ABSTRACT
The site and buildings of Glasgow University as it was in the thirties of last century have been rendered familiar to the Scott reading world by the engravings in the 1838 edition of Rob Roy. They have all the attraction that one might conceive to have belonged to Plato's Academy in ancient Athens. The city of the living lay away to the west of them and the adjoining Cathedral; the city of the dead, the present “Necropolis,” had not yet risen to hem them in on the east, and the grove on the eastern side still crowned the hills and flowed down into the University grounds, and you could hear the murmur of the stream that separated it from them. In front ran the High Street, still the residential quarter of well-to-do merchants and manufacturers, baillies and professors. But by the seventies all this had been changed. The well-to-do had drifted far west to the banks of the Kelvin. The High Street had become little better than a slum. There were graves where groves used to be. The buildings had become too small for the new demands which a great modern city with its crowding would-be students made upon them, and were now something like an hour's journey for students in the new residential districts, who had to rise at six in order to have breakfast before they started on the three-mile walk to their eight o'clock classes. It was under these circumstances that the present site on Gilmour Hill was acquired in the sixties. It had every advantage. Though not an Acropolis or a Castle Rock, it was one of the finest sites in the west of Scotland. It was in the middle of the residential quarter. It was easily accessible by rail or tram to the whole surrounding district. It gave ample room for growth as new departments were added, for professors’ houses, for the gymnasium and playing fields and for the new Infirmary in connection with the medical faculty. By 1870 the new buildings, designed in baronial style by Sir Gilbert Scott, though far from completion, were ready for occupation, not without reminiscences of the old in the beautiful front which used to look out on the High Street, and the not less beautiful stair brought from the corner of the old Quadrangle. The Senate had decreed scarlet gowns as the garb of the students, and the grey streets were lit up with their streaming skirts as we ran to avoid the lock-out that followed the cessation of the tinkling bell, which knew its importance too well to consent to remain behind in the High Street.
