PARTICK (p. [363]).
Returning to the lower end of what was once the main thoroughfare of the Glasgow of old, the Briggait—once a busy centre of the city’s commerce—led to the riverside and what was long the sole bridge connecting the north and south banks of the Clyde. Stockwell Street also gave access to it from the Trongait. Only in the early ’fifties was the ancient stone structure, which had stood for five centuries and which figures prominently in old views of Glasgow from the Clyde, replaced by the present Victoria Bridge. Nine other bridges, including two suspension bridges for foot-passengers and three great railway viaducts, now span the stream within the city bounds. All of them have sprung up within the last fifty years; and the traffic between bank and bank has required, besides, the burrowing under the river-bed of subways and underground lines, and the connection of bank and bank by steam and other ferries. Chief among these bridges, as channels of commerce and intercourse—what London Bridge is to the Metropolis—is the “roaring lane” of the Jamaica Street Bridge. The fine structure immediately below it, which carries the Caledonian line across from the Bridge Street to the Central Station, marks the limits of navigation for all but the smaller kind of river-craft; for here Clyde may be said to merge into Glasgow Harbour, and a new and almost last chapter in its career opens at the Broomielaw.
PAISLEY (p. [366]).
There was a time when Rutherglen reckoned itself a seaport, and when fishermen drew shoals of salmon from the clear-flowing Clyde, and spread their nets on Glasgow Green. Such sights have long ceased to be witnessed; and the Camlachie Burn no longer wimples in the face of day between alder-covered banks through the flat riverside meadow to join the Molendinar and the Clyde. But “the Green” remains the most famous and most prized of the city’s open spaces: it is the central “lung” of Glasgow. If not in fashionable surroundings, in its function as a safety valve for popular enthusiasm and excitement it is the Hyde Park of the Second City of the Empire. In it great political and religious gatherings have been and still are held; here do the East-enders throng and bask in holiday time, and here have been seen also riot and rejoicing, and events of note in the history of the municipality, the kingdom, and even of the world. To mention the greatest of all, did not the epoch-making idea of the steam-engine flash through the brain of James Watt as he took a Sunday ramble, thoughtful and solitary, on the Green, near the Humane Society’s quarters, where afterwards Lambert, “hero and martyr,” achieved his wonderful rescues from drowning? Did not the Regent Moray’s army here cross the Clyde to intercept and disperse Mary Stuart’s adherents at Langside? And did not Prince Charlie—an unwelcome guest in Whiggish Glasgow—review his Highlanders in the Flesher’s Haugh?
At the time of the Pretender’s visit, the era of Glasgow’s commercial prosperity—the reign of the “tobacco dons” and the “sugar dons,” who preceded the “cotton lords” and the present reigning dynasty of the “iron kings”—was only opening. The current of the city’s business life had already begun to turn aside from the channel of the High Street, in order to run parallel with the river, along the line of the Trongait and Argyll Street, to absorb little suburban villages, to overflow the neighbouring fields, and by-and-by to swallow up, one by one, the mansions of its merchant princes. But when the present century opened, the town could boast of only some 80,000 inhabitants. The Saracen’s Head in the Gallowgate was still the chief place of entertainment; there Dr. Johnson housed on his return from his Hebridean tour, and Burns was also among its guests. Queen Street a hundred years ago had not so long ceased to be the Cow Loan through which the citizens drove out their cows to pasture; and George Square, when the century was young, was a retired park, with trees and turf and shrubberies, surrounded by the private dwellings of a few city magnates.