Dr Ailsa Boyd looks into the history of a home demonstrating 19th Cy social mobility, from Gorbals poverty to middle-class comfort

When researching my own home in the Southside of Glasgow, I discovered one of the first occupants had been the perpetrator of a fatal incident in 1897. The Battersby family history is a fascinating tale of social mobility, from poverty in the Gorbals to middle-class comfort in Pollokshields. This exemplifies the social, economic and educational developments of the late nineteenth century, with six of the children, including girls, going to university. But my Southside home is just one location in a network across Glasgow, built by the architect Robert Duncan (c. 1840–1928). Little known today, he designed some of Glasgow’s most distinctive buildings, seven of them listed, from villas and churches to grocers and hospitals, the built heritage of the Victorian city that we walk past every day.

Dr Ailsa Boyd is an independent writer and lecturer in 19th century art, design and literature, with a particular interest in the decoration of the homes we live in and imagined spaces.

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