ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the city of Glasgow, rather than the Scottish capital Edinburgh, became the home of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland in 1857. It begins by asking how historians of science have approached the relationship between British cities, whether metropolitan or provincial, and institutions purporting to represent scientific and engineering culture. The chapter investigates what associations the engineers of Scotland could join, especially those based in Edinburgh, a city with a unique political status after the eighteenth-century union of Scotland with England. It explains some of the factors which made Glasgow, rather than Edinburgh, "well placed" to form an enduring association of engineers. In forming the institution, the city's mechanical activity had been recruited, and the city had been reconstructed, discursively, as the "metropolis of mechanics," a cosmopolitan city which encompassed most of the key industries for which other provincial cities were famed.
