Ross McDowell / Tartan Compass
At the top of Glasgow's old High Street, the Cathedral and Necropolis bring the city's medieval beginnings and Victorian confidence into the same view.
This is where I begin to understand old Glasgow: medieval Glasgow, religious Glasgow and the town that grew around the Cathedral, its trades and its people. St Mungo takes you into the origin story of the city and even helps make sense of Glasgow's coat of arms. Then you cross to the hill behind and the story changes again, into merchants, memorials and a surprisingly green refuge within the city.
Glasgow grew around the religious settlement associated with St Kentigern, better known as St Mungo. The present Cathedral is largely a thirteenth-century building on a site that had already been important for centuries. It survived the Reformation of 1560 virtually intact and continued in use for worship, leaving one of the clearest physical connections with medieval Glasgow. Across the Molendinar valley, the Necropolis belongs to the expanding Victorian city. Developed from the 1830s, its landscaped hillside and monuments record merchants, industrialists, professionals and families from a very different period of Glasgow's growth.
The change in level inside the Cathedral draws attention towards the lower church around St Mungo's traditional burial place and to the religious centre from which the city grew. Across the valley, the monuments of the Necropolis increase in scale and ambition up the hillside, while the view back towards the Cathedral places medieval and Victorian Glasgow in direct conversation. Names, professions, family connections and differences in monument quality reveal more than a simple collection of grand memorials.
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