Glasgow archives reveal history of city's famous clock towers

I often glance up at it while I’m waiting to cross the road, and it always leaves me wondering how many Glaswegians before me did the same thing?

Before wristwatches and mobile phones made personal timekeeping possible, people would have used the cityscape itself to tell the time.

Look up when you’re next walking around Glasgow and you’ll start to spot the city’s surviving turret clocks. Some are at the top of towers while others are mounted high on their building’s walls.

The Briggait (Image: Newsquest)

Some of the most iconic of the city’s clocks are also among the oldest. Those on the Tolbooth Steeple, the Laigh Kirk and St Andrews in the Square – all buildings in the oldest part of the city – are characterised by their blue faces and gilt hands.

Later civic and religious buildings also boast clocks, which sport the more common white faces and black hands.

Among our collections, we hold a Glasgow Corporation tender document of 1895 which outlines all the clocks the successful company would be expected to manually wind, regulate and maintain. Many of those listed are churches, including St Vincent Street UP Church and St Enoch’s Free Church. It also highlights hospital clocks which the city was obliged to maintain, such as those at the Royal Infirmary.

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The town council itself was very concerned with helping its citizens to tell the time accurately. The council created a special Committee on Markets, Clocks and Bazaars in 1834 which later investigated whether the manual system of winding Glasgow’s clocks should be replaced by an electrically-controlled system. This committee’s minutes and reports are held in our collections.

Turret timepieces were also common at Glasgow’s many crosses: Partick, Gorbals and Bridgeton all had clocks at the junctions where their major throughfares met. As a common meeting place, and an area through which most local residents would pass, it made sense to have a clock located there. 

Transport hubs or stops were also common locations for turret clocks. For example, the beautiful former tram shelter in Langside which now houses the Battlefield Rest has a clock tower atop its roof. In the west, the now demolished Botanic Gardens Railway Station at the top of Byres Road provided the time for those hurrying to make their train. Knightswood Bus Garage also helped its drivers to follow the Corporation timetables with its turret clock.

It was also common for businesses such as factories to display clocks on their buildings to encourage good timekeeping among their employees. For example, the Cyro Works in Temple (pictured), which produced typewriter accessories, was built with a distinctive Art Deco clock visible throughout the local area. Although the factory itself was demolished in the mid-1990s to make way for new flats, the developers rescued the clock and incorporated the timepiece into the new building where it can still be seen today.