Glasgow is Scotland’s largest city.

It was a major religious centre in medieval times until the Reformation forced the city to reinvent itself. Having been badly damaged by two major fires in 1652 and 1677, Glasgow was rebuilt as a stone city described by Daniel Defoe as “In a word ’tis one of the cleanest, most beautiful, and best built cities in Great Britain”.

Throughout the 18th Century, influenced by its trade with the early American colonies, the city was extending to the west and south as the Glasgow grid was born.

Sadly by the 1820s, on the back of the industrial revolution, the post-medieval city centre was hugely overcrowded so was condemned in a Parliamentary debate for its “filth, crime, misery, and disease”. This gave rise to the Glasgow City Improvement Trust which learned lessons from Baron Haussmann’s Paris to cut through Glasgow’s dense urban fabric and bring in light and air to sweep away the miasmas.

By the late Victorian age Glasgow was the Second City of the Empire and a centre of Municipal socialism. The city was so well off it gave rise to two schools of architecture: The Glasgow Style and the Glasgow Baroque before both fell victim to the fashion for American Classicism.

After the war, the Bruce Plan proposed a tabula rasa of the city centre with everything, the City Chambers, Central Station and the Glasgow School of Art, to be bulldozed.

Glasgow was to have more motorways per head of population than any other city in Europe while the creation of 29 Comprehensive Development Areas allowed the Council to demolish old tenements and replace them with more tower blocks than any other city in the UK.

By the 1980s the virtues of the tenement had been rediscovered as Glasgow became the world’s first Post-Industrial City and a Cultural Capital of Europe all while its population plummeting in the face of deindustrialisation.

So where are we now?

Join Niall Murphy, Director of Glasgow City Heritage Trust, for a whistle stop tour through 850 years of Glasgow’s urban history.

Niall Murphy, Director, Glasgow City Heritage Trust Biography

Hailing from Hong Kong, Niall is an architect with over 25 years of experience, specialising in heritage, conservation, and community issues in Glasgow.

He is currently the Co-Chair of the Glasgow Built Heritage Commission, the Chair of the Govanhill Baths Building Preservation Trust, a Trustee of the Built Environment Forum Scotland and served on the Glasgow Urban Design Panel for a decade.

Niall has received several awards, including the Glasgow Doors Open Day Outstanding Talk Award (2023), and is passionate about architecture, urban design and cities.

Glasgow 850 - The Evolution of a City | Festival Talks 2025