Thursday 28 July 2022

South Nitshill Remembered. A Gallery of Memories.

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A view of Moss Heights (white hi rise flats on left) plus the edge of Glasgow city centre on right as seen from South Nitshill.

 

 As in the previous Nitshill post I continued my walk from the Darnley Industrial estate, seen here on left and Darnley, seen here on right, looking up Kennishead Road. Just watched the 2018 film tonight on TV 'Mary, Queen of Scots'  which had the famous Queen and Lord Darnley galloping around the Scottish Highlands, courting each other, scheming, and fighting battles... against a dramatic background landscape of deep glens, foaming rivers, and high savage mountains, when in fact they did all of these things right here and fought running skirmishes/battles at nearby Camp- hill and Battle- field. Hence all the Glasgow district place names including Queen's Park which because they are so familiar to everyone local are not always stripped back down to their origins and just taken for granted as district labels. A nearby very old sycamore is named the Darnley Tree that she reputedly nursed him under when he was ill during a journey and too weak to travel further but given the 500 year gap since then it may well be a more recent replacement or possibly several successive mature trees grown here that have marked this spot ever since as it would presumably have been a tree of some girth back then to provide shelter under the leaves from sun and rain. 

Lord Darnley owned all this land, a vast estate, and the nearby Crookston Castle, (one of the oldest buildings left in Glasgow and open to the public, though it's now a well preserved multi level ruin in the middle of Pollok) was his as well. So they lived their short but eventful lives firmly in the lowlands when standing or riding on Scottish soil, flitting between Glasgow and Edinburgh within the Central Belt district. Going nowhere near the Highlands. In productive land terms the Scottish Highlands, although very beautiful to look at are nowhere near as fertile a landscape to grow things with poorer soil and shorter summers. This gently rolling landscape right here is where the real riches lay in the 1560s when they roamed about, talking and planning the events that would eventually lead to her son James the VI and I becoming King of Scotland by the mid to late 1500s and King of England and Ireland by the 1600s. A rich land of fields, crops, livestock, and timber. Money firmly rooted in the ground.... and for centuries to come this was still the case, spiraling down to the Stirling Maxwell family in the 1800s who developed/allowed coal mines, limestone quarries, ironstone pits, and other industry as well as farming. 

They did the same thing with William Wallace in the film Braveheart, who apparently, according to the film, grew up in a remote Highland glen near Fort William then marched all over the Scottish Highlands raising an army and battling the English when in fact he too was a lowland fighter in the Central Belt most of the time and grew up in Elderslie near Paisley ( or Lowland Ayrshire, according to some accounts.) In fairness it would be very hard to film anything historical in the Central Belt outdoors nowadays without power lines, wind turbines, housing estates, skyscrapers, or some other modern intrusion getting in the way... But this was their true landscape setting right here.
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I didn't notice or care about any of this of course when I was growing up here in the 1960s and 1970s. I don't think I even noticed the Darnley Tree much either. Not when I had hundreds more to pick from, climb, and explore. Dams to Darnley Country Park in 2022. Back in the 1960s and 1970s it was not as wild as it is now, Far more grass fields and hungry cattle keeping the landscape short with ankle deep grass to walk across and yearly trimmed hedgerows marking out each field boundary. The Brock Burn was an easily accessible stream curving though short grass fields on either side. So this wild overgrown landscape here, above...uneaten and untrimmed for over 40 years....

 

....used to look much more like this. This is just slightly further out in the same area in the still unchanged field and farming district around Barrhead in 2020 and I'd imagine this was more what Pollok and Nitshill would look like in Mary Queen of Scots time as well. Maybe not the black and white cows but certainly farming and hungry munching livestock with estate workers carefully tending the fields...It was only after seeing this contrast first hand that I fully realized what a difference (and contribution) these taken for granted living lawnmowers, (and hard working farmers) make to any landscape. Within ten short years it reverts into a tangled jungle on its default journey to eventual primeval woodland again.

