The Scottish Film Archive has several films from several decades that give condensed histories of the city. This variety allows you to choose from short school-book presentations of the facts to longer more impressionistic films.
These clips give us an overview of the history of the city by showing us what people believed to be the history of the city when making their films. In contrasting and comparing them we can uncover areas in common and of different emphasis. We can build our own history of Glasgow.
- All the facts in the order you'd expect. Religious centre to university town to narcotic trafficking port to industrial boom town.
- We belong to Glasgow. A wonderful city to live in .... and to die in too.
- This Glasgow city of 1 million souls, anvil of Scotland.
- From 1707 to 1970 in 60 seconds.
- Boom! The industrial revolution. The face of the country utterly changed.
- Glasgow, the musical? Poetic look at working-class Glasgow as it developed, using local songs.
Glasgow is, indeed, a very fine city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one city ….. in a word, it is the cleanest, the most beautiful, the best built city in Britain, …
Glasgow is earth’s nearest suburb to hell.