History
Glasgow has long been famed for shipbuilding and trade due to the city being positioned on the River Clyde. Much of the trade took place in the nearby towns of Greenock and Port Glasgow as the River Clyde is too shallow at Glasgow for larger ships to reach. The present site of Glasgow has been used since prehistoric times for settlement due to it being the forded point of the River Clyde furthest downstream, which also provided a natural area for salmon fishing. The origins of Glasgow as an established city derive ultimately from its medieval position as Scotland's second largest bishopric. Glasgow increased in importance during the 10th and 11th centuries as the site of this bishopric, reorganised by King David I of Scotland and John, Bishop of Glasgow. There had been an earlier religious site established by Saint Mungo in the 6th century. The bishopric became one of the largest and wealthiest in the Kingdom of Scotland, bringing wealth and status to the town. Between 1175 and 1178 this position was strengthened even further when Bishop Jocelin obtained for the episcopal settlement the status of burgh from King William I of Scotland, allowing the settlement to expand with the benefits of trading monopolies and other legal guarantees. Sometime between 1189 and 1195 this status was supplemented by an annual fair, which survives to this day as the Glasgow Fair.
Glasgow grew over the following centuries, and the founding of the University of Glasgow in 1451 and elevation of the bishopric to an archbishopric in 1492 increased the town's religious and educational status.
Daniel Defoe visited the city in the early 18th century and famously opined in his book A tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, that Glasgow was "the cleanest and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted."[13] At that time, the city's population numbered approximately 12,000, and was yet to undergo the massive changes to the city's economy and urban fabric, brought about by the influences of the Scottish Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
After the Acts of Union in 1707, Scotland gained trading access to the vast markets of the British Empire and Glasgow became prominent in international commerce as a hub of trade to the Americas, especially in the movement of tobacco, cotton and sugar into the deep water port that had been created by city merchants at Port Glasgow.[14] By the late 18th century more than half of the British tobacco trade was concentrated on Glasgow's River Clyde, with over 47 million lbs. weight of tobacco being imported at its peak.[15]
In its subsequent industrial era, Glasgow produced textiles, engineered goods and steel, which were exported. The opening of the Monkland Canal in 1791, facilitated access to the iron-ore and coal mines in Lanarkshire. After extensive engineering projects to dredge and deepen the Clyde, shipbuilding became a major industry on the upper stretches of the river, building many famous ships (although many were actually built in Clydebank). Glasgow's population had surpassed that of Edinburgh by 1821. By the end of the 19th century the city was known as the "Second City of the Empire" and by 1870 was producing more than half Britain's tonnage of shipping[16] and a quarter of all locomotives in the world.[17] During this period, the construction of many of the city's greatest architectural masterpieces and most ambitious civic projects, like the Loch Katrine aqueduct and Subway, were being funded by its wealth.
From the late 1840s onwards, vast numbers of Irish Catholics settled in Glasgow. Originally forced to flee Ireland due to the Great Famine, the Irish continued to immigrate into the City of Glasgow in huge numbers for the rest of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, driven to the city by economic stagnation at home. Many of these Irish Catholics came from County Donegal, a large county in the west of Ulster. This Irish immigration has given Glasgow a large Catholic population.
The 20th century witnessed both decline and renewal in the city. After World War I, the city suffered from the impact of the Post-World War I recession and from the later Great Depression, this also led to a rise of radical socialism and the "Red Clydeside" movement. The city had recovered by the outbreak of the Second World War and grew through the post-war boom that lasted through the 1950s. However by the 1960s, a lack of investment and innovation led to growing overseas competition in countries like Japan and Germany which weakened the once pre-eminent position of many of the city's industries. As a result of this, Glasgow entered a lengthy period of relative economic decline and rapid deindustrialisation, leading to high unemployment, urban decay, population decline, welfare dependency and poor health for the city's inhabitants. There were active attempts at regeneration of the city, when the Glasgow Corporation published its controversial Bruce Report, which set out a comprehensive series of initiatives aimed at turning round the decline of the city. There are also accusations that the Scottish Office had deliberately attempted to undermine Glasgow's economic and political influence in post-war Scotland by preventing the creation of new industries and creating the new towns of Cumbernauld, Glenrothes, Irvine, Livingston and East Kilbride, dispersed across the Scottish Lowlands, in order to halve the city's population base.[18]
However, by the late 1980s, there had been a significant resurgence in Glasgow's economic fortunes. The 'Glasgow's miles better' campaign, launched in 1983, facilitated Glasgow's new role as a European centre for business services and finance and promoted an increase in tourism and inward investment.[19] The latter continues to be bolstered by the legacy of the city's status as European City of Culture in 1990, and concerted attempts to diversify the city's economy.[20] This economic revival has persisted and the ongoing regeneration of inner-city areas, including the largescale Clyde Waterfront Regeneration, has led to more affluent people moving back to live in the centre of Glasgow, fuelling allegations of gentrification.[21] The city now resides in the Mercer index of top 50 safest cities in the world[22] and is considered by Lonely Planet to be one of the world's top 10 tourist cities.[23] Despite Glasgow's economic renaissance, the East End of the city remains the focus of severe social deprivation.[24] A Glasgow Economic Audit report published in 2007 stated that the gap between prosperous and deprived areas of the city is widening.[25] In 2006, 47% of Glasgow's population lived in the most deprived 15% of areas in Scotland,[25] while the Centre for Social Justice reported 29.4% of the city's working-age residents to be "economically inactive".[24] Although marginally behind the UK average, Glasgow still has a higher employment rate than Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester.[25]
0 comments:
Post a Comment