Josef wrote:When was John Knox Street built (or named)?
Only a month late, here's this from a Scotsman article of April 1872; the paper took great interest in the Glasgow Improvements.
At the upper end of High Street, in immediate vicinity to the Cathedral, the Trustees have effected changes as important in a sanitary point of view as they are desirable with reference to the amenity of the district. From the top of the hill there straggled downwards in a south-easterly direction, a narrow and dingy street known as the “Drygate,” along the north side of which, and on the adjacent slope of the Molendinar Valley, was heaped together a cluster of wretched houses, including, under the name of the “Rookery,” a teeming nursery of vice and disease. Clearing away this mass of squalor, the Trustees are forming a new street, to be named “John Knox Street,” in honour of the great Reformer, whose monument overlooks the ground from the summit of the neighbouring Necropolis. The slope towards the Molendinar, which, through the covering in of that fœtid stream, will become coterminous with the Necropolis, is intended to be laid out as a garden or shrubbery. The process of reconstruction has here been commenced by the Trustees themselves, who have erected a number of dwelling-houses for the working classes, as also what may, we believe, be regarded as a model lodging-house. From the style of architecture adopted in the more recent of these buildings, it may be inferred that the new street when completed will present somewhat of the picturesque appearance of Cockburn Street, Edinburgh. A subsidiary effect of this clearance will be to open up a view of the Cathedral from Duke Street; and, altogether, there is perhaps no part of the Trustees’ undertaking more generally appreciated than their attempt to improve the surroundings of a building which St Mungo’s citizens cherish as one of their choicest possessions.
Following straight on from this, an interesting bit showing something of the attitudes of the powers that be:
The population ejected from the High Street and Saltmarket regions are supposed to have bestowed themselves among the poorer class of houses in the east, north, and south quarters of the city. It has not been clearly ascertained to what extent they may have improved their social condition, or how far their removal may have occasioned overcrowding in the districts to which they have migrated. One thing, however, seems to be clearly made out, and that is, that the dispersion of the dangerous class has had a material effect in diminishing their power for mischief. The police have now comparatively little trouble in a district where formerly it tasked all their energies to preserve order; and to the operations of the Trustees, among other causes, the Chief-Constable attributes a remarkable diminution of crime which has taken place in the city within the last two or three years. “Through these operations,” he says, “the city has been cleared of the foulest dens of crime and profligacy, and their occupants have been scattered amongst a population breathing a purer moral atmosphere, thereby affording facilities to the police for bringing the vicious to justice more easily and certainly than when the whole formed a concentrated and combined colony of ruffianism.”
In other words, they demolished areas of bad housing without providing any alternative accommodation for the evicted population, leaving them to find new living space as best they could in the remaining bad housing elsewhere in the city; the polis were happy though, as there was less trouble from the people who weren't there any more.
All the world seems in tune on a Spring afternoon, when we're poisoning pigeons in the park.