Genius Fan

Hollywood sometimes uses the streets around Glasgow’s George Square to shoot city disaster scenes for blockbuster movies. Recent examples would be Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), The Batman (2022) and World War Z (2013). They’re tapping into architecture which resembles Philadelphia, New York and Gotham City. Scotland’s biggest city has impressive, ‘heavyweight’ architecture dating from the industrial Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. If you haven’t been to Glesca, as it’s known, you should go, and make time to walk around the city. It is amazing.

Now, just a minute’s walk from George Square is Glasgow’s Merchant City, where you’ll find Miller Street and the last surviving, Eighteenth century villa. The Tobacco Merchant’s House, as it’s known today, was built in 1775 by John Craig, who was…wait for it…a tobacco merchant. It’s a neat little building that you can easily overlook as you cut through Miller Street making your way across the city centre.

Walking towards the Clyde, away from George Square, you’ll find the buildings on either side rise up above you. These are high-ceilinged properties of four and more floors with frontages that most definitely bring to mind New York in the 1930s. Miller Street today doesn’t offer glamorous vistas, but two plus centuries ago this street would certainly have been a highly desirable place to live. If you could afford to build or buy a home in this row of villas then you were likely someone who’d made their fortune in the American colonies. Probably in tobacco.

Tobacco and Glasgow: There are plenty of places online that will guide you through the connection between Glasgow and tobacco, and the role in the Eighteenth century Atlantic slave trade, which (thanks to the 1707 union with England) brought access to American trade and markets, growth in business, rapid population growth and the rise, particularly, of a hugely wealthy group labelled the Tobacco Barons. I won’t do it here. This little post is just about the house.

The Eighteenth century is all around is, as I’ve often said in the past. We just need someone to point these things out.

Find out more about Scottish architectural heritage on the Scottish Civic Trust Facebook page. They have a nice little post where you can download a “print off, cut out and make your own” paper Tobacco Merchant’s House.