The Glasgow Guide
www.glasgow-guide.co.uk
© David Williams

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Few of the buildings in this part of High Street have much ornate decoration, but there is a curiosity at 215 High Street. This is the former British Linen Bank (1905, Salmon, Son & Gillespie) which has some Renaissance styling, a cupola roof and a crowstepped gable. Pallas, the Greek goddess of wisdom and weaving tops the building, a suitable figure for the original occupier.

At the side of the building is a plaque inscribed On this site stood the house in which the poet Campbell lived. Born 1777. Died 1844. Thomas Campbell`s statue stands in George Square. The plaque also shows a gabled house and people dressed in early nineteenth-century styles.

The north-eastern corner of the junction of High Street and George Street / Duke Street is overlooked by the five-storey City Improvement Trust tenements (1900-01; Burnet, Boston & Carruthers). This bears the inscription City Improvement Trust, the name of the body which was charged with the task of cleaning up the squalid living conditions that existed in the city in the second half of the nineteenth century. Learning from visits to Paris, to see the work of Baron Haussmann, the trustees were very successful in adapting the traditional tenement house style to rehouse many thousands of people.

High Street curves round and climbs quite steeply through a canyon of tenements up to Rottenrow, which is met on the left. This spot was originally known as the Bell o` the Brae and a village developed here in medieval times. Tradition has it that around 1297, during the Scottish Wars of Independence, William Wallace`s forces attacked and defeated a force of English soldiers here, with Wallace personally dispatching Earl Percy, the English Governor.

High Street now leads to the historic group of buildings in the Cathedral Precinct.

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This the very historic Glasgow Cathedral which stands at the top of High Street, the medieval street which ran between here and the River Clyde. The cathedral is one of the city`s most important buildings and it is very popular with visitors.