The Heart of Glasgow by Jack House

Author:Jack House [House, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Europe, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9781906476632
Google: DIuu6IvTv8AC
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
Published: 2011-09-14T23:24:04.427950+00:00

9

SATURNALIA

When I was a small boy you could always tell when it was Saturday in Glasgow because of the number of drunks about in the streets. Today you still see the occasional drunk, but perhaps more often on a Friday than a Saturday, because Friday is pay day in a great many Glasgow works and factories. But then the Saturday drunks would come reeling out as far as our prim suburb of Dennistoun, where each stuck out like a sore thumb.

This was considered a bit of a liberty (though such a common phrase was never used in Dennistoun) because drunks were expected to stay in the area where they got drunk – and, as everybody knew, that was Argyle Street. If you heard anyone refer to ‘Argyle Street on a Saturday night’ you knew he was talking about the wild and disgusting Saturnalia which went on there.

Presumably the drunks chose to celebrate in Argyle Street because of the number of pubs up the side streets there. They were also, however unknowingly, carrying out a tradition that Argyle Street was the place where one paraded in Glasgow. The first pavement in the city was the one which I have already mentioned, the Plainstanes in the Trongate. But the Tobacco Lords and other merchants decided that only they were fit to walk on a pavement and kept everybody else off.

But in 1777 a second pavement was laid, along the Westergait, later to become Argyle Street. It was described as ‘Handsome flagged trottoirs, with curb-stones’, and the people who had been kept off the Plainstanes hurried to have the pleasure of sauntering up and down the trottoirs. To this day Argyle Street is a place for a promenade, and the biggest crowds you will see in any of the city thoroughfares are here.

As I have already suggested, the promenaders today will go right on into the Trongate, with most of them not realising in the least that the trottoirs have given place to the Plainstanes. Nowadays Argyle Street starts at the junction of the Trongate, Stockwell Street and Glassford Street. This means that the Trongate has lost a little of its original length, because it went on to the West Port and the Westergait for the whole frontage of the Shawfield Mansion. That is to say, the Trongate reached almost to where Virginia Street is today. There was a famous well here, and then the country road called Westergait which, when it became a proper street, was named after the 4th Duke of Argyll.

Perhaps, by the way, it would be a good thing to get this spelling anomaly cleared up. The street is spelled Argyle, but the notable shopping arcade, just before Buchanan Street, is spelled Argyll. Nowadays Argyll is considered correct, but in the 19th century people spelled names any way they chose. On the maps and charts of those days you will find just as many Argyles as Argylls.

From the Shawfield Mansion to the west there were several estates and houses to the north of the Trongate and the Westergait.

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