Author Description

'In 1901 "James Hamilton Muir" published such a graphic and faithful account of the city as was never seen before, and is never likely to be bettered. Glasgow in 1901 is now a classic....Asute collectors will gladly pay a guinea for a resonably clean copy.' So wrote Neil Munro in 1928. One hundred years after its acclaimed publication this idiosyncratic and entertaining little book, packed with interest for any lover of Glasgow, is at last available again. Celebrating Glasgow at the dawn of the 20th century, it evokes a smoke-hazed and sombre city, ringing and thundering with ship-building and other industry, not beautiful but alive and splendid. The book makes piquant reading today, after a century of painful deindustrialisation. But while the city's finest institutions receive their due - the account of Corporation's dynamic intervention in the provision of public services is particularly thought-provoking - Glasgow in 1901 also presents a more unexpected and problematic view of the human and environmental cost of the city's industrial pre-eminence.