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About Glasgow
Glasgow's earliest history, like so much else in this surprisingly romantic city, is obscured in a swirl of myth. The city's name is said to derive from the Celtic Glas-cu , which loosely translates as "the dear, green place" - a tag that the tourist board are keen to exploit as an antidote to the sooty images of popular imagination. It is generally agreed that the first settlers arrived in the sixth century to join Christian missionary Kentigern - later to become St Mungo - in his newly founded monastery on the banks of the tiny Molendinar Burn.
William the Lionheart gave the town an official charter in 1175, after which it continued to grow in importance, peaking in the mid-fifteenth century when the university was founded on Kentigern's site - the second in Scotland after St Andrews. This led to the establishment of an archbishopric, and hence city status, in 1492, and, due to its situation on a large, navigable river, Glasgow soon expanded into a major industrial port . The first cargo of tobacco from Virginia offloaded in Glasgow in 1674, and led to a boom in trade with the colonies until American independence. Following the Industrial Revolution and James Watt's innovations in steam power, coal from the abundant seams of Lanarkshire fuelled the ironworks all around the Clyde, worked by the cheap hands of the Highlanders and, later, those fleeing the Irish potato famine of the 1840s.
The Victorian age transformed Glasgow beyond recognition. The population boomed from 77,000 in 1801 to nearly 800,000 at the end of the century, and new tenement blocks swept into the suburbs in an attempt to cope with the choking influxes of people. At this time Glasgow became known as the "Second City of the Empire" - a curious epithet for a place that today rarely acknowledges second place in anything.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Glasgow's industries had been honed into one massive shipbuilding culture. Everything from tugboats to transatlantic liners were fashioned out of sheet metal in the yards that straddled the Clyde. In the harsh economic climate of the 1930s, however, unemployment spiralled, and Glasgow could do little to counter its popular image as a city dominated by inebriate violence and - having absorbed vast numbers of Irish emigrants - sectarian tensions.
Shipbuilding, and many associated industries, died away almost completely in the 1960s and 1970s, leaving the city depressed, jobless and directionless. Then, in the 1980s, the self-promotion campaign began, snowballing towards the 1988 Garden Festival and year-long party as European City of Culture in 1990. More recently, Glasgow was UK City of Architecture and Design in 1999, an event which strove valiantly to showcase the city's rich architectural heritage.
Glasgow's large City Centre is ranged across the north bank of the River Clyde. At its geographical heart is George Square , a nineteenth-century municipal showpiece crowned by the enormous City Chambers at its eastern end. Behind this lies one of the greatest marketing successes of the 1980s, the Merchant City , an area which blends magnificent Victorian architecture with yuppie conversions. The grand buildings and trendy cafés cling to the borders of the run-down East End , a strongly working-class district that chooses to ignore its rather showy neighbour. The oldest part of Glasgow, around the Cathedral , lies immediately north of the East End.
Called by poet John Betjeman "the greatest Victorian city in the world", Glasgow's commercial core spreads west of George Square, and is mostly built on a large grid system - possibly inspired by Edinburgh's New Town - with ruler-straight roads soon rising up severe hills to grand, sandblasted buildings. The same style was copied by many North American cities, and indeed parts of Glasgow have been pressed into service as nineteenth-century New York in films such as House of Mirth . The main shopping areas here are Argyle Street , running parallel to the river, and Buchanan Street , which links Argyle Street to the pedestrianized shopping thoroughfare, Sauchiehall Street . Just to the northwest of here is Charles Rennie Mackintosh's famous Glasgow School of Art .
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