The old and Thenew: St Enoch’s Square

Come with me on a walking tour of St Enoch Square in 1853, courtesy of George McCulloch’s View of Glasgow.

Extract from McCulloch’s lithograph View of Glasgow in 1853 [Mitchell Library].

McCulloch captured this part of town at an interesting moment. Much of the street plan is recognisable today, though only a few individual buildings survive. Meanwhile, there are details that look back to the origin of the Square seventy years earlier.

Extract from the OS 25-inch map of Glasgow (1857) [National Library of Scotland].

St Enoch Square started as a piece of “Town’s Property” at the western edge of the expanding city. It was edged by the already altered course of the St Enoch’s Burn, which formed the official boundary of Glasgow.

Extract from McArthur’s town plan of Glasgow (1773) [National Library of Scotland].

The area was traditionally associated with St Thenew, mother of St Kentigern. The ruins of her chapel were still visible in the early eighteenth century, and her well, now lost, lasted some decades longer.

It was customary to nail votive offerings to a tree that overhung the well. The custom seems to have survived the Reformation; when the well was cleaned out around 1800, some of these offerings were found at the bottom. (Our authority for that statement, by the way, is the pastry-cook and inventor Robert Hart, who also gave us the story of James Watt’s epiphany on Glasgow Green.)

In the 1780s, new ranges of buildings gave St Enoch Square its modern rectangular shape. Adam’s Court Lane, which mostly still exists, marks the old boundary of the Square and the line of the Burn.

Extract from Fleming’s town plan of Glasgow (1807) [National Library of Scotland].

The main feature of the Square was St Enoch’s Church, built 1780-82 and rebuilt, retaining the spire, in 1827. It was a classic project of prosperous late eighteenth-century Glasgow, investing its unscrupulously acquired wealth in elegant bricks and mortar.

Engraving of St Enoch Square in 1797 [The Glasgow Story].

By the 1850s the city had thoroughly swallowed the Square and its surroundings. McCulloch’s View shows a complex urban landscape of tenements, warehouses, shops, light industry and public buildings.

Let’s look for a few details…

On the east side of the Square is Surgeons Hall, the HQ of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. Founded in 1599, the Faculty was already two centuries old when it moved to the Square in 1791. In 1862 it would move to its current, even more upmarket premises on St Vincent Street.

McCulloch’s View, with Surgeons Hall marked.

From 1801 onwards, Surgeons Hall was the base for the smallpox vaccination campaign, a quietly heroic achievement that provided ten thousand free vaccinations, mostly to children, in the first five years.

The Post Office Directory gives us a picture of the other inhabitants of the Square: merchants and agents; printers; the National Hotel to the west of the entrance from Argyle Street, and the Scottish Temperance League to the south. In McCulloch’s View we can also catch a glimpse of traffic at the north end of the Square, suggesting that the cab rank predated the station.

The block to the east of the Square was trisected by two thin streets: St Enoch Lane, the original western boundary of the Square; and the older St Enoch’s Wynd.

McCulloch’s View, with arrows indicating the entrances to St Enoch’s Lane and St Enoch’s Wynd. Extract from the OS 25-inch town plan of Glasgow (1857), showing St Enoch’s Square, Lane, and Wynd [National Library of Scotland].

Beyond them is Maxwell Street, where “Dr” James Knox Stuart dispensed spurious remedies for everything from gonorrhea to cholera from his “Private Medical Establishment” (and later ventilated hat emporium) at number 39.

The like of Maxwell Street were causeways of relative respectability thrown across the Wynds, an ill-defined region with a reputation for villainy that made Mos Eisley look like Milngavie. (The area cleared for the station in 1876 was said to have contained 150 brothels and 190 shebeens.) Hugh MacIntosh speculated that a building of unknown date on St Enoch’s Lane might have been “a conventual or monastic institute” associated with St Thenew’s Church. It was an area, even by McCulloch’s day, that few reliable records bothered to describe.

At 11 St Enoch’s Wynd were the former premises of the Night Asylum for the Houseless and House of Industry for Indigent Females. Established in 1838, it was the city’s first homeless shelter. By 1847 it had already been replaced by a larger building in North Frederick Street.

