Who Lived In A House Like This? Discover The Story Of A Tenement Dwelling In Scotland.

In this week's video I explore a time capsule tenement home here in Glasgow, Scotland and talk about the story of the lady who lived here. Hello and a warm welcome to Through Lucy's Lens weekly videos where I go somewhere interesting and hopefully you will find them interesting too. My name is Lucy, I'm your guide, I'm a social historian which means I love history but I'm interested in the history of people not politics. I am on my Scottish adventure and we have just arrived in Glasgow. Stop number one. Why are you going to Glasgow Lucy when you're actually on your way to Orkney? Well this is a place that I have wanted to visit for decades and I'm finally here so let's explore together, let's go and see the tenement house. So welcome to the tenement here in Glasgow. A tenement in Scotland is a building split into flats with the shared stairwell called a close. They were the standard form of urban housing across Scotland from the mid 19th century onwards. They housed clerks, labourers, teachers and tradesmen, widows and large families rich and poor. In Glasgow the industrial boom of the 19th century led to explosive population growth. By 1911 Glasgow's population had reached over 1 million making it the largest city in Scotland and the second city of the empire. To house this influx of workers and their families tenements were built in huge numbers typically four stories high in sturdy sandstone with one room, two room or three room flats inside. A huge proportion of Scotland's urban population once lived in tenements. They were the dominant form of urban housing from the mid 19th century right through until the mid 20th century and many are still lived in today. By 1911 Glasgow had over 1 million residents and around three quarters of them lived in tenement housing. That means that roughly 750,000 people in Glasgow alone were living in tenements. Across Scotland's other cities like Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Paisley tenements were also the standard form of housing for the working and lower middle classes. By the 1930s it's estimated that more than half of Scotland's entire urban population lived in flats like these. The National Trust for Scotland which now looks after the tenement house in Bucklew Street points out that at their peak millions of Scots were living in tenements from modest single ends which were one room flats in poorer districts to spacious middle-class tenements with parlours and bay windows in better areas like Glasgow's West End or Edinburgh's Marchmont. Overcrowding was common though. A 1935 Scottish housing survey found that in Glasgow over 40 percent of families lived in a single room within tenements. In some notorious areas like the Gorbals families of up to eight to ten people or even more might share just two rooms with a lodger. The tenement model however was about practicality. Unlike the slum courts and back-to-back housing of English cities tenements could house many families on limited land while still giving them their own front door. The conditions of tenement dwellers varied greatly. Some tenements for the better off had their own sculleries or even bathrooms. Others particularly in the Gorbals or Calton were one room single ends crammed with whole families with their lodgers. Today in Bucklew Street one of these tenements has been preserved exactly as it was and this is the home of Miss Agnes Toward now known as the tenement house The Glasgow Improvements Act of 1866 allowed the City Improvement Trust to clear slum courts and replace them with better planned tenement blocks. The tenement Agnes lived in was one of this later wave of more respectable sanitary housing. Tenements range from single ends like I said that was just one room with a bed recess in the wall to the more comfortable two or three room flats that had a kitchen. Regardless of how many rooms you had in your tenement everyone shared the back green for drying clothes and the steamy was the wash house for laundry day. Miss Toward's home was a two room and kitchen flat. It has a front parlour, a bedroom and a living kitchen with a coal range. What was unusual for this home is that it has an indoor bathroom and you'll see this later and this was fitted by Agnes herself and her mother. Most working class Glaswegians of the time only had an outside toilet. Agnes was born in 1886 and moved here with her mother who was also called Agnes in 1911. She worked as a shorthand hypist and her mother operated as a seamstress with a shop in nearby Stockihall Street. After her mother's death in 1939 Agnes lived alone here for decades. Agnes experienced a lot of early loss with the death of her father when she was just three years old. Her two sisters also passed away in infancy leaving her and her mother to navigate life together here. Agnes was raised by her mother and developed a very strong bond with her and they shared a modest yet comfortable existence here. Agnes's role as a typist allowed her to contribute financially to the household and provided small comforts. Agnes never married and while there's no definitive record explaining her choice, several aspects of her life offer insight into her decision. A postcard was found from a Mr Bulldog who would have been writing to Agnes when she was a teenager. In the postcard he suggests that she should come meet him on a Monday night after unfortunately being detained for some hours. We don't know if she ever went to meet him but she kept this postcard her whole life meaning she must have wanted to keep a memory of her admirer. Later Agnes was corresponding with William Wood, a colleague from her job as a typist. William enlisted in the London Scottish Regiment and was stationed in France. He was reported missing in action in July 1916 at the age of 24. Agnes at this point would have been in her 30s and wrote to her friends about William. There's a letter where she talks about engagement and perhaps she was hoping for this. She kept all of William's letters and maybe at this point in her life she decided to remain a spinster after so much heartbreak in her early years. Agnes had a modest but reliable comfort here. She had a working coal range, gas lighting