ABSTRACT
The Necropolis is the gateway to Glasgow, a monumental memento mori to the motorist driving too fast along the M74. Perched on a drumlin (mound) overlooking the Merchant City district, its granite obelisks and urns outlined against the racing clouds are relics of the city’s Victorian splendour, articulating a powerful corrective to Glasgow’s modernising ambition. The great cemeteries of nineteenth-century London, designed to accommodate an exploding population and its attendant epidemics, are full of neo-Gothic exuberance unquelled by Marxist rationalism, even, and especially, in Highgate. Not so Glasgow which, like its model the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, aimed to treat death hygienically and scientifically. Its site ignored the contemporary trend to locate burial grounds on what were then the outskirts of town. Instead, the triangle formed by the Royal Infirmary, where the burghers died, the Cathedral where their funeral rites were conducted, and the Necropolis, where they are buried, proudly proclaims economy of effort since it is contained within little more than a square kilometre. Indeed, if scientific rationalism inspired its creation, neo-classicism presided over its design. Just as Père Lachaise is marked out (quadrillé) in ‘divisions’ of a quasi-military precision, so the Necropolis (avoiding the banality of ‘cemetery’) is divided into sectors named for the letters of the Greek alphabet (alpha, beta, etc.) with recourse to Latin (primus, secundus) when the former were exhausted, and embellished with a funerary architecture of Doric temples, Corinthian columns and Roman sarcophagi, much of it designed by Alexander ‘Greek’ Thompson (Black, 1992).