The Night Asylum [The Glasgow Story].

Argyle Street was already a prospering thoroughfare, though almost all the big retail buildings we associate with it date from the 1870s or later. An exception is the Argyll Arcade (1827), already well established in its L shape between Buchanan Street and Argyle Street.

McCulloch’s View, with arrow indicating the Argyle Street entrance to the Arcade.

John Willox’s Glasgow Tourist and Itinerary (1850) described Argyle Street as “a vista of street architecture not to be surpassed in Scotland” and noted that the Arcade sold “bijoutery, millinery, stationery, fancy cutlery, and perfumery”, i.e. bling. Stay classy, Glasgow.

A couple of buildings to the west is another survivor, though not immediately recognisable.

In 1879, Kate Cranston would open a tea room at 114 Argyle Street, below a Temperance Hotel. In 1898, now the empress of Glasgow’s tea scene, she would return with big ideas.

McCulloch’s View, with arrow indicating Cranston House. Cranston House today [LoopNet].

The facade of the eighteenth-century tenement was completely remodelled, giving it its characteristic “Belgian” look. Inside was one of the famous Cranston interiors, designed by George Walton and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and the first to feature the classic Mackintosh chair.

McCulloch’s View, with arrow indicating the Arcade Café.

In Morrison’s Court behind it, the Arcade Café still survives, now under the name of its early C20th proprietor David Sloan.

Precious little else of the scene in McCulloch’s View survives. Everything to the east of the Square vanished in 1876 with the arrival of St Enoch Station and the magnificent Station Hotel.

Photograph by James Valentine of the St Enoch Station and Hotel in 1879 [Wikimedia Commons].

St Enoch’s Church was demolished in 1925. The station, in turn, was demolished in 1977 and replaced in 1986 by the shopping centre. Other buildings vanished one by one: some replaced by better, some by worse.

To the robot stare of Google Earth, this is what it looks like now.

Contemporary Google Earth view, approximately matching the perspective of McCulloch’s View.

As ever, the city forgets itself; remembers itself; jumbles memory and forgetting together into myth.

(And somewhere, perhaps, below the centuries of building and rebuilding, the well of St Thenew waits until the city, like all cities, ends.)

Main sources

As usual I’ve leaned heavily on NLS Maps and the Glasgow Post Office Directories. Hugh Macintosh’s speculations can be found in his Origin and History of Glasgow Streets (1902), and the story of the votive offerings is from Andrew Macgeorge’s Old Glasgow (1888). For tea rooms, I referred to Perilla Kinchin’s Tea and Taste: the Glasgow tea rooms 1875-1975 (1996). Corrections and additions, as always, welcome!

#argyllArcade #cranston #GeorgeMcCulloch #stEnoch #surgeonsHall

Let’s have a look at this patch of central Glasgow as drawn by George McCulloch in 1852. It’s not spectacular; there are only a handful of recognisable buildings; but it tells a few tales about the growth of Glasgow and the human lives — and deaths — that underpinned it.

Detail from George McCulloch’s View of Glasgow (1853). [Photo from the copy in the Mitchell Library.]

First, let’s orient ourselves. Hope Street runs diagonally across the map; near the centre is the junction with Gordon Street. Near the bottom is Argyle Street, and rising towards the top left is the ridge of Blythswood Hill.

Detail from Joseph Swan’s map of Glasgow (1854-5). [National Library of Scotland]

The empty plots in the middle lie between Bothwell Street and Waterloo Street. They would be the last part of central Glasgow’s grid to be completed, and to understand that we need to look at how the city spread.

By the early nineteenth century, Argyle Street was an urban tentacle running parallel to the Clyde, toward the village of Anderston. The space between it and the river, with easy access to the quays, was filling up with works and warehouses. To the north and west lay a feued but undeveloped region, belonging to the Campbell family and marked on the map as the Blythswood Building Ground.

Extract from Peter Fleming’s “reduced” map of Glasgow (1807). [National Library of Scotland.]

