ABSTRACT
Partick – Byres Road was born. The final ingredient in Byres Road’s success was its connectedness to the rest of the city. Glasgow introduced the world’s third oldest underground system in 1896 (after London and Budapest), which included a stop at either end of Byres Road. This had the effect not just of linking Byres Road to the rest of the city, but, perhaps just as importantly, connecting the rest of the city to Byres Road. This gave its shops and businesses access to a much wider market and allowed it to develop into an upmarket retail street at the heart of a prosperous middle-class neighbourhood. And thus it has continued. As the surrounding streets have evolved from Victorian gentility to early-21st-century bohemia, Byres Road has prospered. A number of factors have cemented its role as a great street. The first of these is the ubiquitous (by Scottish standards, at least) tenements. The mass of this building typology not only provides an appropriate scale of development, but ensures a density and variety of population that helps to support services and facilities. The flats also provide all-important activity, vibrancy and natural surveillance day and night. Added to this, shops on the ground floor provide a continuous active frontage, aided by the Victorian legacy of party walls that restrict the width of shops, keeping an enviable degree of variety and activity and a strong urban grain while also encouraging independent