 

All I was truly aware of then was that this was a paradise I was living in and every trip over the fields was a new adventure. Always enjoyable... never boring.  ( this was taken a couple of years ago in the fields between South Nitshill and Barrhead, still a beautiful rural delight for a walker or cyclist) Even as children we did know how to walk in the countryside... never open any gates ( we could normally easily slide through any gate, hedges, or wire fences at that age anyway) and always keep to the edges/ margins in any crop fields we passed down... so we never had any farmers shouting at us.

 

Cyclist on Salterland Road, a quiet back lane between South Nitshill and the town of Barrhead. Still a wonderland landscape in 2020. One of the reasons we always liked going over the fields and up to the Barrhead Dams was that there was very little in our rooms to amuse us anyway. Just a bed, small table, wardrobe, and if you were very lucky a record player or radio. Living room TV's were black and white, often a grainy, hard to make out image, with an indoor aerial on top of the set you moved around by hand to gain a better picture and even when it was working it was only three channels, mostly boring grown up stuff and a 12 inch screen. Most mothers didn't really want you in the house anyway as most days, lacking a fridge or freezer, they had to go shopping, cook meals, clean the house, take a turn brushing and washing the tenement stairs ( does that even happen now?) and a host of other jobs. 


 Anytime I was between friends and moping about the house for any length of time my mum would always point out the window and say " look, there's a wee boy ( occasionally a girl) over there with no-one to play with at the moment, just like you. Quick, away over there and talk to him/her before someone else snaps him up." New friendships were often as simple as that. The other reason for wanting you outdoors was that it was healthy... built at speed, lacking a big budget, and often constructed of cheap substandard materials ( this was a time, 1900s to 1950s, when Glasgow doubled it's population every ten years) the tenement bedrooms were often damp and many houses here suffered from terrible condensation ( the housing office usually blamed the tenants for breathing too much but being in a dry well built house for the last 35 years, often not requiring any heating at all to stay dry, warm and unmouldy, that wasn't the case. My room had very little in it, it was well aired every day yet it still remained soaking and mouldy even in summer, during dry spells, as the walls were extremely porous, sucking in moisture when it rained. Putting a fire on in the bedroom, coal or electric, made it worse, moisture visibly coming through in tell tale red droplets, (the colour of the outside bricks,) if it was raining hard outside, trickling down the walls onto the skirting boards as red puddles so being outside most of my free time was a good thing.


 

Berry bushes today between South Nitshill and Barrhead. An area still packed with excellent unofficial walking trails across semi wild country...and long may that continue to be the case.


The town of Barrhead with Neilston Pad behind, one of the distinctive high landmarks in this district and highly visible from many areas of Glasgow.


 Meanwhile, on the opposite side of South Nitshill I was reacquainting myself with the Darnley estate. Some of these stone bridges over the Brock Burn are very old, going back hundreds of years yet little noticed by residents today. This area has changed dramatically as well since the 1970s

 


Once a wild graffiti laden concrete deck assess estate rising up to seven storeys high with several connecting sky bridges linking the different blocks together it's now a low level pleasant tree filled district of mixed housing scattered around. A completely different place... as is Glasgow generally. Especially in housing stock terms.


Only the remodeled blocks in the distance give you some idea as to what the original estate looked like although they have also undergone changes with door entry systems and enclosed walkways replacing the 'streets in the sky' open drafty corridors and stairwells that anyone could walk along or loiter in without hindrance...which was one of the main drawbacks of the original estate. Maybe because it was a lovely warm day and high summer growth all around but I really enjoyed the walks I did during the recent summer months and this was no exception.


Corselet Road next and the South Nitshill entrance to Dams to Darnley Country Park. It used to be the Darnley Lime and Fireclay works for 100 years only closing down at the start of the 1960s. Not much evidence of industrial toil and extensive quarrying today, everything buried or obscured in thick vegetation or landfill but I remember exploring this area in the 1960s with pals and finding loads of interesting stuff from the newly abandoned site yet the nearby Darnley Mill Farm still had herds of dairy cattle in it and neatly grazed fields lined both sides of the Corselet Road all the way up to the Barrhead Dams, seen below in summer a few years ago, with thick carpets of sweet smelling clover that bees and young children love. (Click on 2nd down photo to see it properly.) 