Development of the Blythswood lands had been projected by the entrepreneur William Harvey, who in 1802 had purchased the estate of Sauchy Hall and anglicised it to Willowbank. (The ubiquitous James Cleland also had property nearby.)

Detail from Fleming’s (1807) map showing Willowbank to the west and Baillie Cleland’s wee pad a little to the north of “Sauchyhall Road”. [National Library of Scotland.]

To the south was Grahamston: an odd enclave shaped by Alston Street and Union Place, defiantly squint — as it still is — to the Blythswood grid.

Left: Grahamston in Fleming’s map (1807) [National Library of Scotland]. Right: the same area in satellite view [Bing Maps].

Grahamston, just beyond the old city limits, was largely owned by John Alston, heir of the maltman John Miller who’d developed Miller Street. It was also the site, from 1764-80, of one of Glasgow’s earliest theatres.

Grahamston in James McArthur’s map of Glasgow (1778). [National Library of Scotland]

As Glasgow grew, the commercial zone edged northwards. On Alston Street lay Alexander Galloway’s brewery, and next to it Wilson, Strang & Co.’s sugar house. (The sugar house was built in 1809, a reminder that Glasgow’s involvement with enslaved labour didn’t end with the slave trade.)

James Lumsden’s map of Glasgow (1830). [National Library of Scotland.]

Meanwhile, the elegant townhouses of Blythswood were advancing downhill towards Grahamston. The awkward area between the residential and commercial districts saw a few changes of street plan before it was soldered together, and the grid still takes a wobble there.

Detail from McCulloch’s View, showing the awkward join at the end of Gordon Street.

McCulloch’s View also bears witness to Scotland’s national genius for inventing new flavours of Protestant. In sight are seventeen churches from nine denominations, all building keenly for the future, and offering over eighteen thousand seats between them.

Extract from McCulloch’s View with all seventeen churches marked.

A decade on from the Disruption there were five Free Churches to three Established. Others — United Presbyterian, Reformed Presbyterian, Original Secession, Episcopal — reflect earlier splits. Others still, like David Dale’s Old Scotch Independents, followed their own course.

Three of those seventeen churches were Gaelic-speaking, serving generations of new Glaswegians displaced from the Gàidhealtachd. The most prominent was St Columba’s, originally the Gaelic Chapel on Ingram Street, which in 1904 would be displaced again to St Vincent Street. Gàidhlig-language worship in the “Highland Cathedral” lasted until 2021. A few decades later, the stretch of Argyle Street to the east of Hope Street would become a less official gathering-place for Gaels: the Hielanman’s Umbrella.

Missing entirely from the scene is any Roman Catholic church, despite the city’s growing Irish population. (There were at this time eleven Catholic churches in the city and surrounding burghs. The Free Kirk had 37; the Established Church had 38.)

On the corner of Waterloo Street and Hope Street is the Corn Exchange, opened in the 1840s, and conveniently located near the great grain stores towards the wharves.

Detail from McCulloch’s View: the Corn Exchange and some of the grain stores.

There’s also evidence of the labour behind the ongoing building boom. There are about a dozen timber, slate and stone-yards: much of the land that looks empty on the maps was anything but.

Detail from the OS map of Glasgow (1857) with timber, slate and stone-yards shaded. [National Library of Scotland.] Detail from McCulloch’s View: timber yards on Waterloo Street and Cadogan Street. Detail from McCulloch’s View: the timber yard opposite St Columba’s on Hope Street.

With wealth being generated in the quays and factories and flowing uphill into Blythswood, raising churches and public buildings on the way, the city was a model of Victorian prosperity — the model Thomas Sulman would present a decade later.

Extract from Thomas Sulman’s Bird’s Eye View of Glasgow (1864), showing roughly the same area as our extract from McCulloch. [Glasgow City Heritage Trust.]

But.

Let’s turn our attention more closely to the blocks either side of Alston Street. In the 1870s everything in these blocks would disappear, replaced by the first phase of the Caledonian Railway’s Central Station.

Detail from McCulloch’s View showing the area surrounding Alston Street.