throughout the home and heavy Victorian furniture that was used right up until her death and of course she had her bathroom. Agnes was very careful with money and she was careful with her possessions and slow to modernise. This is why when the National Trust acquired her home after her death in 1975 it was purchased by a private buyer who realised it was far too important not to preserve and after living there for several years and finding it almost untouched passed this property as a time capsule to the National Trust for Scotland. In her last 10 years Agnes was unwell and spent long stretches in hospital but she kept her tenancy of the flat even when she couldn't live in it. That decision meant that when she died her home was intact with clothes still in the wardrobe, china still on the dresser and the gas mantles still in use. As you tour the house today the light is low still relying on the sizzle of the gas lamps for lighting. Today the tenement house is preserved exactly as Agnes left it. It gives me an extraordinary glimpse into the respectable working class Glasgow life between 1911 and the 1960s. The smell of the gas mantles and the polish takes you right back to a bygone time and I found this home to be a very moving experience. It's worth as a general overview to listen to the voices of those who lived in tenements. There's many oral history projects in Glasgow that have captured words of tenement dwellers beautifully and can be accessed online. One woman remembered, you had your washing day and if you missed it you'd be in trouble with the neighbours. We all shared the steamy and that's where the gossip was done. Another recalled that as a child the green out the back was our playground. We had nothing but chalk on the ground made a game. The mothers would shout out the windows when your tea was ready. Somebody remembers how hard it was living in a tenement. There were six of us in the room and kitchen and a lodger in the recess. You could smell the damp and the gas from the lamp. My mother never stopped scrubbing and this to me is a testament of how everybody tried to keep as clean and respectable as possible even in difficult circumstances. Many of the accounts you read really stress community. The doors were never locked. If you were short of sugar you just asked next door. We all looked out for each other. In one tenement block you could have a myriad of circumstances and life stories just across the landing. Which is what I think for me makes them so interesting. Not necessarily as a structure but as a social experiment that worked for some to provide a great housing option but to others similar to these back-to-back houses in England created a miserable existence to some of our ancestors when we look at it through our modern eyes. As always I want to highlight these modern ideals. I try never to look back in pity. As we know from being here today living, breathing and learning about their lives they were survivors. Agnes's own life was quite solitary, careful and was more unusual to a lot of tenement dwellers but it connects directly to these broader tenement experiences. She too lived with the coal smoke, the back green and the rhythm of the life within the close. The communal noise and hubbub of living cheek by jowl with your neighbours. Agnes is reported to have slept in the box bed or recess bed in the kitchen until her mother's death along with her mother. You're going to see a lot of box beds coming up on the channel over the next few weeks. By sharing the box bed together they could save on heat and laundry and middle class as they may have seen to the less fortunate Agnes was incredibly careful with her money. She was a prolific preserve maker and baker and some of the jams and preserves she made are still intact in the jars stored in the kitchen. She worked right up until she was 73 knowing that she didn't have a pension or support from a spouse or family to rely on although she was an active member at a local church. Agnes sadly developed dementia and according to accounts had become rather eccentric in her later years. Neighbours told how she would mop the closed stairs wearing an old war helmet. On a day in 1965 Agnes left to go to an appointment telling her solicitor she would be away for a couple of nights. She was never to return. She spent the last 10 years of her life in hospital where she sadly died. I'll leave you now to have a look around the remainder of the bedroom and also the amazing bathroom installed by Agnes and her mother. I'll be back though so keep on watching. By the mid 20th century many tenement buildings across Scotland had been condemned and families were moved out into new housing schemes and tower blocks. Yet as we know much of what was lost was not the bricks and mortar but the fabric of the communities that existed within these spaces. This tenement as it is today survived because of Agnes's tenancy keeping it on even though she wasn't living there and the foresight of those who preserved it. I'm sure there are hundreds if not more properties like this that just got stripped out after the 1960s so I'm really glad that it's still here because for me I think it's one of Scotland's most interesting museums. It's not the story of kings or castles but of an ordinary woman and the dignity and the normality of her everyday life. I wonder as Agnes was obviously a bit of a hoarder like myself whether she would be pleased that people like me now relish the time spent in her home. I really hope that she would. Thanks as always for watching. I loved this house and I'm sure that the tenement in New York is going to come up in the comments. Of course one day I would love to visit but that is very much a bucket list location to work towards. You watching my videos, supporting me, liking, subscribing may get me there one day but for now there is so much more to come on my Scottish adventure. Scotland is a place packed with social history and some of the most beautiful natural sights I've ever seen so be sure to tune in over the next few weeks to see that and of course hit that notification bell to see when I upload next. It's usually on a Sunday about 8pm Greenwich Mean Time. Until next week when I will be heading northwards towards Orkney I will see you later, goodbye.