Driving in Glasgow - Cathcart and Battlefield - April 2021

Shot under tier 4 restrictions

[ZLJK]

Absolutely fascinating! Thank you. I knew within the first two seconds where you were! In the days of my boyhood I travelled that along that road countless times on the no. 37 bus to Castlemilk, then a new housing scheme. The building immediately on the right with the curved roof was a newly-built garage in those days. I see it still survives, but I see as well at 7.50 that it will not be surviving very much longer.
Back in my early days, like most people, we didn't have a car, so I never got to see all the roads you took us round here. There is no doubt that Glasgow possesses the most wonderful architecture. Certainly the grand Victorian buildings in the centre are, along with those in Manchester, the finest of their kind in Britain. But everywhere else, as we see in this tour, the domestic architecture is equally fine. The generous availability in the area of the attractive sandstone that is easy to work is the main reason for that, but we must admire the craftsmen who worked it so painstakingly to achieve the results they did. In this tour we see the attractive tenements with their neatly ashlared stone blocks and ubiquitous bow windows. There is ample evidence of mouldings and carvings that are completely absent in the later buildings, when I suppose time was money and the emphasis rested on getting the job done. And the decline in craftsmanship continued into recent times. An example is the pitifully dull block of flats on the site once occupied by Langside bus garage. It would be a compliment to describe it as mediocre.
So well done for devising that drive. A great treat indeed!

[moshihus]

This is a great the tours around the city!