WestFest

Veteran festival and events director Michael Dale, who founded the West End Festival in 1996, reviews his experiences of being the boss not just of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in the 1980s but also the very successful Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988 and many more besides. Michael left WEF in 2021 to take on other […]

Websters Theatre, formerly Lansdowne Parish Church, is home to stained glass windows by highly acclaimed Glasgow designer Alf Webster. David Robertson, Director of Four Acres Charitable Trust describes this wonderful stained glass, and the massive glass conservation project which the public will be able to visit and observe. Along with the public realm upgrade at […]

Rowena Statt, local resident and architect, presents old maps and archive images to explain the Victorian evolution of North Kelvinside, when speculative building rapidly consumed the R. Kelvin's beautiful wooded north bank. The tenements, terraces and villas remain, still in demand today, as are churches, shops, schools, bridges and even an industrial relic, the North […]

Michael Meighan, author and historian, remembers riding a trolleybus or tram to visit relatives and taking a steam train and paddle steamer ‘doon the water’ to Dunoon. Since then, trams and trolleybuses have given way to modern buses, the electric ‘Blue Train’ and the diesels arrived, and paddle steamers, ferries, ships and shipyards disappeared from […]

Glasgow’s West End is renowned for its glorious Victorian townscape, but there's also a rich legacy from its earlier history. In this talk, historian Gordon R. Urquhart will examine the settlement of the city’s western hinterlands, from the Neolithic period, through the Viking hogback tombs in Govan, to the era of the grand Georgian country […]

Will Jess and Lucy Janes of Arlington Baths History Group will bring to life this Grade 'A' listed Victorian bathing complex designed by John Burnet and other eminent architects. Owned and run by members, the club is the oldest of its kind in the world, and successfully maintains its 154-year old tradition of a relaxed […]

Little is known about the manual workers who constructed major Victorian buildings, but Joseph Sharples of the Hunterian, University of Glasgow, has researched in detail the lives of about 100 of the 900 masons, joiners, bricklayers, etc., who built the University between 1867 and 1871, under contractor John Thompson of Peterborough. Their recruitment, experiences before […]

After WW2, Glasgow's infamous 'Bruce Plan' proposed motorways encircling a completely remodelled futuristic city centre. So many key assets were demolished for modernisation that by 1964 our Victorian heritage was in mortal danger. This was part of a national problem, and Westminster passed the protective Civic Amenities Act in 1967. Glasgow quickly designated its first […]