 Ah, the miracle of a bumble bee! Big body- tiny wings. It shouldn't be able to fly at all, like a flying bear,  but nobody told the bee that. Some like to be tickled as well. Magical.....

 


  A world of sharp contrasts.


It was also jam packed with nature back then. In summer fast moving swifts, house martins, and swallows soared above the fields or perched on power wires along the lane. On the higher grass slopes skylarks were a common sight to us youngsters, trilling noisily as they ascended upwards until just a dark speck of tiny life was left hanging, almost invisible against a horizon to horizon wide cloudless blue universe above. I loved to lie back and watch them soar upwards as a child. Likewise lapwings, linnets, goldfinches, greenfinches, yellowhammers,goldcrests, wrens, blackbirds, thrushes, water voles, newts, tadpoles, frogs, stoats, weasels, buzzards, kestrels, owls and bats were all common sights then every summer. Decades since I spotted a linnet, newt, or water vole anywhere yet every year here I spotted them in the bushes on the ridges, swimming in the Brock burn, or caught them in the flooded quarries in the case of the newts... these amphibians fascinated me as a child... tiny perfectly formed dragons. When they used these flooded quarries containing dozens of precious beautiful newts and hundreds of frog and toad tadpoles in each one in the late 1960s for landfill use I was heartbroken. Today there might well be an outcry if it happened with newts so scarce UK wide but not back then. We went back one summer to our favourite flooded quarry in the late 1960s which was situated along a dirt track running between Darnley House and Dubs farm and it was gone... filled in completely. For anyone interested it used to be halfway up Corselet Road just past the stone bridge (where the road takes a sharp turn left to climb up to the waterworks gate)  and this second track led right, passing an abandoned cottage then a circular grass area with ornamental metal railings that could have once been a grand house but was no longer there, just the imprint of grandeur remaining. The flooded quarry was nearby, surrounded by mature trees in an obvious grand estate moulded landscape and a stone's throw away from that, trending diagonally left, was a dry curling pond, still plainly visible and beyond that another ruined mansion house beside the waterworks gate in the woods, this one still visible today.  All this is noted on old 1960s maps of the area but little trace remains today. The curling pond is probably still there, sunken concrete completely obscured by brambles nowadays but very obvious back then when it could have been refilled with water and played on no problem when frozen.


We had so many different things to see then it was a continual amazement all through childhood. This is the Brock Burn (possibly named after badgers?) in June 2022. Just diagonally left and up from this photo was the flooded quarry and the abandoned cottage, the curling pond, and possibly Darnley House. Yet the area we called 'the lost world' was somewhere else entirely  This was a different area over the fields near Patterton and to our puzzled but inquiring juvenile minds a complete mystery. Buried in the woods we found several long concrete trenches about nine foot deep set behind one another, an area of exceedingly bumpy ground, egg box carton like but spread over a wide area and other man made oddity's still there to this day. At the time we hadn't a clue what it was and it was only years later we discovered it was the Patterton World War I and WWII rifle and pistol ranges, accessed by the nearby Patterton train station with a replication of trench warfare to prepare outgoing troops heading for action. Coming from the opposite direction, slogging across kilometers of wild woodland scenery to get there, we never guessed this proximity to nearby civilization and a handy railway line. ( this rifle range map is in the Darnley Lime and fireclay link in the last post.)