Much of the area is occupied by warehouses. The line of low buildings along Hope Street include a smithy, a reminder that it was not just human labour that kept the city running.

Behind St Columba’s Church is the windowless bulk of a gas holder, three or four storeys high and surrounded by highly inflammable grain and bonded warehouses. (Glasgow’s dire reputation for fire deaths was probably not helped by urban design like this.)

Dominating the block, with its tall chimney gushing smoke, is the Wilson sugar refinery, a legacy of the original industries of Grahamston that we’ve seen already. It was not, though, the original building, and the fate of its predecessor opens a grim but informative window into the age.

At about 7am on October 30, 1848, the sugar house on Alston Street suddenly collapsed. It took more than a week to clear the rubble and recover the bodies of the fourteen workers who had died, either crushed by debris or scalded to death by molten sugar.

Many of the victims were Irish. They ranged from middle-aged men with families who had been in Scotland for decades to Andrew Broadley, a lad of twenty who was sending money home each week to support his widowed mother in Tyrone.

Many of the victims’ dependents were left destitute. We know this because the Chief Superintendent of Police was sent to investigate their circumstances, to make sure charity went to those who deserved it. His appraisals — “dissipated habits”; “well spoken of” — appeared in the newspapers while they were still grieving.

Article from the Glasgow Chronicle (8 November 1848) describing the victims.

Even before the last body had been recovered, rumours started. The building had been repaired a few years earlier; there were hints that corners had been cut. The authorities found, and tersely reported, that there were no grounds for prosecution.

Nevertheless, the Dean of Guild’s Court – the equivalent of the Planning Committee – embarked on a programme of inspection, ordering the demolition of other dangerous buildings across the city. Many of the buildings they targeted were in the slum areas where the immigrant workers lived, and it seems that “being full of Irish people” was considered to be a risk factor. It’s the story of economic migrants through the ages: the young men come first; they do the dangerous, badly paid jobs; they send money home to their families; and everybody blames them for everything.

In total, the appeal for the victims’ families raised around £400. (For comparison, the cost to property was estimated at £15000.) The refinery, as we’ve seen, was soon rebuilt.

I came across the story of the Alston Street disaster by accident; it’s mentioned in passing in a few books. I don’t doubt that there are other disasters less well known. Cities rise on wealth; and wealth, too often, rises because we place too low a price on human lives.

Detail from George McCulloch’s View of Glasgow (1853). [Photo from the copy in the Mitchell Library.]

The last thing to notice in McCulloch’s picture: the thousands upon thousands of dotted windows.

Imagine the folk behind them. The natives, the immigrants; the workers, the wealthy; the citizens by whom, or for whom, this city rose.

What price on them?

Main sources

My access to McCulloch’s View was granted by the Mitchell Library. I’ve made heavy use, as ever, of the Post Office Directories and maps digitised by the National Library of Scotland, and of newspapers supplied by the British Newspaper Archive. Fhuair mi eachdraidh nan Gàidheal bho glaschu.net.

I’ve also used assorted information from Senex’s Glasgow Past and Present (vol. 1). After the Alston Street disaster, the Glasgow Herald ran a series of columns following the work of the Dean of Guild Court and commenting on the old buildings they were examining. These columns were written by Robert Reid, aka Senex, and when compiled as Glasgow Past and Present they became the basis for practically everything that’s since been written about Glasgow built heritage. If it weren’t for that atrocious industrial accident, you might not be reading this now.

https://newcleckitdominie.wordpress.com/2023/12/28/danger-city-under-construction/

#alstonStreet #blythswood #centralStation #gaelic #GeorgeMcCulloch #grahamston #history #stColumbaS #sugarRefinery

[This is extracted, and in places expanded, from an online talk I gave to Glasgow City Heritage Trust on 28 June 2023. For a brief guided tour of the View, see the video; versions will appear on the blog in due course.]

George McCulloch’s View of Glasgow is one of the most fascinating documents of mid-nineteenth-century Glasgow, but it is much less well-known than Thomas Sulman’s celebrated print from a decade later. It’s the key to a number of stories, some of which I’ll write up here eventually: in this post I want to set out the background and try to give the artist some of the recognition he deserves.

