Calton, Glasgow East End

The Weavers' Strike of 1787: Britain's First Industrial Massacre

In September 1787, the handloom weavers of Calton — at that time a separate village outside the limits of Glasgow — went on strike to protest a reduction in their piece rates. The weavers of the East End were skilled tradespeople who produced the high-quality cotton and silk cloth on which Glasgow's growing textile trade depended. Their craft required years of apprenticeship, and the looms on which they worked were their own property, kept in the weaving shops attached to their cottages in Calton's densely packed streets. When their employers announced a cut in wages, the weavers struck — refusing to work until the rates were restored.

The response of the authorities was swift and violent. Dragoons were called in to disperse gatherings of strikers, and in the confrontations that followed, six weavers were shot dead. The Calton Weavers' massacre of 1787 is now recognised by labour historians as the first recorded occasion on which soldiers killed striking workers in British industrial history — a grim distinction that predates the more famous Peterloo Massacre of 1819 by more than thirty years. The six weavers are buried in Calton burial ground, where their grave — a simple stone slab — remains a place of pilgrimage for labour historians and trade union movements. The inscription records their names and the manner of their deaths with a directness unusual for the period.

The strike failed, and the wages were cut. But the Calton weavers' action established a tradition of working-class organisation in the Glasgow East End that would shape the city's politics for two centuries. The radicalism of Calton fed into the Chartist movement of the 1840s, the Independent Labour Party of the 1890s, and eventually the Red Clydeside politics of the early twentieth century.

Glasgow Green and the People's Palace

Glasgow Green is the oldest public park in Britain — a common land on the north bank of the Clyde that has been in the ownership of the people of Glasgow since at least the fifteenth century and possibly since the city's medieval foundation. The Green was, for centuries, where Glasgow's washerwomen dried their linen, where the city's cattle were grazed, and where public gatherings — political meetings, fairs, executions — took place. James Watt is supposed to have conceived the improvement to the steam engine that made the Industrial Revolution possible while walking on Glasgow Green in 1765. Whether the story is strictly accurate or not, it captures something true about the Green's place in Glasgow life: it was where the city came to think.

The People's Palace, opened in 1898 at the eastern end of the Green, was built specifically as a cultural centre for the East End working class — a museum, winter garden, and exhibition space that would give Calton and the surrounding neighbourhoods the kind of cultural provision that the city centre's institutions provided for the middle classes. The museum's collections focus on Glasgow's social and labour history, and its displays on the city's Irish and immigrant communities are among the most thorough in any Scottish institution. The Doulton Fountain in front of the Palace, presented to Glasgow by the Doulton ceramic company for the 1888 International Exhibition, is the largest terracotta fountain in the world — a remarkable Victorian confection of allegorical figures representing the British Empire's constituent peoples.

Celtic FC and the Irish of the East End

Celtic Football Club was founded in Calton in November 1887 by Brother Andrew Walfrid, a Marist Brother from County Sligo who had been working in Glasgow's East End since 1874. Walfrid's explicit purpose was charitable: to raise money for the Poor Children's Dinner Table, a soup kitchen that fed the children of Calton's destitute Irish immigrant community. He modelled the new club on the Irish-founded Hibernian FC of Edinburgh, which had been successfully raising money for the Edinburgh Irish community since 1875. The first match Celtic played was in May 1888, and they won 5–2.

The Irish community of Calton and the East End was the founding constituency of Celtic FC, and the connection has remained central to the club's identity across its entire history. The area around Celtic Park in Parkhead — the club's home from 1892 — became the heartland of Glasgow's Irish Catholic community in a way that had no real equivalent in any other British city. The rivalries, loyalties, and cultural identities formed around Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow drew much of their energy from the sectarian divisions between the Irish Catholic community and the Protestant Scots majority — divisions that Calton and the East End embodied more nakedly than almost anywhere else in Scotland. For Irish-American and Irish-Canadian families tracing heritage in Glasgow, the East End and Calton are often the point of arrival.

The Barras and the Street Life of the East End

The Barras — from "barrows," the market stalls — is the famous weekend street market that has operated in Calton since the 1920s. Margaret McIver, who had been renting out barrows to traders from the early years of the century, formalised the market in the 1920s and eventually enclosed it behind the distinctive iron arches and the Barrowland sign that still defines the market's entrance today. The Barrowland Ballroom, opened above the market in 1934, became one of Glasgow's most beloved music venues — and after being rebuilt following a fire in 1958, it became the venue of choice for acts from the Rolling Stones and David Bowie to contemporary Scottish bands. It remains today one of the finest music venues in Britain, celebrated by musicians for its sprung dance floor and its acoustic.

The Barras market at street level has always been a reflection of the East End's economic life — the place where the working-class and poor of Calton came to buy and sell, to find bargains, to hear gossip, and to participate in the informal economy that was often the only economy available to them. In its heyday in the mid-twentieth century the Barras occupied a vast area of the East End and drew crowds of tens of thousands on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Though much reduced from its peak, it continues to operate today as one of the last authentic street markets in Glasgow — and as a heritage site in its own right, preserving a form of commercial culture that has largely disappeared from British cities.