 

Anyway, so much for history, on this occasion, June 2022, I took a new path I'd never walked before from the Brock Burn outlet in the last photo above, trending rightwards and swinging back in a banana shape just to see where it took me. Instead of the closed in lower wooded shade of the rest of the Dams to Darnley country park I'd just wandered through, mostly under the shelter of the trees, this section was open and expansive, with a bright burning sun above me, gradually heading for a heathland/ chalk downs vibe/feeling ridge line. I really enjoyed this section but compared to the field system and dairy farm set up of yesteryear there was a notable absence of bird activity and wildlife. Never seen much at all in fact on this occasion. A few bees and small brown butterflies. According to garden research wildlife prefers a mixed habitat- open grass meadows or fields, some wild bits of cover from predators, cow pats for insect feeders like bats and hedgehogs, scrub bushes or hedgerows for birds to nest in etc but it was found that a wildly overgrown garden, (like this one ) was not as good as you would think it would be.


 

Parkhouse estate and South Nitshill view from the ridge line.

 

The wide open blue yonder. Further along this scenic path.


 

 

When I reached the top of the slope and looked ahead I realized where this path was leading so I turned back as I knew it would link up with Salterland Road and eventually Barrhead featured a few photos ago. It was only an afternoon walk and I wanted to get back under the Clyde Tunnel before the rush hour traffic started building up as that would have been a waste of expensive petrol. The only drawback of the dams to darnley country park is a lack of decent places to park on this side of it although public transport to here, buses or railway, is easily available.


 

I could already see it in the distance. Dubs Farm, Cowan Park and Barrhead's new high school here.


 

So instead I went back down Corselet Road, still a much loved country lane and a good walk or cycle route on a bike, especially the long twisting freewheel from Newton Mearns down through the Barrhead Dams to Nitshill Road, a very enjoyable peddle free experience even today, although the hedgerows on either side are much higher than they used to be on this section.

 

So many good memories locked up in this still pleasant country lane. In the 1960s water voles could be spotted, even in daylight hours, swimming between the banks of the stream close to this spot. That's how numerous they were then.




Wednesday 20 July 2022

South Nitshill Remembered. Paradise explored... lost... and found again.

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                                                           South Nitshill in June 2022.

I had a free afternoon a few weeks ago and was heading over to Rouken Glen Park near Thornliebank when I passed by the bottom of South Nitshill. This view of the half circle of open meadow that surrounds the estate on its northern side took my breath away and I instantly realized I would have a more interesting and enjoyable time here. So I parked discreetly in the small trading estate behind the Nia Roo pub and went for a wander. As you can see it's beautiful here.

 It was the extensive carpet of buttercups that stopped me in my tracks, the best I'd seen anywhere and I knew this was where I wanted to be. Rouken Glen Park is nice but I've been there umpteen times so it held few surprises whereas this area still did, judging by this unexpected display of colour. Kennishead Flats in distance.

 The whole hillside was alive with bees, butterflies and wild flowers and it transported me right back to the reason I fell in love with this place from the moment I arrived here. As some of you may know I spent the first 27 years of my life here and it was a fantastic place to grow up in the 1960s and 1970s. Even today you can superimpose a giant clock face over this estate and craft an excellent rural or semi rural different walk for every hour around that clock. There's few other places in Glasgow, or anywhere else for that matter, where you can do that. 12 different walks with many variations possible.

 A view of Nitshill from South Nitshill in 2022. This wide banana shaped slope was always referred to as 'the grassy hill' by locals and as kids we loved it. Normally it was green grass that covered it and for most of the year it was not as long as it is here but from 5 to 15 it was a great playground and escape. In the summer months you could often watch kestrels hovering here in search of mice, or look for mice, birds or reptiles yourself or just loose yourself in your own imagination on a hot summers day.

 

It was also a safe place to play, free of cars or adults, so for a child it was the perfect size to explore and for its modest height it offered great views over the local area and the city of Glasgow beyond. The Lochliboside hills, The Fereneze Hills and the Brownside Braes were always visible in the distance, as seen here, offering a glimpse of greater treasures to find once we got older.

 

Up until the age of 9 or 10 though this grassy hill, and the back courts we lived in became our universe. Growing up in the 1960s we had a level of personal freedom almost unimaginable to children today. From about primary school age we could wander anywhere around this estate on our own, usually with same aged friends. After a school day, primary and secondary, this 'stairway to heaven' led up to the scheme, with one long front row of 4 storey tenements encountered first (Whitehaugh Road and Crescent) then several other long rows of  three storey tenements behind the first one... stairs which I used daily Monday to Friday to get home. 