When you picked up your copy of the Glasgow Herald on 20 December 1852 you’d have seen this advert. It was placed by the publisher and printseller Morison Kyle, and it advertised “An Elaborate Bird’s Eye-View of Glasgow”, drawn by a young local artist, George McCulloch, and printed by the high-end London firm of Day & Son.

Kyle was a canny publicist, who would later become known as a music publisher and promoter — in the 1860s he would take out adverts condemning the Council when they refused to licence his opera shows in the City Halls — and in advertising the View he played heavily on civic pride. He arranged for the two Glasgow MPs to have a sneak preview of the work, and duly recorded their supportive comments, and he ensured that various Glasgow newspapers also published advance reviews.

The print went on sale on 1 January 1853, at 30/- for a proof and 21/- for a print. (There seems to have been no difference between them except that the proofs, clearly labelled as such, were a limited run of 250.) It’s not clear how many were produced, but I’m aware of seven surviving copies: four held by Glasgow Museums, one in the Mitchell Library, one in the Hunterian, and one in private ownership. There is also a high-resolution scan held by the University of Strathclyde Archives, which they might share with you if you ask them nicely.

George McCulloch, “View of the City of Glasgow in 1853”. [Photo taken by permission of the Mitchell Library]

This is the copy held by the Mitchell. The photo doesn’t really do it justice. It’s “double elephant” size, which means about 40 by 30 inches; it’s a bit battered; at some point some eejit has glued it to a bit of cardboard and torn it; but it’s still wonderful — especially when you zoom in.

To get our bearings: the viewpoint is somewhere above Tradeston, looking roughly north-east across the city centre. It’s an angle that emphasises the city’s industrial muscle, with the foundries of Lancefield and Anderston Quays in the foreground, steam and sail jostling on the Clyde, and the great chimney at St Rollox punching into the horizon. There’s a characteristic south-west wind catching the smoke from innumerable stacks, and an equally characteristic mixture of sun and cloud which allowed McCulloch to drape shadow over unappealing areas like Rottenrow.

To consider how the View came to be made, it’s helpful to zoom in on one small portion of the city, and to appreciate the fine detail with which it’s crammed.

Detail of Port Dundas from McCulloch’s “View”. [Photo taken by permission of the Mitchell Library.]

Let’s choose Cowcaddens and Port Dundas, towards the top left of the View, because this was George McCulloch’s stamping ground. At the top, the Forth & Clyde Canal winds past Speirs Wharf, where the new Grain Mills (built in 1851 and still extant) are prominent. At the foot of the slope is another survivor, the Normal Seminary on New City Road; and not far away is its rival, the Free Church Normal Seminary on Cowcaddens Street.

The Caledonian Railway’s goods station is prominent to the right, roughly corresponding to the modern site of Glasgow Caledonian University. Along the line of the canal are various industrial sites, including the cones of the Glasgow Glass Works, and the wharf itself is crowded with masts.

Cowcaddens and Port Dundas on the OS six-inch map of 1864 (surveyed 1857). [National Library of Scotland]

This is the heart of one of Glasgow’s early industrial zones, built as an inland port on a spur from the “Great Canal” and which realised its potential when the Cut of Junction linked it to the Monkland Canal and hence the coalfields of North Lanarkshire. A few years later it would become home to Townsend’s Stalk, Glasgow’s tallest chimney and one of the world’s tallest free-standing structures; at the time of the View, Charles Tennant’s stalk at St Rollox was still unrivalled.

George McCulloch’s father, also George McCulloch, was a confectioner with a shop on Cowcaddens Street. At the time of the 1841 census he was living on Garscube Road with his wife Janet, their daughter Agnes, and sons George, James, and Robert. It was not an upmarket district; the Glasgow Tourist and Itinerary of 1850 described Cowcaddens Street as “a tortuous and squalid line”.

