked between the ornate gates of the Botanic Gardens. Erected in 1894 by Glasgow architect A. B.McDonald, the wrought-iron gates and twin mock-Tudor sandstone gatehouses are category B listed buildings.
McDonald famously designed the People’s Palace in Glasgow Green in 1893. He also designed the Prince of Wales Bridge in Kelvingrove Park the following year.
Grosvenor Terrace
Before reaching Byres Road, take a quick detour up the stairs toward Grosvenor Terrace, designed and completed in 1858 by prominent architect John Thomas Rochead, considered at the time the finest range of buildings in the UK. A short path leads toward Belhaven Terrace and its priceless Victorian properties, the entire street recognised as a category A listed site.
Observatory Road
Further along Byres Road, Observatory Road takes its name from the route that once led to the University of Glasgow’s astronomical observatory in Horslethill. The Macfarlane Observatory’s origins, however, began at High Street. After Victorian-era pollution began to compromise its night sky views? A move to the West End.
By 1937, growing light pollution forced another move, this time to the University of Glasgow gardens. In its place, Notre Dame High School, where it remains to this day.
The Japonisme Movement
Look down the surrounding streets of Finnieston, Byres Road and Great Western Road. Peer a little higher and the abundant blossom trees rise up, their petals raining down upon the iconic streets in season.
The historical significance of those blossom trees run deeper than the West End or Glasgow alone. In the late 19th century, hundreds of Glaswegian engineers travelled to Japan to support the country’s developing infrastructure. They returned home carrying a fascination with Japanese culture. With them came the blossom tree.Its seasonal bloom is now one of the most quietly-memorable features of the West End streetscape.
That cultural exchange would shape far more than the city’s gardens. The career of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, arguably Glasgow’s most famous architect, was inspired, defined and sculpted by the Japonisme movement that swept through Glasgow during the same era.
His Mackintosh House, a centrepiece of the already mesmerising University of Glasgow grounds, which includes Sir George Gilbert Scott’s 1870 Cloisters, reflects that Japanese-inspired minimalism: natural light, simplistic design, blackened furniture. A striking reversal of the oversaturated Victorian aesthetic that was common at the time.
Great Western Road
On Great Western Road, it would be easy to walk past the commanding French Renaissance facade and clock tower of Coopers without a second thought. The building was erected in 1886, designed by Glasgow architect Robert Duncan for the modern thinking grocery chain Cooper & Co. The unmissable clocktower still watches over Great Western Road, as it has done for the last near 140 years.
Down on the riverbank, tucked beneath GWR, lies one of the West End’s most atmospheric and popular venues, it was originally commissioned by the Caledonian Railway Company, and intended as a vital connection to the Grand Central Hotel.
The arches that now house Inn Deep once served Kelvinbridge Railway Station, opening in August 1896 as the mainline gateway for visitors to the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition, it would eventually close to passengers 56 years later in 1952. Few pubs can claim to sit inside a more quietly remarkable piece of Glasgow’s history.
Historic Churches
Within the radius of the West End, a notable number of historically well-maintained churches punctuate the skyline. There’s the 160-year-old Lansdowne Church on Great Western Road, now the official home of Glasgow comedy institution The Stand, and Saltoun Street’s Gothic Kelvinside Hillhead Parish Church, historically inspired by Paris’ Sainte-Chapelle.
Stewart Memorial Fountain
It’s impossible within one article to fully expand on the West End’s history. Within Kelvingrove Park alone, 22 significant statues and bronze figures each reveal a fragment of the area’s past, among them the unmissable Stewart Memorial Fountain, built to celebrate the Loch Katrine Act of 1855, which transformed the health of an entire city.
The University of Glasgow
The West End of Glasgow feels like a location without comparison. Once accessible only to the uppermost tier of Edwardian and Victorian society, it forever evolves to support the dreams of those who dare reach beyond the boundaries they were handed.
Rising above it all, as a beacon of education and architectural transcendence, is the University of Glasgow. Founded in 1451, the fourth oldest university in the English-speaking world, it towers above the West End in the night sky, watching over it.
Time spent walking amongst its ancient buildings delivers a weighty, palpable sense of history that is difficult to articulate, impossible to forget but is easily felt deep within your bones.
Look Up
A simple walk between the famous streets and back lanes creates an intriguing emotional connection to the area’s heritage. Cobbled stones and communal back gardens evoke the second city of the empire’s lofty ambitions, and with them a bridge to a Glasgow that now exists only in manuscripts and romanticised poems written decades past.
A surreal, almost fantastical place to live. Almost all of the elegant traditional lampposts that guide the way home are considered protected historical street furniture, falling within the Glasgow West Conservation Area, the removal of one such fixture in 2023 caused a genuine public outcry.
Always in flux and consistently developing, there are very few locations that have managed to find a synergetic balance between honouring the traditional significance of the past and embracing the progressive nature of time.
Whenever you find yourself weighed down by the gravity of reality, or are finding the day a particular battle, don’t forget to look up, and in doing so, experience a sense of living history, one that’s evolving with you at the heart of its future.
