A brief overview of the 'Second City of the Empire' 1860c - 1910 with particular focus on the housing plight of the working classes and Glasgow poor folk.

1. Dissertation Overview Sean McDonagh ‘Glasgow Poverty and the Housing Question c1860-1914: The Middle Class Charity Effort for the Advancement of Society for the Poorer Classes’

2. Victorian Glasgow: Setting the Scene Nineteenth Century Glasgow can be defined as a ‘City of Paradox’ as it was respected for its status as the ‘Second City of the Empire’ whilst simultaneously known for its unrivalled squalor. Despite key legislation targeting public health and overall civic development throughout the latter half of the century, the cities key ‘social ill of the hour’, its inadequate and often inhumane housing, would be neglected and left in the hands of the cities speculative builders, private landlords and overall the free market. An Inactive role by the state did not help matters; despite making the link between cholera epidemics and squalid housing, no housing reform would take place.

3. A summing up of Glasgow’s terrible housing conditions is described by Captain Miler, Chief Constable of Glasgow’s Police Force (c1841) ‘...an accumulated mass of squalid wretchedness...with houses not fit to be pigsties and apartments filled by a crowd of men, women and children all in the most revolting state of filth and squalor.’ ‘Here men, women and children, fathers and mothers, lodgers- the dissolute and the criminal-squat for the night among rags on the floor of a single apartment.’ One Roomed ‘home’ in Glasgow

4. Kingdom of the One Roomed House Infamous Single End 1871-1880: 126,000 single end inhabitants Backland Building

5. Overcrowding and Immigration Glasgow population 1851: 329,097 – Majority living within an area only two miles long and one mile in breadth (East End: Bridgeton, Calton, Saltmarket, High St and Tron) By 1840 around 50,000 immigrants were arriving annually, mainly Irish and peoples from the Russian Empires. Glasgow’s overcrowding phenomena largely experienced in the city’s east end and further strengthening existence of a cycle of deprivation.

6. Victorian Philanthropy Middle class charity and a general philanthropic ethos should be recognised as an institution of the Victorian era particularly due to the sheer number and scope of the charities which existed at the time. For example, the 1876 Glasgow Charity Handbook details that there were 180 operating charities and friendly societies. Glasgow Benevolent Society Relief of the Destitute Sick and Others in Extreme Poverty Glasgow City Mission Glasgow Night Asylum for the Houseless

7. Glasgow Common Lodging Houses, High St. The closest thing the city charity effort came to providing philanthropic aid to Glasgow’s poorest inhabitants. ‘The philanthropist, no matter how well intentioned, has failed to not only grapple with the frightful immorality amongst the poor, crushed together in habitations unfit for human or even animal existence, but in the model buildings erected in the metropolis for casual and permanent lodgers.’