George junior was 14 at the time, and an apprentice lithographer. Lithography was a relatively new technology, invented in Germany in the 1790s, and it was having its boom period: from about the 1840s to the 1860s it dominated the printing of illustrations, technical diagrams, and maps. However, in January 1844, aged sixteen or seventeen, George also applied for and got permission to copy pictures in the Hunterian Museum. It’s a suggestive detail, which indicates that he already saw himself an aspiring artist rather than just a trainee printer.

George senior seems to have died about 1849; by 1851, George – now a lithographic draughtsman – and Robert (a seal engraver) were staying in a tenement at 32 Maitland Street. It’s not clear where George was working; the Post Office directory lists about forty lithographic printers in Glasgow, many clustered on Argyle Street. (One of George’s near-contemporaries, a couple of years younger, was working as a lithographer for Joseph Swan’s firm; his name was Thomas Annan, and a few years later he would set up in business as a photographer.)

Think about Glasgow as George, born about 1827, would have seen it. His was the first generation for whom it had always been a big industrial city, always growing, always expanding westward. He’d have walked through this cityscape every day to work, and across town to the Hunterian with his sketching kit, watching the place shuddering and spreading before his eyes.

The adverts don’t explain how McCulloch created the View. In a standard trope, the Glasgow Herald compared it to a balloon view, and imagined “many a chill and lonely vigil on attic windows and chimney tops”. Despite this flight of fancy it is fairly certain that no balloons were involved, or Kyle would have made a selling point of it: balloons were good publicity. Whether McCulloch did find his way up chimneys and into attics is harder to answer: he would certainly have had access to vistas of rooftops from vantage points such as the steps up to Speirs Wharf, and would surely have taken the opportunity for a few studies, but this can’t have given him all the raw material he needed.

It seems likely that McCulloch constructed his View in a fairly well-established manner. You start with a base map, and you use standard perspective techniques to project the plan as seen from the required viewpoint. You then wear out a lot of shoe leather walking the streets taking notes and sketches, and you use these to raise the elevations of the buildings along each street. It’s effectively how Google Earth constructs its simulated reality from map data and photos, but a lot slower; I’d guess there were months of work involved, and possibly weeks down in London where Kyle sent McCulloch to get the lithograph made.

Allan & Ferguson’s “Plan of Glasgow” (1847). [National Library of Scotland]

One remaining puzzle is what base map McCulloch used. The first detailed Ordnance Survey map of Glasgow wasn’t made until the mid-1850s, so he was probably working with something like Allan & Ferguson’s plan from 1847, which gives the street layout but doesn’t get down to individual buildings. All that detail must have come from observations, and it is extremely hard to catch McCulloch out about any of it.

Morison Kyle apparently made a profit on the View, because he now had McCulloch produce a follow-up: a tinted lithograph of the Cathedral. This wasn’t a random choice: the north-east tower of the Cathedral had been demolished in 1848, so there was a gap in the market for a souvenir showing it as it now appeared.

[Probably:] George McCulloch, “Glasgow Cathedral”, 1853. [The Glasgow Story]

I can’t find a copy anywhere that’s attributed to McCulloch, but Glasgow Museums hold a tinted lithograph of the Cathedral. It’s dated “c. 1830” but must be after 1848 because the tower has already gone. In the absence of other evidence, it seems likely that this is George McCulloch’s second published work.

After the Cathedral Kyle wanted more, but the law of diminishing returns was kicking in. The next effort, in 1854, was an imaginary portrait of Robert Burns — and that seems to have sunk without trace.

At this point, George McCulloch and his younger brother Robert moved to London. It was a natural move for an ambitious young artist, and George had evidently made connections during his earlier stay: he found a job with Day & Son, the printers of the View.

“The Volunteer”, lithographed by George McCulloch from a painting by J. Absolon, and published by Day & Son, 1860.

Unfortunately, the jobs that were available were basically hack work, and within a few years McCulloch was producing patriotic Victorian kitsch like the whiskery chap shown here with his porcelain girlfriend. By now, lithography was falling out of fashion, and coloured “chromolithographs” in particular were getting a justifiably poor reputation.

