Glasgow, Volume II: 1830-1912

The Glasgow of today, with its opulent City Chambers and sandstone tenements, was at least in part the creation of the Victorians and Edwardians. The second volume of this three-part history of a great city covers the years 183O-l9l2, when in many respects Glasgow was at its apogee. A central theme of this book is the unprecedented economic growth of Glasgow, and the social problems which followed it. The contributors cover the building of the Victorian city and its industrial and commercial development; Glasgow's population explosion, and the City authorities' response to the disease and tenement slums which it brought; the development of the middle and working classes, their political mobilization and civic government; and the Victorian "Glasgow of the imagination", the city whose architecture receives so much praise today. Throughout, the book introduces the personalities who made the city a place of world stature and a lynchpin of the British empire.