 

 

The heart of Pollok. Silverburn shopping centre in 2022. At it's 1970s height roughly 50,000 inhabitants hidden within a forest lived here. That's why every walk was special. The magic didn't work for everyone though. Apparently Moors Murderer Ian Brady lived in Pollok in the 1940s and early 1950s before going on to Manchester and notoriety so beautiful surroundings had a different effect on him. And he didn't live in rough tenement land like us but in a more pleasant garden suburb district of Pollok with  low level cottage type housing stock that remains intact and in good order to this day.

During secondary school I would take the bus to school in the morning as it was down in the centre of Pollok but coming home, if it wasn't raining, I would often get off here just for the sheer joy of climbing these stairs again or traversing the full half circle of the hillside. Even after hundreds of ascents and descents I never tired of it and did the same again this time. Just as special today.


Looking down the stairs towards Nitshill. Most of the inhabitants of Pollok/ Nitshill came from Glasgow's inner city districts like the Gorbals (Ian Brady), Kinning Park (me and my sister), and Govan having lived or grown up in 100 year old tenement slums there. Nitshill/Pollok was on the southern outskirts of Glasgow and had previously been rural farmland and grand estate grounds in Renfrewshire. Even though Nitshill was an ex mining village and Industrial Revolution hub with brick-works, small factories, and semi abandoned buildings by the 1960s it was winding down so for us it was an incredibly green and leafy place.

 Good to see the Nia Roo pub still open in 2022 when so many others have closed UK wide. I'm including this photo because in the 1960s this trading estate didn't exist and an abandoned flooded quarry sat in a large area of waste ground ( on old maps it's down as a reservoir but I remember it more as a flooded quarry.)The flat roofed three storey tenements of Priesthill, built in the early 1950s formed a diadem around this hill, with a large, high, dark looking, water tower placed right in the middle on top of everything like a crown. I always thought it had a slightly sinister appearance. I didn't visit this quarry much as the Priesthill kids thought of it as their own and we sometimes got beaten up here if they caught us. Being an older established scheme Priesthill kids were tough! Instead of these factory buildings it was just thin scrub land with an abandoned mineral railway from the Fireclay quarry and mine running behind the Darnley Hospital as it was then. The rails and sleepers still in place but under a few inches of water. Corncrakes could be heard in the field nearby. At the top of the grassy hill near the spot where this photo was taken two small coal bings stood. One was bigger than the other, maybe 20 feet high at a guess? I remember sliding down them but they suddenly disappeared, maybe after Abervan in 1966 as that would be about the time they vanished. The old Darnley Fire Station was still operating in the early 1960s and I remember getting a primary school tour inside it before it closed down. We then got an unofficial 'abandoned engineering' tour of the roof and tower of this structure before this disappeared as well. The tram lines from Thornliebank passing Darnley going up the side of Parkhouse Road were also visible for a few years before they too were lifted.

Leverndale Tower and Cleeves Road, where the brick works once stood. According to old maps online from the 1800s numerous quarries, ironstone pits, and coal mines surrounded Nitshill, plus a chemical works, but they were mostly invisible by the time I arrived. At the bottom of the grassy hill though, where the red car is, a shallow pond once stood, about the size of a tennis court fringed by a ring of scabby stunted trees. The water was always dirty looking and I never saw anything swimming in it or any birds in the trees so I wasn't bothered when it too disappeared in the late 1960s. This was probably when the grassy hill was smoothed out as before that time it was more rugged and bumpy with a six foot deep shallow canyon half down the main steps featured earlier, on the right hand side looking down. A set of long metal pipes sat stacked to the right of the pond on the open hillside for many years as a preferred storage location until they were moved inside the fence where the yellow JCB is. Probably a health and safety issue with children crawling all over them occasionally.


 

Remarkably there's still metal pipes stored inside there to this day, 50 years later! Amazing! So there are changes here but also some things stay the same.