For the next thirty years, George McCulloch struggled by as a not very successful artist, lodging for most of that time in Bloomsbury. He married Martha Morgan Guttridge in 1872, and by the 1890s they were sharing a house in Hampstead with George’s nephew Douglas, her widowed sister Elizabeth, a young colleague of Douglas’s called Thomas Ellis, and a servant called Kate Ellis who may have been Thomas’s sister: a small but sprawling extended family subsisting on a patchwork of small incomes. George apparently earned a living with commercial jobs, and exhibited more serious work when he got the chance — in particular in the Dudley Gallery’s “black-and-white” exhibitions in the 1870s. He enjoyed occasional nice reviews, and seems to have been known by a handful of people who took lithographs seriously, but he never quite broke through.

William Merritt Chase, “James Abbott McNeill Whistler”, 1885. [Wikimedia Commons]

Then, towards the end of his life, George McCulloch had a brief flicker of fame. In 1897 he gave a talk about the artistic value of lithography to the Society of Arts. In the audience was one James McNeill Whistler: painter, lithographer, and notoriously the only person in London to best Oscar Wilde in conversation. Whistler was the first of the audience to respond, and there must have been an anxious moment for the speaker; but Whistler simply announced that McCulloch’s talk was so good that he had nothing to add.

That was more than just a welcome ego-boost, because McCulloch needed a powerful friend. He had recently been commissioned to make a mezzotint of somebody else’s portrait of a bishop. It turned out that Victorian London was not under-supplied with mezzotints of bishops, and when the print didn’t sell the dealer tried to claw back costs by saying it was substandard work and refusing to pay the £31 (about £4000 in modern terms) he owed McCulloch.

When the case came to court Whistler himself was in Paris, but he wrote in support and his friend and biographer Joseph Pennell turned up as an expert witness on McCulloch’s side. Pennell was an unpleasant piece of work, but he was also the expert on lithography. He went through the dealer and his “h’artist” like a dodgy curry, and McCulloch got his money plus costs.

So for a couple of years, finally, McCulloch was earning a touch of respect from some serious artists. It was about this time that he published his most widely circulated print, The Dreamers.

George McCulloch, “The Dreamers”. The Studio, 1898.

The Dreamers appeared in the journal The Studio, where Whistler also published. It’s perhaps not remarkable, especially compared with the spectacular View that had launched his career; but finally, more than fifty years after the teenage McCulloch had gone to copy paintings in the Hunterian, he was working in the great tradition of Western art and making pictures of lassies with nae clothes on.

He died three years later, but at least he got his moment in the sun.

To wrap up, let’s briefly consider the tradition of which McCulloch’s View is part.

Bird’s-eye views became common in Europe from about the sixteenth century, following the explosion of interest in systematic perspective. This was a strongly geometrical approach to art; by the late eighteenth century perspective was even being taught as a distinct quasi-mathematical discipline. The rise of ballooning also boosted interest in ways of showing landscapes, especially cities, from an aerial viewpoint, and it was also the time that panoramas — basically IMAX-style perspective paintings — developed.

John Bachmann sr, “New York and Brooklyn”, 1851. [Library of Congress]

As American cities expanded in the first half of the nineteenth century, bird’s-eye views appeared, both charting their progress and advertising them to potential incomers and investors. One of the most striking is Bachmann’s view of New York and Brooklyn in 1851, with its gleefully busy river in the foreground; I suspect that McCulloch took his cue from this or something similar.

“A Balloon View of London”, published by Banks & Co, 1851.

The most famous bird’s-eye view from Britain in that period was the “Balloon View” produced for visitors to the Great Exhibition in 1851. It was a combination guide and souvenir, with street names marked; the perspective was not entirely systematic, but it gave the sense of immense detail that is much of the appeal of these views. Given the timing, it is plausibly what suggested the Glasgow View to Morison Kyle.

Thomas Sulman, “Bird’s Eye View of Glasgow”. Illustrated London News, 26 March 1864.

After McCulloch, of course, came Thomas Sulman’s view for the Illustrated London News in 1864. It’s a wonderful thing, but it also makes a strong contrast with McCulloch. It’s particularly noticeable how much Sulman widens the streets, and he takes an angle that makes the layout much more maplike; the overall effect is more like the 1851 London view than like McCulloch. (In fact, Sulman doesn’t really use a single viewpoint, as Will Knight’s work on a modern update illustrates.)

The other striking feature is how much more respectable Sulman’s Glasgow looks. There’s less smoke – even though Townsend’s Stalk is now breaking the skyline of Port Dundas and out-topping Tennant’s – and because of the angle you see much more of the Green and the West End. Compared to McCulloch it’s all just slightly middle-class.

H. W. Brewer, “Glasgow from the Necropolis”.The Graphic, 12 May 1888.

Bird’s-eye views faded out of fashion again towards the end of the century, but one interesting example deserves a mention. It’s part of a series made by H. W. Brewer for the Graphic magazine to coincide with the International Exhibition in 1888. Supposedly it’s a view from the Necropolis, but in fact Brewer plays with the perspective a lot, especially over to the left. It’s very much a composite, and there’s at least one church in the wrong place; I think at some point Brewer mucked up his base map, and presumably never popped back up the Necropolis to check.

H. W. Brewer, “Some English architecture of the last fifty years”. The Builder, 7 January 1893.

Another of Brewer’s works gives the technical game away. Published in The Builder, it’s an entirely imaginary cityscape representing “Some English architecture of the last fifty years”. The technique that McCulloch used to give us such a vivid and realistic picture could be used equally well to create a city that had never existed.

That makes a bridge to a famous twentieth-century bird’s-eye view.

The “inner core of the city” from the Bruce Report (1945). [The Glasgow Story]

This is the vision of future Glasgow from the Bruce Report in 1945. Like McCulloch, it’s an oblique aerial view north-east across the city centre. The viewpoint is higher than McCulloch’s, but there’s at least a distant family resemblance.

And of course the Bruce view is pure fantasy. McCulloch had taken a detailed street-level knowledge of the city and projected it into an imaginary perspective. The artist for the Bruce Report did the opposite: he takes an almost mathematical image of the perfect city, which would then be projected down to street level, flattening the existing landscape as it went. Mid-century planners, as James C. Scott points out in Seeing Like a State, loved these bird’s-eye views, because they made the mess of the city legible and then let you project that legible model back onto reality. It adds a slight question-mark to how we see McCulloch’s and Sulman’s works: magnificent in themselves and as documents of the city, but also a step towards the M8 and the high-rise schemes.

George McCulloch, “View of the City of Glasgow in 1853”. [Photo taken by permission of the Mitchell Library]

But let’s end on McCulloch’s View. Think of it as the sum of all those vivid details, all those “chill and lonely vigils”, spent not up a chimney somewhere, but tramping the streets in the cold and rain and endlessly sketching, endlessly absorbing the city.

And honour him by always zooming in.

Main sources

I’ve reconstructed McCulloch’s life largely from census returns and other official records, including his death certificate.

The scattered information about McCulloch’s London career comes from occasional newspaper reviews and passing references in texts such as Pennell’s Lithography and Lithographers (1915), though some of these seem doubtfully accurate. (A hazard of trying to trace our George McCulloch is that among the other contemporary Georges McCulloch of Glasgow was one who went to Australia and became a mining magnate and art collector, corresponding at one point with Whistler.)

McCulloch’s encounter with Whistler is recorded in a handful of letters held by the University of Glasgow and digitised as part of the Whistler Correspondence Project. I’m grateful to the University of Glasgow Archives for access to these, and the letter that gave the young McCulloch permission to use the Hunterian.

Most other sources are linked and/or credited in the text.

Finally, I’m indebted to a fellow collector of Glaswegiana, who would like to remain anonymous, for putting me on the trail of the View and sharing his other discoveries, to the Mitchell Library for giving me access to their battered but beautiful copy, and to Glasgow City Heritage Trust for letting me speak about it to an initially willing audience.

https://newcleckitdominie.wordpress.com/2023/11/16/many-a-chill-and-lonely-vigil-george-mccullochs-view-of-glasgow-in-1853/

#birdSEyeView #GeorgeMcCulloch #lithograph