 One taken in the winter time, 1990s I think, with Parkhouse Road under heavy snow and a stuck bus. The biggest change to this area was the building of the Darnley Deck Access Estate in the early 1970s on previously open farmland, The Parkhouse Estate, the edge of it seen here on the left soon followed, Then the Southpark Village and Darnley Mains Estate and the Deaconsbank Estate, The last four private owner occupier estates built over what was once fondly remembered fields and farmland. One of the real assets for me, living here then,was the natural transition from exploring the grassy hill... occupied and loved from 5 to 10 years of age roughly.... to the next great leap further afield... 10 to 27.... exploring the great unknown on the other side of this road. Before the Parkhouse Estate arrived 20 paces from my front door led us into 7 or 8 huge fields, some of them filled with contented grazing dairy cows, some empty for gathering hay to feed the cattle in winter and some of crops, usually golden swaying corn or occasionally turnips. There was even a modest hay harvest. Every field was bordered with hedgerows filled with bird life. Numerous small woods completed the picture. The Darnley area and other districts mentioned were the same... gradually gobbling up fields year by year and three working farms disappeared. Just out of curiousity I measured the acres of beautiful rural landscape lost since 1970 in this area that I spent many happy years exploring and you could disappear Queen's Park, Rouken Glen Park, Bellahouton Park, Victoria Park ( all in Glasgow) and Barshaw Park in Pasiley to get the equivalent acres we used to roam across all during the 1960s here. The original Darnley estate was great though... deck access buildings two, three, five, and seven levels high with open corridors that meant  you could walk from one end to the other without coming down. 'Streets in the sky' and a great playground. The modern Darnley, and the other low level estates are probably very pleasant places to live now... but less exciting. 


I had a tour round the old estate on my bike in the late 1990s just before it was knocked down. Woodfoot Road area here. At the start it was a good scheme, every house filled with tenants, but when I reached my teenage years in the 1970s it turned rougher, like all the big Glasgow council estates of that era. By the late 1990s... early 2000s the big four... Pollok, Easterhouse, Castlemilk and Drumchapel had demolished most of the tenements in them and almost halved the population in these areas. Around 30,000 and more reduced to around 15,000 today.

 As I was spending most of my free time over the fields, woods, and Barrhead Dams anyway I largely avoided any gangs or teenage peer pressure to do things that might/would get me into trouble. You could either have this version of the 'beautiful south.'....

 Or this one... half an hour's walk away across rolling fields with dairy cows in them.


I personally liked the contrast with two very different worlds side by side... this... (Woodfoot Quadrant)...

 

... or this... rural Renfrewshire an hour's bike ride away... Cattle and drumlin country...

 

Or this...Rouken Glen Park.... half an hour away up Nitshill Road past Arden....


 


Then back to this again... South Nitshill local shops. Now there's no shops at all in the estate. There used to be two sets. One set of five or six here and another similar set down in the valley at the other end of the estate/scheme. The name might possibly come from Nutshill as a hazel wood is reputed to have once been in this district and before this estate arrived here it was a dairy farm and open fields in what was then rural Renfrewshire. The Hazelwood pub in Nitshill certainly alludes to that idea.

 

Willowford Road and 'the valley' part of South Nitshill. The original lower houses here still remaining plus some new owner occupier starter homes built where the primary school used to be, opposite St Bernard's Catholic Church, which is still there.


As is the takeaway, halfway up the hill. Once a doctor's surgery... then the Sky Dragon ... it still seems to be doing business. Although no local shops exist within South Nitshill nowadays, apart from this one they do have a large Lidl, a similar sized B and M store (both at the bottom of the grassy hill and featured in this post) plus a Sainsbury at Darnley, all within walking distance, plus the Silverburn Shopping Centre in the middle of Pollok, none of which existed in the 1960s and 1970s so I can't see the two rows of closed local shops within this estate coming back again anytime soon. Nitshill Village still retains its own row of traditional local shops, accessible through an underpass for 'the valley' cluster of houses, so they too have a good choice of shopping nowadays, especially with a car. Far fewer cars in the S. N. estate in the 1960s and 1970s.


  Nitshill village and its traditional row of local shops beside Nitshill Railway Station.


The old tenements are long gone in South Nitshill and a new set have taken their place on Parkhouse Road, seen here. The fantastic rural countryside still surrounds this re-modeled estate it's just slightly further away than it used to be but only by another 15 mins walk in this direction to pass the Parkhouse Estate, hidden in the dip.

 

The new look Whitacres Road where three storey tenements once stood. A really nice owner occupier estate now. New buildings and gardens....just like it was when I stayed here in the beginning of the scheme. History it seems moves in circles.

 

 A Renfrewshire bike ride in the area from years ago, above. Wandering around the area this time I found myself thinking "I could live here again, no problem" as it has such a great variety of walks even today, in every direction.... so part two is next....

Good link here and old maps and photos detailing Nitshill's industrial past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darnley_Lime_Works_Tramway_and_Mineral_Railway






Tuesday 12 July 2022

Yorkhill Hospital. Clydeside Expressway New Murals. University of Glasgow Views.

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Recently I had to go to Yorkhill Hospital for various routine check ups and tests so I decided to turn it into a photographic outing after I found out it was also a great viewpoint.

Part of Yorkhill Hospital lies abandoned (with a security guard) with some services moved into the new hospital at Govan .....but the general surrounding area has an interesting mix of  buildings....

Late 1800s architecture here...

 Same building with a construction date of 1887.

 

Newer buildings... still Yorkhill District...

 

 

The upper floors and spires of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum as seen from Yorkhill.

 

 

The period red sandstone tenements that Glasgow is famous for the world over. Probably late 1800s to early 1900s era construction and still looking good today.

 

 

University of Glasgow and an elegant blond sandstone terrace in front to frame it.

 

The more modern University Library and Gallery of Modern Art building plus the C.R Mackintosh House. The last two mentioned here are open to the well behaved general public as is the Hunterian Museum next door, which is situated directly under the latticework stone spire in the main building photo, above.


 

 

The Clydeside Expressway Murals sit not too far away down several sloping streets from the hospital so I went there next as I noticed dozens of new murals had appeared recently. City Tourist Bus here. A perfect dry day for it.

 

China Bull Mural. A clever idea this from a popular saying.

 

Butterfly Girl. Over the last ten years or so this long mural wall and the lane behind these railway arches has developed into a major street art attraction in Glasgow.


 

 One of my personal favourites was the Cleopatra mural that graced this gable end in the back lane last time I was down this way but it's now been replaced by this one. Luckily I got a photo of it in time before it disappeared.


 

And a new favourite. Cat and Quantum Physics girl. ( the book she's reading.)


 

A couple of abstract ones....

 

Really good levels of skill in street art now and a wide range of different styles.

 

 

A creative intruder.... Maybe a young local thinking ' I'm as good at art as they are! Here's my effort!'..... and I only need two colours!


Egyptian mural.


and Death... the great leveler for winged creatures, walkers, crawlers, hoppers and slithery beasts alike... rich or poor...angel or demon... there's no escape in the end...for everyone and everything.


Fashion Female.

Fish mural.

 

Hummingbird colours. Very delicate, almost mist like approach to painting here. Really liked this one.


 Two fish swimming and a bird mural from the same guy that put up animal murals in the Shawbridge Shopping Arcade in the last post.


Open gate in Yardworks lane.

Flower and Girl mural.


Dice mural.


Fox mural.


Sci Fi babe...



Guy and snake mural.

Unicorn...


Yeti and waterfall...and at least two dozen others in the same location. This is just some of my own favourites here. 


Not a bad way to spend an afternoon in the city. Also within walking distance of the Tall Ship, The Riverside Museum, Glasgow Distillery, Glasgow Harbour, Kelvingrove Park, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Museum, and Glasgow University. And shops, trains and buses at Partick. So plenty to do and see.